[backstage] Programmes with audio description
Is it possible to filter /programmes for upcoming programmes with Audio description? I'd like to try downloading the audio from recordings on my Myth TV box for listening in the car. Of course, some programmes probably work well as audio only without being specifically described, so a list of programmes recommended for blind people might be a nice alternative. http://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/policies/audiodescription/index.shtml says From spring 2009 you will be able to check the Programmes website to see whether a programme has audio description, but I can't see it anywhere, and I certainly can't see how to filter by it. Thanks, Robert (Jamie) Munro signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [backstage] Clay Shirky: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Kevin Anderson wrote: funding - the licence fee. Commercial newspapers are finding their readership and advertising decline. Unless the licence fee were extended to a public service newspaper (highly unlikely), the BBC doesn't provide that much of a model that could easily be transferred to newspapers. I think that news.bbc.co.uk is already a public service newspaper - albeit one without a print edition. Robert (Jamie) Munro signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [backstage] The BBC as sheep... and irresponsible ones too
David Greaves wrote: So here we are, a month after Which? gave out the same dumb advice the BBC follows: http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/technology/newsid_791/7910045.stm Sensationalist pillock :) I can't wait for someone to be seriously hurt trying to drill through a hard drive. FWIW: http://16systems.com/zero/index.html I'm not an expert, but from my understanding of the theory, that challenge isn't offering anything like enough money. $500 is less than recovery companies charge for a normal recovery. I would have thought at least $10,000 is more like what you would need to offer, maybe more. You'd need something like a magnetic force microscope, and you'd need to read the disk at many times higher resolution than the data was initially recorded on it, so you'd need a large RAID array or something to store your intermediate data. And it would probably take many days to read. Once you've read the drive, you'll probably need to go through several rounds of writing some test data onto it and read it again in order to work out the pattern that the drive writes it's data in. Each of these will require even more massive amounts of time and storage. I suppose you may be able to skip this if you have sufficent documentation from the drive manufacturer, but I doubt it. Robert (Jamie) Munro signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [backstage] Slightly bias view maybe?
Dave Crossland wrote: 2009/2/23 Ian Forrester ian.forres...@bbc.co.uk: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7899602.stm Via Glyn, just wondered what everyone else thought? Isn't this an old story? I thought the Ars Technica article from December was much better ;-) http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/12/uk-ignores-logic-backs-20-year-music-copyright-extension.ars I specially like this part Said the source: The 'creativity' argument is based on ignorance. There is nothing to stop a creative person using an old recording as part of their work - as long as they do not release it. Like to see that stand up in court... Right - typical comment from someone whose understanding of copyright-law is for how it was pre-DRM-law. I liked this quote best: Some of them have no pensions and need this money, he said. So do some people who aren't creative performers. Perhaps builders who built buildings in the 1950s should be paid rights on the labour they used to build the building as long as the buildings still stand. Or Doctors whose patients continue to be alive. Robert (Jamie) Munro signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [backstage] Slightly bias view maybe?
Dave Crossland wrote: 2009/2/23 Robert (Jamie) Munro rjmu...@arjam.net: Some of them have no pensions and need this money, he said. Perhaps builders who built buildings in the 1950s should be paid rights on the labour they used to build the building as long as the buildings still stand. Or Doctors whose patients continue to be alive. Surely the comparison is with doctors who did the best they could but now their patients are dead, but they ought to be continually paid for the excellent job they did at the time? Musicians are only continually paid if the track happened to be a hit (or perhaps was used in a film or something) lots of music has been recorded in the last 50 years that was just as good as music that became a hit but it didn't become a hit due to the vagueness of the music industry. The performers of this music won't get any benefit from term extension. Similarly Doctors and Builders should only be paid while their patients are still alive or the buildings are still used, no matter how much effort it took to treat the patient or build the building at the time. :-) Robert (Jamie) Munro signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [backstage] DOGs on the BBC TV online streams?
Andrew Bowden wrote: I've just got Freesat HD, and it's amazing to see the best picture quality that the BBC broadcast. But then they go and spoil it with a DOG in the corner. It's almost worth reverting to watching the program on BBC 1. If they must have a logo, do it with MHEG and enable the exit button (like how it says Press Red). As a wise man once said to me - the problem with allowing you to turn such things off, is that people will switch them off! There's some stuff on the BBC Internet blog about BBC HD's DOG http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/10/dogs_on_the_blog.html Congratulations on not putting a DOG on BBC HD during the presidential inauguration, even though there was one (saying LIVE Washington) on BBC One! An unusual but welcome reversal. It was a bit strange that at the end, when they showed a mini-highlights of the day, it was not only SD, it was 4:3. Was that package provided by the US network or something, where AFAIK, 16:9 always means HD? Robert (Jamie) Munro P.s. What would be handy is an also available on HD DOG on the SD version of simulcasts. In fact, couldn't the MHEG program detect an HDTV receiver and switch channel automatically? signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [backstage] DOGs on the BBC TV online streams?
Christopher Woods wrote: I've noticed that BBC One's online stream has a BBC One DOG on it, the same going for BBC Two. Isn't this one of the most impractical applications of a channel graphic ever? (and a waste of bits) I've just got Freesat HD, and it's amazing to see the best picture quality that the BBC broadcast. But then they go and spoil it with a DOG in the corner. It's almost worth reverting to watching the program on BBC 1. If they must have a logo, do it with MHEG and enable the exit button (like how it says Press Red). Robert (Jamie) Munro signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [backstage] DOGs on the BBC TV online streams?
Andrew Bowden wrote: I've just got Freesat HD, and it's amazing to see the best picture quality that the BBC broadcast. But then they go and spoil it with a DOG in the corner. It's almost worth reverting to watching the program on BBC 1. If they must have a logo, do it with MHEG and enable the exit button (like how it says Press Red). As a wise man once said to me - the problem with allowing you to turn such things off, is that people will switch them off! But they are only on to aid changing channels. It would appear every time to change channels to BBC HD until you press exit on your remote. It could reappear during the continuity announcement between programmes - I don't think most people would mind having to press exit once per program. There's some stuff on the BBC Internet blog about BBC HD's DOG http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/10/dogs_on_the_blog.html But on a purely technical level, we wouldn't be able to use the same mechanism to provide the DOG as we use for the press RED on Sky and Virgin as, IIRC, you can only have one graphic up at a time, and that would mean we wouldn't be able to do press reds [1], or things like Press Green to set reminders. And as the video comes from the same underlying data source for all four TV platforms, you couldn't easily make them turnoffable on Freesat and Freeview, and not on Sky and Virign Just make it a single graphic that says: +-+ | BBC HD| |Press Red| +-+ You could even be clever and have the first press of the exit key remove the press red, and the second remove the whole thing. Robert (Jamie) Munro signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [backstage] Your ideas are now finally welcomed
Matt Barber wrote: I used to like the way T4 would put T4: [show] at the start. That way, you could figure out what you wanted to watch. It would be good if Big Breakfast and such did that. No, that's a truely utterly horrible thing to do. When searching by showname in my PVR, if I want to find, for example, Friends, some non-T4 epsiodes are under F, others are under T. And the whole T section of my PVR menu grows very big and unbalanced. Sometimes the same episode is shown with both names, and it will record it twice thinking they are different programs. Heh. The show-within-a-show problem that Children in Need presents crops up more often than you might imagine. I think kids tv shows, Comic Relief, and maybe T4 (?) and the old Big Breakfast show all do it. It always frustrates me when the TV listings have one big long show down in the schedule, but I only really wanted to watch a show within it. Could you list multiple overlapping shows? So CIN is a program that starts at 7pm and finishes at 12pm. Then there is a Doctor Who (CIN episode) that starts at 8:15 and goes to to 8:30. Just ignore the fact that they overlap. Omnibuses could have the individual episodes they are composed of listed in the same way. Robert (Jamie) Munro signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [backstage] BNP mashups
Dave Crossland wrote: 2008/11/19 Ian Forrester [EMAIL PROTECTED]: If you've not heard about the BNP member leak, you've obviously not reading Techcrunch UK I have decided to take down the map Good. IHMO, being a member of a political party (i.e. giving them money) shouldn't be a private matter. For example, all 300,000 Obama donors are listed here: http://www.newsmeat.com/campaign_contributions_to_politicians/donor_list.php?candidate_id=P80003338 I do realise that there is an issue with the BNP and possibly some other parties, where by being a member you are demonstrating yourself to be an extremist, and opening yourself up to physical attacks from rival extremists. I'm not sure how to deal with that. Robert (Jamie) Munro Ps. In the interests of full disclosure, I've been a member of the Liberal Democrats for several years, not that I agree with everything they have ever stood for. signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
[backstage] High Frame-Rate Television
Brian Butterworth wrote: This one, can't go around praising a document and not linking to it, terrible form... http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp169.shtml There was a cinema standard that called Showscan that ran at 60 instead of 24fps for similar reasons. And IMAX do a thing called IMAX HD that runs at 48fps. These systems both require a lot of lighting, and a lot of film stock to shoot, so I don't think they are likely to be popular, except in special cases like theme-park ride-films. I wonder if highly shuttered video produces better results on TVs that do motion compensated 100Hz stuff. E.g. if you delivered them 25p but with the shutter open for 10ms rather than 40ms, they will be able to make a much better job of the motion compensation, producing something very close to true 100Hz video, but with no need for extra bandwidth or changes to the transmission chain over what we have already. Should broadcasters consider shooting with this kind of TV in mind? Another thought I had was what about capturing motion separately to the picture, at a lower spatial, but higher temporal resolution. Perhaps using a strobed infra-red ilumination to generate smething like MPEG P B frames, and a full colour camera to generate I frames at a low frame rate. Robert (Jamie) Munro signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
