7 ms·

TV Station Launches Multiple 4K Broadcasts OTA on ATSC 1.0 [video]

96 points by RF_Enthusiast 3y ago

k03im-d 3y ago
hey, thanks for sharing this link, and the interest in my work. station owner here, feel free to AMA.
- RF_Enthusiast 3y ago
  Huge fan here. I've been following your work. I downloaded your PDF slideshow a year or two back, and I was very impressed with what you were doing with the vanilla flavor of ATSC. I was particularly impressed in your ability to secure a testing ground for it. I'm hoping to being my HDHomeRun with me next time I'm in the area and check it out first hand (although a portable VHF setup might not be easy). Please keep up what you're doing and I look forward to hearing about your progress!
RF_Enthusiast 3y ago
I think this is clever: a TV station in Oregon is delivering on the promises of ATSC 3.0 with ATSC 1.0. They are broadcasting a mix of high-definition channels, including four channels in 4K, two in 1080p, and eight in 720p, all on a single RF channel. Viewers can experience some of the benefits of ATSC 3.0, like higher resolutions, without needing a new ATSC 3.0 compatible TV or tuner. If you click through to the full interview, the owner of the station (who bought the station for a place to test his ideas) says there are even some fringe benefits, like increased effective range.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Are they also offering the streams online? Very cool project!
  - dylan604 3y ago
    There's very little incentive for an OTA broadcast station to offer a stream. These stations are always claiming to work on constrained budgets (what company doesn't?). They can't just air the same ads on the stream they do OTA, so there's that loss of revenue on top of the additional cost of hosting the streams. Replacing the ads in the stream with streaming friendly ads comes at an additional tech cost too, plus you need to either hire people to run it or pay someone to manage it for you. Also, you can typically find all of the content via other streaming platforms, so the station may not even have streaming rights for the content they have broadcast rights for
    - Salgat 3y ago
      I imagine they have zero streaming rights to the vast majority of their content.
    - jjulius 3y ago
      >They can't just air the same ads on the stream they do OTA... >Replacing the ads in the stream with streaming friendly ads... I'm ignorant and genuinely curious - why can't they just live stream what's being broadcast OTA with the same ads?
      - thakoppno 3y ago
        There are a couple issues. One is rights. It might be prohibited by contract. Also, there’s money left on the table. Server side inserted ad solutions are available and monetize better.
        bombcar 3y ago
        And OTA ads are often hyper-local, because you know exactly the area they can be seen. There's zero utility in seeing an ad for Big Bill Hell's cars outside of the Baltimore metro area.
      - akira2501 3y ago
        > with the same ads? Not sure if it's still the case but the AFTRA union made that somewhat difficult for many years. The ad itself needs to be cleared for digital streaming and use electronic reporting if it uses union talent. When we carry "network" programming, some of the ads slots belong to the network, and some to the local station. We have no visibility on network ads, so we had to assume they were not clear, and could never be streamed. This was an issue in radio, too.
  - VanTheBrand 3y ago
    Any licensed content would have to be separately licensed for streaming online.
- toast0 3y ago
  > Viewers can experience some of the benefits of ATSC 3.0, like higher resolutions, without needing a new ATSC 3.0 compatible TV or tuner. How many TVs/tuners are compatible with HEVC over ATSC 1.0 is a real question I have. I'm pretty sure my computer based tuners would be fine; AIUI, it's still an mpeg transport stream, and demultiplexing doesn't care about the codec, and my player app can figure that out (or not, but I think it would), but I don't know if even my recent atsc 1.0 only tvs know about this and they do have the codecs supported for smart tv. Otoh, if they're broadcasting in ac-3 audio instead of ac-4 that's common on atsc 3.0, that's a big compatability win. I can't get ac-4 to work well at all.
  - thakoppno 3y ago
    > How many TVs/tuners are compatible with HEVC over ATSC 1.0? Great question to which I don’t know the answer. My intuition is the video decoder is the compatibility limiter but it’s beyond my expertise but not my interest.
    - k03im-d 3y ago
      this Q is covered in the longer-form interview, but in short, here's what I've seen and heard from audience feedback: -If it's a UHD TV, and has an ATSC1 tuner, it seems everything we test or encounter will decode HEVC pictures, up to 2160p, at up to 30 FPS -If it's a 1080 only TV, but has usb/sd/mmc card support, and made after 2020, it's likely that it'll decode HEVC up to 1080p30 -If it's a 1080 but made between 2013 and 2020ish, and has usb/mmc/sd/etc, it's likely it'll at least decode AVC up to 1080p60 If someone is using a USB or network tuner, and decoding on something like a computer, laptop, tablet, etc. with software like the VideoLAN CLient (VLC), the "Channels" app (for hdhomerun units), or ffplay/etc. then it's totally likely everything will work up to the limits of their system. That seems to be 2160p30 at least, today, but likely p60 if they've got a semi-recent GPU or fast enough cpu to decode & push frames around to their display.
  - boopmaster 3y ago
    https://www.rabbitears.info/screencaps/or-eug/185855-0_0.htm https://www.rabbitears.info/screencaps/or-eug/185855-0_0.htm
xnx 3y ago
tldr the station does this by usingusing more efficient codecs like HEVC instead of the common MPEG2
- dylan604 3y ago
  Broadcast stations are the epitome of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it, especially if it's going to cost money". They also do not like roll your own solutions. They want a rock solid piece of equipment typically from someone like Snell&Wilcox or Tektronix type of devices. They do not want to deal with "are we on the air" type questions because some one's nephew's science experiment can't be maintained. If there's a chance that something can go out that's non-standard, fines can be levied, and those can get expensive.
  - RF_Enthusiast 3y ago
    Agreed! It literally takes an experimenter buying a station to see innovation like this.
    - dylan604 3y ago
      The experiment didn't need the full power of a station to prove though. I'm not really sure that this is as much innovation as you imply. Channels have been splitting their bandwidth for years. In fact, Congress wasn't really happy with the network's decision to fraction the signal as the intent was a single full bandwidth signal. We've also already seen what the switch from MPEG2 to MPEG4 can do for allowing more channels via cable boxes. It's also a case of equipment available today is much more robust compared to the cable TV. I was testing the MPEG4 abilities of some of these earlier boxes. Encoding based on the white papers provided for the chips, we found these were not very accurate and required a lot of tweaking to get to work. The chips in today's TVs are much better, so there's a lot more that can be gotten away with.
      - k03im-d 3y ago
        if this hadn’t been performed on a real, live, over the air signal with a real, live, audience providing feedback to the station, we (and my competition, other broadcast brethren) wouldn’t be talking about this now. fyi - AVC and HEVC decoders are, sadly, far more fickle than they should be, in 2024. we would like to believe they all implement a working HRD buffer model, read and obey stuff we put into the SEI and VUI NAL units, as well as properly support basic functions like slices and layers (such as non-ref P frames for 60P refinement of a 30p sequence), and etc. heck, based on current feedback and testing, the least common denominator for maximum reference frames in AVC is four, and HEVC is five. sad, but better than mpeg2.
gosub100 3y ago
digital TV never worked as well as analog. in my opinion, the switch should have never been justified until it could be qualitatively proven that digital > analog. by "greater than" / better I mean not interrupting the viewing experience, especially the audio. This test would be done using stock antennae within reasonable distance from the transmitter. or even better, actually ask users which they prefer: UHF analog or digital. don't switch until 2/3 or more prefer digital. I've never consistently watched DTV, because inevitably a disruption will come and block the audio for about 1.5s, and completely freeze the video. It's simply a waste of time.
- dylan604 3y ago
  The big difference to me about analog vs digital broadcast is that analog could receive part of the signal and display the poor video and then cleaned up the image/sound as the signal was dialed in. With digital, you're either receiving the stream of 1s&0s or your not. If you miss enough, you have no signal to decode. I met an old timer satellite dish installer (big giant dish types) that used this to align newly installed dishes. He knew the location of a specific satellite and the frequency it was broadcasting one. He had a tuner dialed in for that channel. Once he found it, he'd move along the one axis to count the number of signals he'd pass until he got to the satellite meant for receiving. He'd then swap out to the receiver for that signal to verify. The loss of analog just made the playing and experimenting much less fun
  - GeorgeTirebiter 3y ago
    "analog" used high-power horizontal and vertical sync pulses. These were hard for the receiver to lose / mess up, if there was any signal at all. Put another way, the receiver would receive the sync pulses (aka 'blacker than black) before even a shred of the video could be decoded. Another way to say this: The sync pulses had such good SNR compared with the picture content, so when the picture content was even barely visible, it was solidly in sync.
    - dylan604 3y ago
      There's a lot about the old analog video signal that was just fun to me like that. The fact the color signal could be received by a b&w was cool, except for now with hindsight being 20/20 we now have to deal with the ramifications of that cool. Part of it lingered into HD, but we're finally getting rid of most of that baggage with 4K. Things like the color burst, 1 volt peak-to-peak, whiter than white, how the video signal that was too hot could interfere with the audio that was multiplexed into the RF signal, how a signal could cause the picture to distort when not within spec. Just all sorts of things that were fun to mess with
miyuru 3y ago
Interesting to see cloudflare TV on the list. https://youtu.be/e_94q9TCCDY?t=259 https://youtu.be/e_94q9TCCDY?t=259 I thought cloudfare only did online steaming. There is an little screen recording too. https://youtu.be/e_94q9TCCDY?t=277 https://youtu.be/e_94q9TCCDY?t=277
- RF_Enthusiast 3y ago
  Looks like he got the rights to broadcast their educational ("Cloudflare U") content: https://cloudflare.tv/ https://cloudflare.tv/ Here's the source of the first screenshot: https://www.rabbitears.info/market.php?request=station_search&callsign=K03IM https://www.rabbitears.info/market.php?request=station_searc...
drmpeg 3y ago
Slideshow "UltaHD over ATSC 1.0" from station owner Anton Kapela. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1hysslJsp6rTYkWuOmDBKfLXK-wl_8WrGCc0Bk2sF9IE/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1hysslJsp6rTYkWuOmDBK...
RF_Enthusiast 3y ago
I'm driving through Eugene in a few months. Guess I'll be bringing my HDHomeRun and an obnoxiously huge VHF antenna!
GeorgeTirebiter 3y ago
Is OTA TV even relevant anymore, except for the specific content that OTA has that isn't (yet) available over the net for free / ad-supported? I believe it's a waste of valuable spectrum to burn it on TV. It would be better to allocate TV's spectrum to cell services (for example). Radio should be used when things are moving relative to each other; AM and FM Radio make sense as receivers are often in cars. People don't watch TV in cars. If the communications is point-to-point, run the wires/fiber and hook up. If you're in a car, boat, airplane, or train -- fine, use 'wireless'. Yet, even today, wi-fi / 5G + some wide-area services for special cases (planes, boats) gets you there. TV is a vast wasteland (of spectrum).
- devrand 3y ago
  I agree, despite the fact that I use OTA TV. I would prefer to just get an internet stream, but I need to pay like $70/mo+ to get the content (plus a ton that I don't want), and it still has ads. I would be willing to pay a reasonable price to access a live CBS/NBC/ABC/Fox stream, but no one (legitimately) offers that. So OTA it is.
  - GeorgeTirebiter 3y ago
    Exactly. OTA remains a little walled garden of content, justifying (?) their wasting of the precious spectrum. There are some bundles of content (youtube TV, I think)? But operationally, for the viewer at home -- HOW the bits get delivered to your screen is irrelevant; what's ON the screen is what we care about. I'm thinking the TV operators are running a scam, in a desperate attempt to hold on to $ and spectrum -- both of which they are less and less capable of justifying.
- MisterBastahrd 3y ago
  The quality of OTA TV is certainly superior to anything you're gonna get over fiber or coax. If you're in the US and you have an online provider for cable channels, try swapping an NFL game between the online broadcast and the OTA broadcast. There's a night and day difference in terms of picture quality.
bifrost 3y ago
This is pretty neat!
TheAdamist 3y ago
Cool, realtime fuzzing of atsc 1.0 hardware that is long since supported.
quink 3y ago
France is doing terrestrial UHD on DVB-T2, a 2008 standard, with HEVC for the Olympics: https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=R9&liste=1&live=1&lang=en https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=R9&liste=1&live=1... There's no major obstacle that I know of that wouldn't make DVB-T possible for HEVC for an even closer analog to the ATSC 1.0 situation, except there's no point as Europe is now broadly speaking on a high level of DVB-T2... it having been a standard since 2008 after all. Here's an application note by a reputable vendor doing UHD with HEVC on DVB-T2 with real products they are shipping: https://scdn.rohde-schwarz.com/ur/pws/dl_downloads/dl_application/application_notes/7bm90_1/7BM90_0E.pdf https://scdn.rohde-schwarz.com/ur/pws/dl_downloads/dl_applic... It dates from 2014. And the main reason it hasn't become popular is because Europe has an extremely high level of cable and satellite penetration. Switzerland no longer has terrestrial television at all for example, with some curious minor exceptions where terrestrial distribution to end-users isn't actually the goal - it's for foreign cable companies to legally rebroadcast a freely received signal on their own networks. That's right, terrestrial television exists solely as a facilitator for a legal loophole. The whole ATSC 3.0 discussion and its DRM and personalised ads has set back innovation in technology standards for a decade. That said, the false choice between either expensive paid cable or terrestrial is probably just as much to blame.
- quink 3y ago
  That said, Australia, ironically being one of the most terrestrial TV countries on the planet despite its low density, did trials of DVB-T2 with UHD and HEVC way back in 2018. But it hasn't eventuated into anything further, probably because the apps are taking over and happen to also carry with them DRM and personalised ads. And as an extra note, DVB-T2 HEVC at HD resolutions is uncommon but definitely in use in places across Europe: https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=MUX-M1-D4&liste=1&live=502&lang=en https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=MUX-M1-D4&liste=1... https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=NET-21&liste=1&live=56&lang=en https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=NET-21&liste=1&li... https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?lang=en&liste=2&live=12 https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?lang=en&liste=2&live=... https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?lang=en&liste=2&live=18 https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?lang=en&liste=2&live=... and in fact in some it's all that's left for terrestrial television because of the aforementioned predominance of IPTV, cable, and satellite. And just found out Spain has HEVC UHD DVB-T2 as well, without anything too obvious that it's still a test: https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=ESP41&pid=40003&live=10&sec=0&lang=en https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=ESP41&pid=40003&l... For some sense of completeness' sake, the terrestrial signal of Rai 4k is a 720p terrestrial channel advertising that Rai 4k can be streamed over the internet with HbbTV, so that doesn't count.
opello 3y ago
I remember there being a fairly strict set of encoding tools and formats within the ATSC standards for broadcast video. I did a little searching (Wikipedia and atsc.org) but could only find mention of extensions to add H.264 and then only up to 1080p (in A/72), but nothing about H.265 of any resolution. This is pretty cool but I'm wondering if it's compliant?
poxrud 3y ago
ATSC is a North American modulation standard for transmission of Transport Streams over RF signals. Transport streams can carry any kind of a payload, including data. When the spec came out it was mandatory to use mpeg-2 for video encoding because that was the popular codec at the time. However there is nothing in the spec preventing broadcasters using other video/audio codecs (many already do). This is what this tv station did. You have approximately 19mbps of bandwidth to pack in as much payload in there as you can fit. ATSC3 brings about other features such as higher bandwidth, improved RF signals transmission efficiency (lower costs), error correction, etc…
- orev 3y ago
  > ATSC3 brings about other features such as higher bandwidth, improved RF signals transmission efficiency (lower costs), error correction, etc… And DRM that requires receivers to get official blessing before they’re allowed to sell their hardware.

96 points by RF_Enthusiast 3y ago

k03im-d 3y ago

hey, thanks for sharing this link, and the interest in my work. station owner here, feel free to AMA.

RF_Enthusiast 3y ago
Huge fan here. I've been following your work. I downloaded your PDF slideshow a year or two back, and I was very impressed with what you were doing with the vanilla flavor of ATSC. I was particularly impressed in your ability to secure a testing ground for it. I'm hoping to being my HDHomeRun with me next time I'm in the area and check it out first hand (although a portable VHF setup might not be easy). Please keep up what you're doing and I look forward to hearing about your progress!

RF_Enthusiast 3y ago

I think this is clever: a TV station in Oregon is delivering on the promises of ATSC 3.0 with ATSC 1.0. They are broadcasting a mix of high-definition channels, including four channels in 4K, two in 1080p, and eight in 720p, all on a single RF channel. Viewers can experience some of the benefits of ATSC 3.0, like higher resolutions, without needing a new ATSC 3.0 compatible TV or tuner. If you click through to the full interview, the owner of the station (who bought the station for a place to test his ideas) says there are even some fringe benefits, like increased effective range.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
Are they also offering the streams online? Very cool project!
- dylan604 3y ago
  There's very little incentive for an OTA broadcast station to offer a stream. These stations are always claiming to work on constrained budgets (what company doesn't?). They can't just air the same ads on the stream they do OTA, so there's that loss of revenue on top of the additional cost of hosting the streams. Replacing the ads in the stream with streaming friendly ads comes at an additional tech cost too, plus you need to either hire people to run it or pay someone to manage it for you. Also, you can typically find all of the content via other streaming platforms, so the station may not even have streaming rights for the content they have broadcast rights for
  - Salgat 3y ago
    I imagine they have zero streaming rights to the vast majority of their content.
  - jjulius 3y ago
    >They can't just air the same ads on the stream they do OTA... >Replacing the ads in the stream with streaming friendly ads... I'm ignorant and genuinely curious - why can't they just live stream what's being broadcast OTA with the same ads?
    - thakoppno 3y ago
      There are a couple issues. One is rights. It might be prohibited by contract. Also, there’s money left on the table. Server side inserted ad solutions are available and monetize better.
      - bombcar 3y ago
        And OTA ads are often hyper-local, because you know exactly the area they can be seen. There's zero utility in seeing an ad for Big Bill Hell's cars outside of the Baltimore metro area.
    - akira2501 3y ago
      > with the same ads? Not sure if it's still the case but the AFTRA union made that somewhat difficult for many years. The ad itself needs to be cleared for digital streaming and use electronic reporting if it uses union talent. When we carry "network" programming, some of the ads slots belong to the network, and some to the local station. We have no visibility on network ads, so we had to assume they were not clear, and could never be streamed. This was an issue in radio, too.
- VanTheBrand 3y ago
  Any licensed content would have to be separately licensed for streaming online.
toast0 3y ago
> Viewers can experience some of the benefits of ATSC 3.0, like higher resolutions, without needing a new ATSC 3.0 compatible TV or tuner. How many TVs/tuners are compatible with HEVC over ATSC 1.0 is a real question I have. I'm pretty sure my computer based tuners would be fine; AIUI, it's still an mpeg transport stream, and demultiplexing doesn't care about the codec, and my player app can figure that out (or not, but I think it would), but I don't know if even my recent atsc 1.0 only tvs know about this and they do have the codecs supported for smart tv. Otoh, if they're broadcasting in ac-3 audio instead of ac-4 that's common on atsc 3.0, that's a big compatability win. I can't get ac-4 to work well at all.
- thakoppno 3y ago
  > How many TVs/tuners are compatible with HEVC over ATSC 1.0? Great question to which I don’t know the answer. My intuition is the video decoder is the compatibility limiter but it’s beyond my expertise but not my interest.
  - k03im-d 3y ago
    this Q is covered in the longer-form interview, but in short, here's what I've seen and heard from audience feedback: -If it's a UHD TV, and has an ATSC1 tuner, it seems everything we test or encounter will decode HEVC pictures, up to 2160p, at up to 30 FPS -If it's a 1080 only TV, but has usb/sd/mmc card support, and made after 2020, it's likely that it'll decode HEVC up to 1080p30 -If it's a 1080 but made between 2013 and 2020ish, and has usb/mmc/sd/etc, it's likely it'll at least decode AVC up to 1080p60 If someone is using a USB or network tuner, and decoding on something like a computer, laptop, tablet, etc. with software like the VideoLAN CLient (VLC), the "Channels" app (for hdhomerun units), or ffplay/etc. then it's totally likely everything will work up to the limits of their system. That seems to be 2160p30 at least, today, but likely p60 if they've got a semi-recent GPU or fast enough cpu to decode & push frames around to their display.
- boopmaster 3y ago
  https://www.rabbitears.info/screencaps/or-eug/185855-0_0.htm https://www.rabbitears.info/screencaps/or-eug/185855-0_0.htm

xnx 3y ago

tldr the station does this by usingusing more efficient codecs like HEVC instead of the common MPEG2

dylan604 3y ago
Broadcast stations are the epitome of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it, especially if it's going to cost money". They also do not like roll your own solutions. They want a rock solid piece of equipment typically from someone like Snell&Wilcox or Tektronix type of devices. They do not want to deal with "are we on the air" type questions because some one's nephew's science experiment can't be maintained. If there's a chance that something can go out that's non-standard, fines can be levied, and those can get expensive.
- RF_Enthusiast 3y ago
  Agreed! It literally takes an experimenter buying a station to see innovation like this.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    The experiment didn't need the full power of a station to prove though. I'm not really sure that this is as much innovation as you imply. Channels have been splitting their bandwidth for years. In fact, Congress wasn't really happy with the network's decision to fraction the signal as the intent was a single full bandwidth signal. We've also already seen what the switch from MPEG2 to MPEG4 can do for allowing more channels via cable boxes. It's also a case of equipment available today is much more robust compared to the cable TV. I was testing the MPEG4 abilities of some of these earlier boxes. Encoding based on the white papers provided for the chips, we found these were not very accurate and required a lot of tweaking to get to work. The chips in today's TVs are much better, so there's a lot more that can be gotten away with.
    - k03im-d 3y ago
      if this hadn’t been performed on a real, live, over the air signal with a real, live, audience providing feedback to the station, we (and my competition, other broadcast brethren) wouldn’t be talking about this now. fyi - AVC and HEVC decoders are, sadly, far more fickle than they should be, in 2024. we would like to believe they all implement a working HRD buffer model, read and obey stuff we put into the SEI and VUI NAL units, as well as properly support basic functions like slices and layers (such as non-ref P frames for 60P refinement of a 30p sequence), and etc. heck, based on current feedback and testing, the least common denominator for maximum reference frames in AVC is four, and HEVC is five. sad, but better than mpeg2.

gosub100 3y ago

digital TV never worked as well as analog. in my opinion, the switch should have never been justified until it could be qualitatively proven that digital > analog. by "greater than" / better I mean not interrupting the viewing experience, especially the audio. This test would be done using stock antennae within reasonable distance from the transmitter. or even better, actually ask users which they prefer: UHF analog or digital. don't switch until 2/3 or more prefer digital. I've never consistently watched DTV, because inevitably a disruption will come and block the audio for about 1.5s, and completely freeze the video. It's simply a waste of time.

dylan604 3y ago
The big difference to me about analog vs digital broadcast is that analog could receive part of the signal and display the poor video and then cleaned up the image/sound as the signal was dialed in. With digital, you're either receiving the stream of 1s&0s or your not. If you miss enough, you have no signal to decode. I met an old timer satellite dish installer (big giant dish types) that used this to align newly installed dishes. He knew the location of a specific satellite and the frequency it was broadcasting one. He had a tuner dialed in for that channel. Once he found it, he'd move along the one axis to count the number of signals he'd pass until he got to the satellite meant for receiving. He'd then swap out to the receiver for that signal to verify. The loss of analog just made the playing and experimenting much less fun
- GeorgeTirebiter 3y ago
  "analog" used high-power horizontal and vertical sync pulses. These were hard for the receiver to lose / mess up, if there was any signal at all. Put another way, the receiver would receive the sync pulses (aka 'blacker than black) before even a shred of the video could be decoded. Another way to say this: The sync pulses had such good SNR compared with the picture content, so when the picture content was even barely visible, it was solidly in sync.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    There's a lot about the old analog video signal that was just fun to me like that. The fact the color signal could be received by a b&w was cool, except for now with hindsight being 20/20 we now have to deal with the ramifications of that cool. Part of it lingered into HD, but we're finally getting rid of most of that baggage with 4K. Things like the color burst, 1 volt peak-to-peak, whiter than white, how the video signal that was too hot could interfere with the audio that was multiplexed into the RF signal, how a signal could cause the picture to distort when not within spec. Just all sorts of things that were fun to mess with

miyuru 3y ago

Interesting to see cloudflare TV on the list. https://youtu.be/e_94q9TCCDY?t=259 https://youtu.be/e_94q9TCCDY?t=259 I thought cloudfare only did online steaming. There is an little screen recording too. https://youtu.be/e_94q9TCCDY?t=277 https://youtu.be/e_94q9TCCDY?t=277

RF_Enthusiast 3y ago
Looks like he got the rights to broadcast their educational ("Cloudflare U") content: https://cloudflare.tv/ https://cloudflare.tv/ Here's the source of the first screenshot: https://www.rabbitears.info/market.php?request=station_search&callsign=K03IM https://www.rabbitears.info/market.php?request=station_searc...

drmpeg 3y ago

Slideshow "UltaHD over ATSC 1.0" from station owner Anton Kapela. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1hysslJsp6rTYkWuOmDBKfLXK-wl_8WrGCc0Bk2sF9IE/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1hysslJsp6rTYkWuOmDBK...

RF_Enthusiast 3y ago

I'm driving through Eugene in a few months. Guess I'll be bringing my HDHomeRun and an obnoxiously huge VHF antenna!

GeorgeTirebiter 3y ago

Is OTA TV even relevant anymore, except for the specific content that OTA has that isn't (yet) available over the net for free / ad-supported? I believe it's a waste of valuable spectrum to burn it on TV. It would be better to allocate TV's spectrum to cell services (for example). Radio should be used when things are moving relative to each other; AM and FM Radio make sense as receivers are often in cars. People don't watch TV in cars. If the communications is point-to-point, run the wires/fiber and hook up. If you're in a car, boat, airplane, or train -- fine, use 'wireless'. Yet, even today, wi-fi / 5G + some wide-area services for special cases (planes, boats) gets you there. TV is a vast wasteland (of spectrum).

devrand 3y ago
I agree, despite the fact that I use OTA TV. I would prefer to just get an internet stream, but I need to pay like $70/mo+ to get the content (plus a ton that I don't want), and it still has ads. I would be willing to pay a reasonable price to access a live CBS/NBC/ABC/Fox stream, but no one (legitimately) offers that. So OTA it is.
- GeorgeTirebiter 3y ago
  Exactly. OTA remains a little walled garden of content, justifying (?) their wasting of the precious spectrum. There are some bundles of content (youtube TV, I think)? But operationally, for the viewer at home -- HOW the bits get delivered to your screen is irrelevant; what's ON the screen is what we care about. I'm thinking the TV operators are running a scam, in a desperate attempt to hold on to $ and spectrum -- both of which they are less and less capable of justifying.
MisterBastahrd 3y ago
The quality of OTA TV is certainly superior to anything you're gonna get over fiber or coax. If you're in the US and you have an online provider for cable channels, try swapping an NFL game between the online broadcast and the OTA broadcast. There's a night and day difference in terms of picture quality.

bifrost 3y ago

This is pretty neat!

TheAdamist 3y ago

Cool, realtime fuzzing of atsc 1.0 hardware that is long since supported.

quink 3y ago

France is doing terrestrial UHD on DVB-T2, a 2008 standard, with HEVC for the Olympics: https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=R9&liste=1&live=1&lang=en https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=R9&liste=1&live=1... There's no major obstacle that I know of that wouldn't make DVB-T possible for HEVC for an even closer analog to the ATSC 1.0 situation, except there's no point as Europe is now broadly speaking on a high level of DVB-T2... it having been a standard since 2008 after all. Here's an application note by a reputable vendor doing UHD with HEVC on DVB-T2 with real products they are shipping: https://scdn.rohde-schwarz.com/ur/pws/dl_downloads/dl_application/application_notes/7bm90_1/7BM90_0E.pdf https://scdn.rohde-schwarz.com/ur/pws/dl_downloads/dl_applic... It dates from 2014. And the main reason it hasn't become popular is because Europe has an extremely high level of cable and satellite penetration. Switzerland no longer has terrestrial television at all for example, with some curious minor exceptions where terrestrial distribution to end-users isn't actually the goal - it's for foreign cable companies to legally rebroadcast a freely received signal on their own networks. That's right, terrestrial television exists solely as a facilitator for a legal loophole. The whole ATSC 3.0 discussion and its DRM and personalised ads has set back innovation in technology standards for a decade. That said, the false choice between either expensive paid cable or terrestrial is probably just as much to blame.

quink 3y ago
That said, Australia, ironically being one of the most terrestrial TV countries on the planet despite its low density, did trials of DVB-T2 with UHD and HEVC way back in 2018. But it hasn't eventuated into anything further, probably because the apps are taking over and happen to also carry with them DRM and personalised ads. And as an extra note, DVB-T2 HEVC at HD resolutions is uncommon but definitely in use in places across Europe: https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=MUX-M1-D4&liste=1&live=502&lang=en https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=MUX-M1-D4&liste=1... https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=NET-21&liste=1&live=56&lang=en https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=NET-21&liste=1&li... https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?lang=en&liste=2&live=12 https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?lang=en&liste=2&live=... https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?lang=en&liste=2&live=18 https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?lang=en&liste=2&live=... and in fact in some it's all that's left for terrestrial television because of the aforementioned predominance of IPTV, cable, and satellite. And just found out Spain has HEVC UHD DVB-T2 as well, without anything too obvious that it's still a test: https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=ESP41&pid=40003&live=10&sec=0&lang=en https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=ESP41&pid=40003&l... For some sense of completeness' sake, the terrestrial signal of Rai 4k is a 720p terrestrial channel advertising that Rai 4k can be streamed over the internet with HbbTV, so that doesn't count.

opello 3y ago

I remember there being a fairly strict set of encoding tools and formats within the ATSC standards for broadcast video. I did a little searching (Wikipedia and atsc.org) but could only find mention of extensions to add H.264 and then only up to 1080p (in A/72), but nothing about H.265 of any resolution. This is pretty cool but I'm wondering if it's compliant?

poxrud 3y ago

ATSC is a North American modulation standard for transmission of Transport Streams over RF signals. Transport streams can carry any kind of a payload, including data. When the spec came out it was mandatory to use mpeg-2 for video encoding because that was the popular codec at the time. However there is nothing in the spec preventing broadcasters using other video/audio codecs (many already do). This is what this tv station did. You have approximately 19mbps of bandwidth to pack in as much payload in there as you can fit. ATSC3 brings about other features such as higher bandwidth, improved RF signals transmission efficiency (lower costs), error correction, etc…

orev 3y ago
> ATSC3 brings about other features such as higher bandwidth, improved RF signals transmission efficiency (lower costs), error correction, etc… And DRM that requires receivers to get official blessing before they’re allowed to sell their hardware.