Posted by Jukka Aho on 12/13/06 17:51

Little Red Hen wrote:

> It's an old article (1999 )
> http://www.fxj.com.au/announcements/apr99/digitaltv.htm
> but it sums up Australia's non standard implementation of DTV, like
> 576p is regarded as HDTV etc.

Thanks, that was an interesting read.

Could you elaborate on the "datacasting" aspect that keeps being
repeated throughout that article? What is meant by that? (Interactive
services? Something akin to MHP or MHEG-5? Asymmetrical Internet
services through the terrestrial transmitters? Something else?)

> The stations only transmit in 16:9 and all 4:3 old movies are
> pillarboxed with in the 16:9 frame (always).

Since there's a vast amount of old tv shows and archive material in 4:3
format, it's hard to imagine the reasoning behind that decision.
Essentially, 25% of the original resolution is being thrown away in such
conversion.

Here where I live, even individual ads during a commercial break are
broadcast in full-screen format (be that 16F16 or 12F12) with the aspect
ratio flags.

> only the HDTV muxes have Dolby 5.1

Well, at least you _have_ HDTV muxes and surround sound. :) (I think the
local broadcasters have tried DD 5.1 once or twice.)

The Australian MPEG-2-based HD system is likely to become a dinosaur in
the DVB world, though, when the rest of the DVB world starts getting
MPEG-4 based HD. But I guess you could come up with some kind of
transition plan. (Europe doesn't seem to be in too much of a hurry with
getting HD broadcasts, anyway.)

> Subtitles are via Teletext for one major network but not the others.

If I'm not totally mistaken, it seems the major European countries have
all adopted DVB subtitling for their digital services. (DVB subtitling
is technically quite close to DVD subtitling - i.e., the subtitles are
encoded as overlay pictures with a transparent background, not as text.)

> threads. Regrettably Australian politicians have a habit of
> 'modifying' international standards from AM broadcasting, FM, TV (we
> had a ch 0 and a channel 5a in the TV analog spectrum) etc etc. Even
> in the professional world of wireless microphones the allocations are
> 'shifted' slightly. Sorry I'm feeling a bit bleak tonight....

Well, there are things like that in every country... (Although it seems
that the EU has ironed out some local wrinkles here so the member
countries can no longer all just go their own separate ways, or go
overboard with local regulations. For example, we just recently got a
permission to use the teeny-weeny low-powered FM transmitters for
relaying music to the car radio from an MP3 player or a similar device.
Might not have happened in the old days.)

--
znark

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