Re: Torchwood This Week - July 26, 2008


"Benjamin Elliott" <bfelliott@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:L7_ik.142$Ht4.43@xxxxxxxxxxx
So, any word on when SKAI (or another Greek channel) will get to Doctor Who Series 4 or some repeats? Maybe Sarah Jane?

No idea. Robin Hood series 1 was being shown on RIK2 I think but that's not on the satellite. SKAI were showing TopGear from about 2 years ago and Life in Cold Blood (with subtitles) about two or three weeks after it was on over here. They also showed Prehistoric Park dubbed into Greek.


Also, is this mostly a problem on imports, or do all TV shows have the same picture/sound issues?

All of them and on every channel. The only channel with reasonable picture quality is 4E when it shows live church services, but even then the sound is still rubbish. The idiots running RIKSat think its a recoding studio so everything is set to average at -18dB even though its heavily compressed already at source, and is barley audible on your TV except at almost maximum volume. Switch to SKAI and everything is set too high and is constantly distorting. ERTWorld have no idea how interlaced colour sub-sampling works and they put high contrast primary colours on adjacent scan lines on news banners which constantly flicker or bleed into each other producing colours that aren't supposed to be there. Apart from that the pictures of everything these channels show are sourced from VHS quality Umatic tape or are sent to the transmitter after about about dozen generations of encoding/decoding/re-encoding so are totally naff. These morons don't even monitor the station output and there have been times when the ERT was broadcasting and entire news programme without any sound and RIK broadcast one lat week were the sound was 10 seconds out of sync with the picture.

The stations that air imports in the US (in particular non English language imports) tend to have less cash and the picture/sound quality is suspiciously bad.

Even a pirate with a VHS player could do better than them.

I doubt that every single Russian or German language show that airs on MHZ originally had hideous picture and sound.

Given that the picture quality of the repeats of Star Trek TNG on BBC2 are almost as bad as the stuff on the satellite I think that the tapes the stations are being provided with by the Americans are Umatic recordings. Channel "902" on HellasSat was showing Buggs Bunny cartoons where the colour was bleeding out about 20 pixels either side of the foreground characters and objects in the background. It was worse that 5th generation VHS.


Cheers,
Benjamin Elliott
This Week In Doctor Who
Torchwood This Week

"Agamemnon" <agamemnon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:R66dnSuIYpk1khbVRVnygwA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Comments on episode 1.

Subtitled in Greek, with the original English soundtrack.

The sound quality was totally naff. The idiots running this station (and every other station broadcasting on the OTE transponder on HellasSat 2) have no idea whatsoever on how to set the audio levels correctly. It sounds almost as if the sound was being patched though a single transistor amplifier running on the non-linear part of the transfer curve, and even then a single transistor amplifier would have sounded less distorted than the sound coming out of SKAI on a daily basis.
(clipped for length)



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