

Analog TV era ends, DTV begins, complexity thrives - pragmatic
http://www.rebol.com/article/0411.html

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nkurz
This is a good article, and his basic premise is worth thinking about: 'When
we separate ourselves from the systems that work on our behalf by adding
layers and layers of complexity, we are ultimately doomed to fail.'

I agree with this, but I don't see it as particularly applicable to digital
TV. He talks about running translators for analog television to provide PBS
access to his local community. He concludes that analog signals are easy to
work with, and then contrasts this with digital: 'If you want to really
examine the signal itself, you need an expensive device that is able to
recognize the signal and help you debug what's going on. Of course, our small
TV organization cannot afford the cost of such a device, so most of the time,
we can only guess.'

This seems misguided, and like an attempt to fix the problem with the wrong
tools. Sure, it's difficult to diagnose the problem with an oscilloscope, but
with cheap digital tuner cards available it seems like it should be possible
to do a similar analysis in software. If one was tasked with retransmitting a
DTV signal, it seems like the solution would be to decode (with error
correction if possible) rather than blindly retransmitting the signal as
analog. Is this harder than it sounds?

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biohacker42
_Is this harder than it sounds?_

No. I suspect that person simply has a lot of experience with analog and
little to none with digital and all of TV is not switching to digital. I
wouldn't want to be him.

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comatose_kid
The guy wrote much of the os for the amiga, and created rebol. Those are
pretty impressive accomplishments.

