Who Cares if Analog TV Goes Dark?

[ChrisX]

Who Cares if Analog TV Goes Dark?

I don't and I rarely watch analog TV here in my room.

My Sony TV is now disconnected from the outside antenna and I watch and record from TV on a couple of DTV STBs.

There is an option of Pay TV having heaps of extra channels here in Australia too.

I am not worried of analog TV going dark?

[edDV]

More importantly, when will I be able to buy a NTSC DTV PCI card that does hardware MPG2 capture?

They all get you a MPeg2 TS stream captured to a file. The ATSC TS stream is a ~19 Mb/s multiplex of HDTV and/or SDTV subchannels plus other data.

Demultiplex software like HDTVtoMPEG2 will allow you to extract individual SDTV subchannels with associated audio and convert them to 704x480 MPeg2 suitable for DVD authoring. HDTV subchannels can also be extracted into 1080i or 720p MPeg2 files. These need to be downconverted to 480i/480p DVD spec by a software program like Sony Vegas. Downconversion is very time consuming in software and it would be great to get some hardware assist.

Individual SDTV streams are ~3-5 Mb/s
Individual HDTV streams are ~15-19 Mb/s

Some cable boxes in some communities provide TS streams for the channel being watched over an IEEE-1394 connector. If these are provided, the local DTV channels are usually unencrypted. Cable channels may or may not be encrypted. It all depends on what your local cable company is doing.

I've looked at several systems and this is what I've observed coming out of cable box IEEE-1394 connectors. The TS is formatted for D-VHS.

Analog channels may be locally (in the box) converted to 720x480i 8-8.5Mb/s streams where available. Quality varies by box model.

Cable MPeg digital channels output at ~ 528x480 at 1.8 to 15 Mb/s
HDTV locals output at various 720p or 1080i at 20 to 25 Mb/s
HDTV cable channels output mostly at 1080i 20-25Mb/s. ESPN-HD is the exception at 720p 25Mb/s.

Is this what others are seeing?

[Seeker47]

Admission: I've only skimmed portions of this thread, but intend to read all of it when time permits. But here's one angle on this that may have gotten overlooked. Emergencies.

I have an old b&w Sony Watchman that's barely working these days. Shortly after the Northridge Earthquake, while power was out for quite some time, while many buildings nearby had come down or been seriously damaged, and aftershocks were still going on, I ran the Watchman on batteries to help stay informed. Radio is fine, but there is nothing like real-time images, even if they are very tiny.

Most of you probably don't have to worry about earthquakes, but other parts of the country have seasonal tornados, hurricanes, blizzards, or other emergency situations that come up. After the changeover, won't all "pocket" TVs become useless ? It is for this reason that I have avoided buying a latter day replacement Casio, or whatever may still be on the market.

[edDV]

After the changeover, won't all "pocket" TVs become useless ?

Yes they will. No way for those to be converted.

[ChrisX]

After the changeover, won't all "pocket" TVs become useless ? It is for this reason that I have avoided buying a latter day replacement Casio, or whatever may still be on the market.

I used to have one, a Casio pocket TV in color and yes this will be useless.

I still have an old 5" B/W TV by National as bought way back 1978 as I rarely use.

This unit is as VHF TV only plus the AM/FM radio and audio cassette recorder.

This one will be useless when analog TV is turned off.