thedarkproject | (no subject)

As I was waiting for the train back from Leamington yesterday, I saw a kid dressed in tracksuit, hood, and baseball cap walk onto the platform, before striding off the other way. I caught myself mid-thought, and reminded myself that just because he looked like a chav, didn't automatically mean he was up to no good.

20 seconds later, several railway station staff rushed in via the same route, and started asking people where the guy went, before heading off in pursuit.

On a totally different topic... digital TV... it's crap. The free stations are apparently transmitted in MPEG-2 format which means you keep seeing the picture divided up into blocks all the time. It's like watching videos on your Commodore 64 or something. And when there's a bit of interference, instead of the picture getting slightly noisier or the hue changing a little as you see with analogue television, you get brightly coloured blocks across the screen, which are much more visually jarring. Apparently the pay-to-view channels use MPEG-4 format, which is probably less blocky-looking, but I wonder how many people will have that by the time the government turns off the analogue broadcasts? Meanwhile the shops try and sell people high-definition televisions that just make the visual deterioration of digital transmissions more apparent. Isn't technology great, improving lives everywhere.

Something else that's annoyed me of late... The Independent newspaper. For some reason they've decided to have some sort of panic headline on the front cover every single day. I'm surprised they don't just call it the OMG instead. "OMG HOLE IN OZONE LAYER GIVING EVERYBODY CANCER!!". "OMG FOUR YEAR OLDS WITH GUNS IN EVERY HOME!!" "OMG ASTEROID ON COURSE TO KILL LIFE ON EARTH BEFORE SUN BURNS OUT!!1one". Newspapers are shit, really. The local one is annoying too. They were talking a month or two ago about how there should be a crackdown on street peddlars, because they "take custom away from legitimate businesses". Who are they to decide which salespeople are legitimate and which are not? Morons.

No real news to report, anyway.

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I'd be interested to know why your experience is different from mine. The data stream is the same for everybody and the blockiness is inherent to the way the data is encoded. It's certainly theoretically possible to run a smoothing filter over the edges afterwards to hide the defects, I suppose.

I have no problems with digital TV. Yes, I can see the blocky artefacts if I'm up close, but sitting back from the screen with my rapidly failing old-age-induced eyesight means I don't notice it at all. Plus there's the added bonus that with digital I actually have TV to watch, whereas without it all I'd be looking at would be a screenful of snow with the occasional semblance of a picture.

I'd bet the cheaper tuners have almost no compensation for a degraded signal which is why they fark up so much and so suddenly. Whereas the more expensive tuners probably make a bit more effort to extract the signal using multiple signal filters plus they probably do a bit more work at the actual decoding. Or something. There's probably a world of things you can do for a few pence more that would improve the disintegrating image problem, that'll be the same few pence they choose to save on the cheapo machines!

Yeah, but most of what I was talking about was not the problems with the interference, but that every single frame of video I see of digital television has visible artefacts. It's especially visible during slow panning or crossfades, and it's an inherent issue of MPEG encoding. Perhaps other people just don't have the eyesight to notice it as much as I do. I see it on DVDs as well, whereas I guess most don't.

Oh that, yes it's just down to the encoding and the rate they used for the particular piece of video. Most muppets don't even realise you CAN encode things at different or even variable bitrates and just set it to be for a particular size. Doesn't help that they chose MPEG-2 as the standard for DVDs when there were already better codecs available either, as it's simply lapsed over into broadcast video (freeview/sky/etc) now. Once again a choice of the known over the applicable.

I'm just waiting to see if I can see the same problems with MPEG-4, which is what the premium channels use, apparently. Having never seen a premium channel I can't really judge. I believe it's still based on the same 16x16 macroblock idea though, so I expect you'll always be able to see the discontinuities at those edges.

There's two issues there. I believe that MPEG-4 handles the discrete blocks better, but it also uses less bandwidth for the same amount of information due to better encoding and decoding algorithms. So on the one hand it'll fark up less because it's having to receive less data to make the same image, i.e. less opportunity per frame for corruption, and secondly the general blockiness will be less anyway due to a better initial encoding.

Of course if you've still got a shit signal then you've still got a shit signal, end of matter.

Some DVDs have the encoding artifacts more noticeable than others; Red Dwarf, for instance, was made particularly carefully, which was one of the reasons for releasing the eight series over four years. Blackadder, on the other hand, I have heard described as "encoded with a hammer" and it's hard to disagree with that one!