[opendtv] Re: --FCC OKs WiFi between TV channels
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 1 Jun 2004 09:14:50 -0400
At 4:24 PM -0700 5/31/04, John Willkie wrote:
>Why waste all of our time? Why is this significant? Who, other than a few
>engineers, and a beat writer would care? The content is still bound to the
>shape of the screen: it it doesn't match, the mismatch needs to be
>accommodated somehow.
Because it is the emerging reality. The era of constrained formats is
nearing an end as the era of intelligent displays dawns upon the new
digital world. Try telling someone who is designing a computer
application or even a web page, that they must constrain the design
to a specific resolution and aspect ratio.
The fact that many displays and many digital motion imagery cameras
conform to a few aspect ratios has more to do with economies of scale
than any other reason. For displays a few aspect ratios are likely to
endure, at least until we can buy generic image tiles and put them up
on the wall to form displays of any size and/or aspect ratio. Cameras
will move away from formats more quickly, as it is easier to create
common high resolution sensors from which an image raster/aspect
ratio can be derived. Thomson is already doing this with the
Filmstream Viper.
As for the mismatch between source and screen, what's the big deal?
What is important is how the unused areas of the screen are utilized
at any point in time. With intelligent display systems and powerful
media gateways that are decoding AND generating the imagery that is
presented on the display, there will be a multitude of applications
that will vie to fill up the unused screen areas, just as we have
seen with the use of a PCs desktop.
>On what planet is not ER transmitted in 16:9? You mean that NBC shrinks
>down the content to 16:9 and then transmits it in 4:3 on analog and digital?
Yes for the analog feed. No for the digital feed.
>Are you so venal that you think that ANYBODY in broadcasting would do such a
>thing? (Yes, you are that venal.) So, WHY do they do that you think what
>they do? (I ask this not to understand NBC -- you can't help me there --
>but to try to understand how/if you brain works.)
Many programmers are transmitting source that is letterboxed into the
4:3 NTSC raster. Not just programs...many commercials are using
letterboxing techniques today as well.
I have long held that the best way to get people to upgrade to
digital is to make NTSC less attractive to the viewer. What better
way than to transmit everything letterboxed into the source aspect
ratio? People would quickly tire of watching tiny ants playing
football on 75% of their low resolution NTSC displays...
NBC is simply promoting the fact that ER is produced in 16:9, and
giving viewers the opportunity to upgrade to digital so that they can
see a better version of the same program.
>"With the DTV receiver, the source is decoded producing an HD raster
>in the display buffer. The receiver then creates various outputs
>which can be connected to different display types."
>
>I'll be sure and tell my 70+ year old mother that this is why she needs to
>upgrade her TV sets.
What an asshole. We don't need to understand how everything works.
Your mother-in-law probably doesn't give a rip about all of this. But
the current generation of teenagers and young adults, who will be the
primary consumers of the stuff we are developing, will care and they
will figure out that the new TVs are more flexible and useful than
the dumb old sets they are getting rid of at garage sales.
>
>"An NTSC/S-video version - this could be 16:9 letterboxed into 4:3, a
>simple crop of the side panels to fill the 4:3 screen 9possibly
>guided by pan and scan metadata, or a geometric distortion of the
>16:9 to fill the 4;3 screen, possible with mild cropping."
>
>Why complicate things? By the way, this is coupling display to source, if
>only to know how to render it. You get hung up on your terminilogy.
It is not coupled, if the user has the ability to determine how the
source is presented. It is only coupled if there are no options for
either the content producer or the viewer.
>
>You are just cluless, but verbosely so. You need to esplain how one gets
>810 x 3 phosphors on a 40 inch wide screen, and keep within today's state of
>the art. Are there phosphors for display screens that are less and 0.18?
Huh?
How this is done is dirt simple. My HD RP monitor has three 4:3 CRTs
WITHOUT shadow masks. The screen is scanned at 31.5 kHz to produce
480 lines progressive when displaying line doubled NTSC. When it is
showing an HD source it is scanned at 33.75 kHz to produce 1080
interlaced lines that fill the 4:3 raster. If the source is 16:9
(either 720P or 1080i) the image scaling circuitry in the monitor
scales the source to 810 active lines - the remaining 270 lines are
filled with a neutral grey to help prevent burn-in of the unused
screen area (although I think this can be "turned off " (to black).
Since this set has no shadow masks, the limiting horizontal
resolution is a function of the image processing engine and the
amplifiers that drive the CRTs (and then there is the MTF of the
display, which limits the ability to resolve high frequency details
due to the lack of contrast in higher frequencies.
Better give it up now John...you are just digging yourself in deeper
and deeper.
Regards
Craig
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