Government Finally Reveals When It Wants Freeview Gone

Black Hole said:
I don't understand why you need to see all the Loose Women's wrinkles.
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The point is people expect 4K and people with 65" TVs (the new normal size) can see the difference between HD and 4K. If Freeview does not provide 4K then those people will use a different transport mechanism so they get 4K. This reduces viewer numbers for Freeview and furthers the arguments in favour of switching it off. Adding Atmos sound to go with the 4K picture would be good too, that's becoming the expectation for people with sound bars (the most popular way of listening to surround sound now, alas).
 
Also the expectation of people with Atmos set-up of any kind. But only if the Hummy can play it! (Only joking about the last sentence, I expect I will need to move on.)
 
Owen Smith said:
people with 65" TVs (the new normal size)
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Has anyone else noticed that it's getting increasingly common for dramas to include as part of the plot things images of paper notes, newspapers etc that are actually too small to make out on older smaller TVs? They assume everyone has a 65" behemoth. (I know, I should have gone to specsavers... )
 
Wildebeest said:
Has anyone else noticed that it's getting increasingly common for dramas to include as part of the plot things images of paper notes, newspapers etc that are actually too small to make out on older smaller TVs? They assume everyone has a 65" behemoth. (I know, I should have gone to specsavers... )
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That, and some hard-coded subtitles on, for example, Sky News are so bloody small I can't see them on my 19" & 22" screens. Whereas some subtitles on French films on TPTV are so big that they take up ~20% of the screen. (So I exaggerated a bit!)
The addition of SMS or some other comms app text on the screen, either on a device or randomly placed, can be another one of those things that is too small and often too fleeting to be able to register. Who considers those of us who are older, decrepit and don't have massive screens when producing TV?
 
prpr said:
They have no clue, but they won't be told, don't listen and think they know best.
Just like politicians really.
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That sounds like every consultation process recently. We want your views, but we've already made up our minds and will ignore or lie about those views. Our decision is final.
 
It makes sense to me. Traditional OTA tv viewers are in decline. The old guard of licence payers since B&W are pretty much a captive audience who are unlikely to stray from TV even if it is only supplied online and unless they find a cure for death will continue to fade away whilst the young use a plethora of other internet based ways to be entertained rather than watching TV shows anyway and are a market that can at least be grown they already have adopted online entertainment as the norm and all the dross that comes with it, no recording, unavoidable advertising. cheap to make reality shows etc so the young are the logical demographic to try to capture whilst the old have no long term benefit to them and those in the middle should have enough tech know how to adapt to what they are given. Just like the decline in landlines it is the way forward for the money making machine even if it is a huge step backwards for us.
 
Owen Smith said:
I got annoyed that they kept asking if I prefer 2034 or 2044 as a switch off date
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There is a much more fundamental problem that the people running the 'consultation' have seemingly failed to grasp, which is one of numeric overflow.
DVB uses Modified Julian Dates (MJD) in its EPG data and to ease calculations between DD/MM/YYYY and MJD, has certain fixed points covering 200 years (which ought to be enough for anyone, right?).
These are 1 Mar 1900 = MJD 15079 and 28 Feb 2100 = MJD 88127 (which neatly avoids the /100 & /400 leap year problems - 2000 was a leap year every 4, 2100 isn't).
When they were designing/specifying the system in 1995, they decided to use MJD and 10 Oct 1995 was already day 50000.
The real trouble is that they only allocated 16 bits for the value of the day (and effectively wasted 2 of them to start with), so the max MJD in DVB is 65535 = 22 Apr 2038, which is nowhere near the other year 2100 calculation limit.

What complete utter morons they were, having used up about 77% of the number range before they even started.
As a result all kit has this baked in to all of the software, both at the transmitting end and the receiving end.

The coding kit is not so much of a problem, as there is relatively little of it and broadcasters are seemingly always changing coders/muxers to claim better efficiencies and ever more reductions in bit-rates for 'no change in picture quality'. This is of course largely a lie (HD now isn't like HD was 15 years ago), but that would given manufacturers an opportunity for implementing a change in the spec. somehow to accommodate later dates.
The real problem is all of the huge amount of receiving kit which will never get any updates for anything. As we know, most manufacturers give up on things 5 minutes after they stop selling whatever bit of kit, and some of them even before that.

So, basically, 22 Apr 2038 23:59:59 UTC is the end of the line, regardless of any pointless consultation by clueless muppets in so-called power. The incompetents already sealed the deal over 30 years ago. Staggering isn't it?
 
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And for the avoidance of doubt, this is nothing to do with the signed 32 bit time_t problem for Unix Epoch time (although it is a similar problem) which dies on 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 UTC.
I would expect a lot of consumer boxes to die then.
Most proper computer Operating Systems have now worked round this with a shift to 64 bit time_t. Sadly this doesn't apply to our Humax HDR/HD T2s.

Today is MJD 61258, so 4277 or really 4184 to go.
 
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prpr said:
So, basically, 22 Apr 2038 23:59:59 UTC is the end of the line, regardless of any pointless consultation by clueless muppets in so-called power. The incompetents already sealed the deal over 30 years ago. Staggering isn't it?
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Idiots. I'm a programmer and the first time I wrote code with limits like this I discussed with my boss if 2100 was OK as an end of life date. His view was "we'll all be dead never mind retired so it's fine". I thought that was a poor answer but given the formats I was working with I couldn't see a way to extend support beyond 31 Dec 2099.
prpr said:
And for the avoidance of doubt, this is nothing to do with the signed 32 bit time_t problem for Unix Epoch time (although it is a similar problem) which dies on 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 UTC.
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So 19 Jan 2038 will actually get the HDR Fox T2 first.
 
Owen Smith said:
I remember Freeview HD picture being almost as good as blu ray, which it definitely is not now.
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And I remember the day when StdDef, whilst not brilliant, didn't have pulsating fine pixelation on SDN and ARQ* usually when the video contains text (eg. HIGNFY missing words or Sky News). I can't imagine it's just a Waltham problem but I've not seen anyone else mention it.
 
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