Re: ATSC modulators

["Robert Green" <ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx>]

"beaver" <ed@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:43f12d17-0ab3-4930-b2f3-a99b5a670aae@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<<Thanks Bob, lots of great info in your post.  Looks like you confirm
what I suspected.  It is in the cable providers best interest to
terminate analog under the cover of the governments mandate of over-
the-air analog termination.  So eventually, COMCAST will go the way of
Verizon too it appears.>>

It's really in our long term interests to make full use of the data pipe so
bandwidth hogging analog is destined to go the way of the dinosaur and dodo.
What a lot of people are finding out now, to their dismay, is something
called the digital cliff.  You can still see weak analog signals:  they just
get fuzzier and fuzzier as distance and interference increase.  Digital is
usually crystal clear and doesn't incrementally degrade over distance but
simply drops out after a point.  A recent study refuted the FCC's estimates
of 60-75 miles before signal dropout and determined it was really more like
35 miles in cities as varied as St. Louis,  Las Vegas and, Philly.

http://broadcastengineering.com/hdtv/study_foresees_dtv_recpetion_0411/

The figures about how many total viewers have antennas that won't be able to
adequately receive digital signals are all over the map.  So you had
probably better do some testing with converters and antennas to see whether
you're even going to get a signal.  If you're going to use a roof or mast
mounted antenna to feed an amplifier, you probably should be OK but I get
very few OTA stations with HDTV and a small antenna mounted near the set.
But of course, you know all of this . . .

<<Looks like your situation is similar to mine (and perhaps others).  I
enjoy a seamless merging of the incoming TV and in-house channels.  I
hate to give that up.  Looks like I need to set up my own internal
analog system in-house after all  8-(. >>

I suspect that a lot of people will have to do that for now.  I think that
the market is large enough and the standards clear and clean enough for a
commercial solution to emerge - eventually.  Right now, I need some way to
merge a composite video output (the RCA yellow phono plug variety) with an
HDMI line.   Basically, it would be a box with a male and female HDMI
connector and an RCA jack.  I'd splice it into the line going to the main
LCD TV.  Even that's a compromise, though.

Right now, I am using a Panasonic DVR that has the ability to output to HDMI
and composite jacks simultaneously.   That feeds an analog version (through
RF modulators) to the house NTSC network.  I can't overlay the picture on
the big LCD, but I can use picture in picture to bring up the composite
network feed.  Not a good solution.  It's also means that I haven't gotten
rid of the old CRT's because you can no longer find 5" TV's anywhere and I
use them all over the place as CCTV monitors and such.   I had hoped the
price on small LCD TV's would drop in proportion to the large ones, but that
hasn't been my experience.  The coming DTV revolution has made really small
TV's nonexistent when you used to be able to buy them for $30 at Target for
a 5" B&W.

I'm putting together a new PC with a digital tuner and HDMI outputs.   I
don't think it would take very many extra dollars for manufacturers to add
an RCA input jack to a modern PC video cards if they already have the tuner
and the MPEG encoders built-in.  For all I know, there's already something
on the market or on the drawing board because many high end video cards come
with breakout cables with a host of connectors.  For the moment, it's long
HMDI cables and a parallel analog and digital network.  I'll keep it this
way until I switch to FIOS, which is scheduled to arrive in my neighborhood
slightly before the DTV switchover.  Then I'll see what's available on the
market, HW (and check what you've done!) and then go from there.   I just
saw something to the effect that Sony and 6 CATV companies have entered an
agreement to do away with set top boxes:

------------------------------------------------------------------
Agreement may mean end of cable set-top boxes
By JOHN DUNBAR ? 1 day ago

WASHINGTON (AP) ? The set-top box, a necessary appendage for millions of
cable television customers for decades, is moving toward extinction. . . .
Sony Electronics Inc., and the National Cable and Telecommunications
Association said Tuesday they signed an agreement that will allow viewers to
rid themselves of set-top boxes, yet still receive advanced "two-way" cable
services, such as pay-per-view movies. . . .cable viewers also could dispose
of another remote control since they could use their TV's control rather
than one tied to the set-top box. . . . The two industries have been feuding
for a decade about how best to deliver cable service to customers while
allowing them to buy equipment of their own choosing. More than a decade
ago, Congress ordered the cable industry to allow outside electronics makers
to compete for the boxes.  The industry responded by developing the "cable
card." . . . the source of frequent customer complaints . . . Subscribers
were unable to enjoy "two-way" features such as video on demand, on-screen
channel guides and cable company-provided digital video recorders. Under the
new system, customers will still need to get a cable card from their
provider, but the agreement means, hopefully, technical glitches will be
eliminated . . . The industry hopes to head off action by the Federal
Communications Commission to impose a two-way standard on the industry.


source:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iGu3D7Z6_BuY8rqXxR5FoZ9rX-QgD90UKB280

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So there's an awful lot up in the air, but a lot depends on the gear you
already have and its capabilities.  FWIW, I used to use a notch filter and
ChannelVision monitors to modulate my own gear (CCTV, DVD, etc) onto unused
channel.  Comcast changed the channel lineup in the upper channels (my notch
filter worked from channel 80 to 100, IIRC) so often that I went to an X-10
based 8 channel video matrix switch that allows any one input to be routed
to any and all 8 outputs and did a lot of the video switching at the source.
Has IR and serial control as well.  I am loathe to give that up for digital,
so I will probably work my new system around it as much as I can and wire
high rez devices like BluRay players to the big LCD TV via HDMI and to the
analog network via composite analog signals.

All my big TV's have multiple composite (RCA yellow phono plug) inputs so I
can always route the analog signal to the HDTV.  I just have to make sure
that any high rez equipment I buy has both analog and HDMI outputs.  I
suspect that such hybrid devices won't be around for very long, based on the
PC world and transition motherboards.  Remember when PC's came with ISA and
PCI slots?  Or when Intel and AMD CPU were pin compatible?  Or when you
could find both 5.25" and 3.3" diskette drives in the same machine?  (-:

--
Bobby G.