Re: AKICIF: Television Formats

Keith F. Lynch <kfl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Torbjorn Lindgren <tl@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
It depends a lot on the reader, mostly it's pretty good now but
early on you had to be careful what you bought or replace the
reading hardware often because even the cheap stuff tended to work
pretty decent for 6-12 months :-)

Bad media can damage the reading hardware? That was true for devices
that physically contacted the media, such as record and tape players
and tape drives, but how can it be true for any kind of optical discs?

No, "bad" hardware working "well enough" for a period before getting
progressively worse. The "damage" mostly comes from cheap components
deteriorating (partly due to the designer not using enough margins)
and optical alignment issues (due to insufficient stiffness, again
$$$). Like I said, it's much better now presumably due to a lot of
experience on the builders part.

There are hardware related issue that can be caused by bad media but
the ones I know of are more of a temporary nature (need to clean the
lens for example).


If it's surface scratches shining it up via one of the polishing
products works well, ...

At a used book sale today, at which there were also DVDs and CDs, I
made sure to take a close look at each DVD and CD before I bought
it. I rejected one DVD because it had literally *thousands* of faint
scratches. I've gotten the same effect from trying to clean a CD or
DVD with a paper towel.

That suggests either substandard media or very abrasive paper towels,
unless the scratches were *very* faint. I can belive it of the
Vanguard I mentioned earlier. There's still bad media out there but
I'm not sure anyone manages to get it that badly wrong any longer but
few things really surprise me with regards to crappy media.

I find it surprising how well most DVD readers can read even somewhat
damaged dvd (without polishing & optical filling in). From your
description it sounds like it may not even have been noticed by most
readers. It's also worth remembering that "noticed" may well mean
simply falling back to a lower read speed, not delayed data or actual
visible problems. Even 1x is enough for normal play and they're often
spun slower than the maximum speed (say perhaps 4-8x) when viewing
DVDs anyway to reduce vibration & noise.


I don't know why they don't use a harder plastic. Paper towels don't
scratch my eyeglasses -- or my skin.

It shouldn't be anywhere near that sensitive but it could still be
better. I suspect it's a cost issue, hard plastic which at the same
time has good optical properties isn't trivial or cheap. I bet the
manufacturing cost for pressed DVDs are in the low single digit cent
range and DVD-/+R probably doesn't cost that much more in the
manufacturing stage and is more complicated chemically. A dual layer
DVD has what, 4 or 5 layers in total, each with wildly different
properties.


But for childrens DVDs there's often no other sane way than to fire
up DVD Decrypter and only let the child handle copies :-)

Will that work with Blu-ray discs, or is the DRM too good?

It can be done (AnyDVD HD for Windows for example) but I don't know
any free examples.

The result is also a lot bigger, single layer BD-R media is still
expensive and my quick peak didn't even give me a price for writable
dual layer media (is it available yet). You also need a BD-R writer
which I also presume isn't exactly free.

You can put it on a hard disk, modern hard disks are big and cheap
enough that it's not TOO bad and there's cheap media players that
ought to handle it fine. It's possible to get significantly smaller
files with the same quality/resolution but it takes a long time (may
change if the GPU based encoders quality goes up a bit) and you loose
the menus and other special features.

It's worth remembering that for the original Blu-ray manufacturer more
data doesn't cost extra as long as it doesn't add a layer (ie 25/50/..
GB) but makes copying it more complicated and gives them a high
bitrate to brag about, so they usually don't try very hard to keep the
size down.

Or you can download the finished rebuilt product if someone happens to
have released this, there is apparently already several groups doing
this, just like there's DivX/XviD of films (less than it used to be
partly because HD, cheap DVD media and larger hard disks).


I wonder how it's possible to adjust an antenna for a digital TV
if you can't see if the picture is getting better or worse.

You find out which "range" it works in and put it in the middle
(many people tune their analog antennas this way too).

You may have a hard time even finding the range. It would be like
trying to aim a telescope without a finder scope. With analog TV, you
can see an image if it's anywhere remotely close to the range, albeit
often un unwatchably bad image. You can then fiddle with it until it
gets better and better.

I've help aim a digital antenna that way without problem using an
antenna which probably was too small to give an usefull analog signal.

I suspect that the usually smaller antennas needed for digital
reception is a lot less sensitive to direction, it's what I would
expect from a smaller antenna anyway (but I'm not an expert on
antennas).

I've not looked (cable myself so no antenna ) but there may be that
some/all of them shows signal strength which should help, it's
probably as good or better than looking at the picture on analog. I do
know many satellite tuners shows signal strength to help you fine tune
the parabol.

Also, you can find out the proper heading and use a compass, that's
how the big old antenna (long gone, for analog) in the case I talked
about before got pointed in roughly the right direction before the
fine tuning (a large roof mounted multi-element antenna, fairly
directional and not fun to adjust).
.

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