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End of an Era: NTSC Finally Goes Dark in America
- tzs 5y agoThe one serious gripe I have with ATSC is the audio handling. When you have a drop out or freeze or other glitch due to poor signal it takes out both video and audio. For most programs most of the time an audio loss or glitch is more damaging than a video loss or glitch. If they had given more bandwidth to audio so they could use more robust ECC ATSC would have been a lot more watchable for those of us who don't have strong signals.
- cogman10 5y agoThey have ECC in ATSC (that's part of how they detect the glitches). The issue they have is the audio codecs used in ATSC simply aren't robust, don't degrade gracefully, and require a lot of bandwidth. The issue we have is that just now, ATSC 1.0 has become the standard everywhere, yet that was a standard from 1995. As you could imagine, we've come a LONG way in the last 26 years in terms of codec capabilities. If we could just get people to upgrade equipment... ATSC allows for much more robust error handling but it's not used because few devices support it.
- MrRadar 5y agoATSC 3.0 has a new modulation scheme with more robust error correction and modern codecs, but it will take years for people to upgrade and for ATSC 1.0 to be phased out. Here's a video giving a preview of how 3.0 compares to 1.0 in real world conditions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgIm01Tsmt4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgIm01Tsmt4
- cogman10 5y agoYeah, it'll be great once it starts rolling out. It'll just take a long time. Right now it seems like the only people deploying it are paid services (which, IMO, shouldn't be legal. We shouldn't have to share public broadcast frequencies with private corps).
- MrRadar 5y agoI definitely agree that paid services should not be allowed to use public broadcast spectrum.
- rob74 5y agoMy first thought when reading the headline: "why are they referring to the analog TV switch-off by using the name for the color TV standard?". I guess most of us associate NTSC with the color TV standard because of the competing NTSC/PAL/SECAM standards, but they also developed the original black-and-white analog TV standard, which was then extended in a backward-compatible way to allow for color.
- yrro 5y agoHuh. What is the right term them... just "analogue TV broadcasting"?
- zinekeller 5y agoI mean this is America-specific so "NTSC" is fine, especially that it is still used as a shorthand for "American standards for standard definition" in certain areas of videography.
- yrro 5y agoOh sure, we all knew what the article meant. I just wonder what the correct technical term encompassing the US analogue TV broadcasting would have been, as opposed to the system used in Europe, Japan, etc...
- zinekeller 5y agoFormally? Unambiguously, CCIR System M is the international formal designation for the US* format of the signal. It does not state what color format it uses - PAL-M (in Brazil) is such a frankenstein format that is not seen anywhere else - but domestically-speaking, NTSC (is confusingly) both the B&W and the backwards-compatible color format, and if someone didn't bother to change the name to ATSC (A standing for Advanced, not American), we could have NTSC Digital 3.0 instead. NTSC (National Television Systems Committee) is the committee which formulated these standards, they didn't bother to put a more proper name to their inventions like SCART's (the association, see below) SECAM and Telefunken's PAL have, or in the digital domain EBU's DVB and ARIB's ISDB. (SCART is another one of these btw, it means Syndicat des Constructeurs d'Appareils Radiorécepteurs et Téléviseurs (Radio and Television Receiver Manufacturers' Association) and it was supposed to be called péritel (insert IBA ENG video discussing SCART) but the name stuck.) * And Canada and...
- discreditable 5y agoOne of the interesting things I've noticed is that (around here at least) the over-the-air TV is much higher quality than the local providers (cable and fiber). The local providers streams are noticeably bit starved to me, while OTA looks quite good.
- jpmattia 5y ago> One of the interesting things I've noticed is that (around here at least) the over-the-air TV is much higher quality than the local providers (cable and fiber). There's a substantial difference in bitrate between OTA broadcast (for the main channel) and the cable broadcast. Typical cable will stat-mux several channels down to well below 10 Mbps/channel. Main OTA tends to be around 15 Mbps (for a different encoding) but not stat-muxed. So to some extent, the quality of the channel you're watching on cable/fiber depends on what is going on in the adjacent channels.
- matmatmatmat 5y agoCloser to 20 Mbps, even, for a full-bandwidth OTA broadcast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATSC_standards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATSC_standards.
- MrRadar 5y agoThough most broadcast stations have sub-channels which eat some of that bandwidth. In my market, almost every station broadcasts at least 3 video channels. A few of them even manage to squeeze 6(!) into their 20 megabits (which would be fine with modern codecs, but ASTC 1.0 is stuck with MPEG-2).
- cogman10 5y agoWhat I've been surprised about is the fact that cable has been really slow at adopting newer digital codec standards. AFAIK, pretty much all cable transmissions are MPEG2 (and analog for a long time before that). It's a little nuts considering all the benefits and readily available hardware decoders of new standards. A H.264 stream would look WAY better with far less bits.
- dylan604 5y agoAn the angels sang! If only it were dead dead. Not kind of dead, but actual dead. Instead, it's the walking dead. There is so much content recorded in NTSC that is still needing to be dealt with for the non-NTSC formats of today and tomorrow. So many people have done so many bad things to an NTSC video due to a lack of understanding the peculiarities of NTSC that causes us today so much pain. NTSC was such a total kick the can down the road solution. The number of B&W sets that had been sold that forced the decision to make the signal remain compatible with those B&W sets is such a small number that we probably see that same number of sales in a week now. Hindsight and all that, but the repercussions of that decision has cost the industry so much. Then again, niche jobs exist because of it, and I've pretty much made a living from it. Honest to goodness engineers required to operate equipment, interlacing, 3:2 pulldown, broken cadence, color burst, 1 volt peak-to-peak, IRE, waveforms/vectorscopes, pedestal, blacker than black, TBCs and video/black/chroma/hue, whiter than white, broadcast safe, chroma bleed, audio anomalies because the video signal was too strong, pincushioning to TV monitors because the video signal was too strong, and sooo many more issuess that I'm so happy to see go the way of the dodo.
- agumonkey 5y agoNTSCobol
- MarkSweep 5y agoThere is one unfortunate artifact from NTSC that is still with us: overscan. For some reason TVs will take a digital signal from HDMI, crop off the edges, and stretch the image. So some video game consoles and streaming devices allow you to shrink their output to compensate. It’s madness. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overscan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overscan
- abstractbarista 5y agoI turned this off on my TV and was just like...wow! So much better! From what I could tell, my TV was taking a perfect 1920x1080 signal, and instead of perfectly stretching it to 4K (4 pixels on the screen for every pixel in the input), it was first cropping the edges, then stretching. This results in clean lines in the input becoming more "fuzzy" on the screen, which a very slight zoom effect. It's maddening and I can't understand why it would be the default. Across my HDMI sources, TV apps, and live TV, none of these signals need any cropping. They fit perfectly with my settings.
- ddingus 5y agoContrary to majority opinion, I like NTSC. It's a fun signal with a lot of hacks possible. In retrocomputing terms, NTSC is something I don't mind having around and am able to deal with. In watching TV / video terms? Yeah, NTSC is craaaaaappy! I won't miss it either, though I do enjoy the look on some programs. DTV is pretty great. I live in a region where signals are reasonable, and it's just better overall. For the few hours I watch TV, DTV gets it done. On the analog vs digital front, for things like embedded projects, I really dislike digital video. It's resource intensive. Analog RGB or Component is EASY, lean, and clean. Right now, the golden time is ending. If you want analog video gear, good CRT's that sort of thing, it's possible still, but starting to get expensive. I nabbed a nice multi-format PVM for my retro gear / computing experiences, and a few other displays, and a couple TV's to modify to make an arcade cab, with a real, fast, gorgeous CRT. Now is the time! Won't last long. If you want analog, get it. Soon, it will be a curio, rare, expensive.
- TrevorJ 5y agoThe joke in the industry was that NTSC stands for "Never Twice the Same Color".
- porjo 5y agoslightly offtopic, but something that bugs me about OTA broadcast DTV is the program guide. (I'm in Australia which uses DVB-T, other standards may differ). The guide is so slow to load, regardless of the TV set. It also seems to require the TV to scan each channel to pickup that channel's guide data so you're left with gaps in the guide data until the TV has scanned each channel. It seems like a missed opportunity. If we're going digital, why can't guide data be instantly available for all channels?
- ksec 5y ago>If you are an American you may have heard of ATSC 3.0, perhaps by its marketing name of NextGen TV. Just like the DVB-T2 standard found in other parts of the world, To those living in US, is ATSC 3.0 a thing yet? It is funny it mention DVB-T2 as counter part in other parts of the world but for many part of EUR, DVB-T2 is now over a decade in use. Although the earlier DVB-T2 are stuck using AVC while Germany and France has newer DVB-T2 with HEVC variant. Or do Americans generally dont care about Free to View TV and only use cables or any other Pay per view network?
- JohnFen 5y agoAll I know is that all of the TV broadcasts in my area had very, very poor picture quality after the digital switchover, compared to what they were when analog. The issue is clearly that the digital signals are being compressed to within an inch of their lives, since the poor quality is due to obvious compression artifacts. So, I don't think it's a technology problem, I think it's a greed problem: the TV stations are trying to subdivide their frequency allotment so they can fit as many different video streams as possible. Either way, it's still a problem OTA broadcasts in my area still border on unwatchable. Fortunately, that was also around the time that I stopped watching TV, so it wasn't a real problem for me (which is good, because the new digital signals literally did not come to my neighborhood -- we went from analog TV to no OTA TV at all). But it was impossible to not notice that broadcast TV quality became orders of magnitude worse, pretty much overnight.
- speeder 5y agoInteresting to see the angry comments about how Digital TV fails more than Analog. I don't watch TV so I dunno how is the situation in my country, but I did noticed when seeing broadcasts on public TVs (for example in bars and restaurants showing sports) that compression issues happen, decoding issues happen, and the whole thing is laggy, most obvious when you are seeing sports, during analog TV times, I would hear the cheers and fireworks after goals, victories and so on, all at same time, now I hear it staggered, with seemly poorer people cheering first, I assume because they have analog TVs and radios.
- Telemakhos 5y agoI grew up with analog OTA TV. When you changed channels, the change was instant. We got a handful of local channels. Then, we got analog cable. When you changed channels, the change was still instant, and you used the same remote as for OTA TV (if you were rich enough for a remote) because the cable just plugged straight into the back of the TV. We got a bunch of channels, including the local ones from before, a handful of new channels worth watching, and a ton of others that were absolutely worthless. This was expensive, but at least cable channels were ad-free... until they were not. Next we got digital cable. This marked a real downturn in user experience. The signal had to be processed by a box that we had to rent instead of just plugging the cable into the TV. We needed a new box and new remote for every TV. Theoretically the new remotes could replace the old ones, but that never worked out in practice. You always needed the old remote for some function not available or not programmed properly on the new one. The boxes also took forever to switch between channels. Channels now were no longer straightforward one-channel-to-one-station mappings, but you had subchannels and HD/SD versions of the same channel. My parents never understood that while they were alive and usually ended up watching the SD channel instead of the HD because it was all they could find. In fact, for them, there was usually no increase in picture quality, just in price and inconvenience. Finally I inherited the TVs, but I never watch them, and I cancelled the cable subscription. I got a digital TV antenna, and it sometimes picks up most of the local stations, which were all that my parents ever watched, but usually it glitches or fails. Changing channels still takes forever, but at least the antenna just plugs into the back of the TV without a rented box. Of what is available on OTA television, as with what was available on cable, there isn't enough to keep my attention. Most of it is vulgar trash riddled with advertisements. I've gone back to reading books for entertainment. They don't require any cable or antenna, no rented box, no remote control. I can get whatever I want from the library (for free!) or Amazon, and I can change books without lag. The signal never drops or glitches. I can take my books with me anywhere, including outside. I'm happier now.
- ReptileMan 5y agoNeverTheSameColor won't be missed
- hulitu 5y agoIt was replaced with AlmostTwiceTheSameColour.
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoIs SECAM (System Entirely Contrary To American Methods) dead, too?
- ReptileMan 5y agoI think yes. Used in only couple of countries. Mostly former french colonies and ussr republics
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoAnd no tears were shed - at least, not by me...
- convolvatron 5y agoi would have thought so too...wasted alot of time trying to get digital systems to generate and recognize ntsc signals. color encoding was a disaster. but I'm thinking now...i could at least build something from the ground up. i dont know how much machinery i would have to build to talk to an hdtv connector - maybe i would even have to apply for a key.
- genpfault 5y agoHopefully it takes interlaced video[1] with it. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlaced_video https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlaced_video
- rasz 5y agoMeanwhile games are dabbling with rendering interlaced (or checkerboard) + reconstruction pass
- szczys 5y agoUnfortunately, no. The highest quality broadcast I get on ATSC is 1080i (the i=interlaced)
- jdofaz 5y agoEven ATSC3.0 supports interlaced HEVC, from what I've read many HEVC decoders not designed for ASTC 3.0 struggle with it
- fomine3 5y agowow, interlaced HEVC looks horrible. I wish it never used other than broadcast.
- iso1631 5y agoThe EBU made compelling reasons why 720p would be better than 1080i for HD However 1080 is bigger than 720, so most sources are interlaced. 4K at least got ride of interlaced as an option, so 2160 is always progressive.
- frou_dh 5y agoNTSC was the envy of many European console gamers back in the pre-HD era, because a lot of game ports to PAL (50Hz) were dodgy and no longer ran at the speed the original game designers had intended, and/or were squashed between black borders at the top and bottom of the TV screen. Importing a JPN/US console was not only to get access to region-exclusive titles!
- buggeryorkshire 5y agoYeah, having access to a TV / monitor that supported 60Hz was gold in the UK. That said, for broadcast TV, PAL looked far nicer - NTSC was named 'Never The Same Colour' for a reason.
- nsxwolf 5y agoI had an apartment in Sydney for awhile and got to experience PAL for the first time. I remember it looking really nice but it had this kind of uncomfortable strobing effect.
- Joe_Cool 5y agoFunny thing: it was the other way around for many C64 games. Many NTSC ports of the time played too fast and had aspect ratio issues. Music from many EU Scene Demos was 20% faster on a US C64. Good thing that's over.
- cloudedcordial 5y agoI grew up in the part of Asia that PAL was the standard. Kids beg their parents to buy an NTSC TV so that they can play Nintendo (Japanese version: the red and white one). I feel old.