HDTV in Canberra

p1 said :

Still higher quality then the Divx copies of shows I download from the intarwebz…

Then go download the HD rips 😛 they are generally around 1 gig tho. The way FTA TV is in Australia i see absolutely nothing wrong with piracy. Provide me a service that is worth watching ads for and i might reconsider.

p1 said :

Sounds like a problem with your antenna, not the broadcaster. Radio waves don’t get blown around by the wind!

fair call, but I also have noticed perticualy windy times seem to break up Prime (and ABC2), and I have an indoor antenna.

Lol the only thing analogue has over digital. In bad whether the analogue signial will be displayed continually while the signal degrades as conditions get worse until it is unwatchable. However as soon as digital comes up against a few too many errors your screen goes blank. In an extreme storm analogue is better as you can still catch emergency warnings.

perticualy is, of course, a very particular scientific word for a certain type of meteorological phenomena, before you all pick on my spelling….

Sounds like a problem with your antenna, not the broadcaster. Radio waves don’t get blown around by the wind!

fair call, but I also have noticed perticualy windy times seem to break up Prime (and ABC2), and I have an indoor antenna.

Growling Ferret said :

Does anyone else get back picture breakup on Prime during strong wind or storms?

In Canberra digital TV is a joke.

Sounds like a problem with your antenna, not the broadcaster. Radio waves don’t get blown around by the wind!

But what you describe is one of the problems of digital TV. On an analogue tranmission when the signal gets degraded by storms or an antenna moving around you get ghosting, but with digital, you get complete picture break-up. How bad the break-up is and how long it lasts for is a function of the quality of your set-top box. Ie good quality ones have better buffering and or intelligence to guess the missing data, poor quality ones just break-up and take time to resync.

I just want it for the formula 1! …I spoke to SCT at the start of the year and they were saying june/july for the rollout, which then moved to september, and now is the end of the year.

Jonathon Reynolds said :

Real HD is 1920 x 1200p

Sorry I mean 1920x1080p… keep on getting my iMac’s resolution mixed up with what HD is meant to be 😛

Ferret, my understanding is that the digital broadcast is at a lower than full strength because to crank it up would interfere with the analog broadcast. So until analog bites the dust, we are stuck with the interference.
In my previous rental with stinge of a landlord, we has to run our TVs off rabbit ears and SD tuners. Even with direct line of site to Black Mountain out the adjacent window, the reception was so bad at times (especially on Prime) as to be unwatchable.

While we’re at it … how come we only get SBS and ABC (Sydney/NSW) on Foxtel in Canberra, when most other cities get all the FTA channels?

Does anyone else get back picture breakup on Prime during strong wind or storms?

In Canberra digital TV is a joke.

Still higher quality then the Divx copies of shows I download from the intarwebz…

Free to Air “HD” Television in Australia is a misnomer…

SD is 720×576i/p
HD is 1280×720p or max 1280x1080i (i=interlaced so in reality only 540 lines at a time transmitted with a 50Hz alternative line refresh)

Real HD is 1920 x 1200p (Blu Ray / and now defunct HD-DVD)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_terrestrial_television_in_Australia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDTV

Quoted from OP: “And when will Canberra’s HDTV options improve to match our bigger city cousins?”

When Canberra finally shakes it’s stigma as a rural area. Which will never happen.

Between broadband rollout and digital TV, the federal Liberals would have been hard pressed to have done a worse job on telecommunications…

I wouldn’t be buying a HD TV just to watch free to air, and I definitely wouldn’t buy one to watch Foxtel either because the Foxtel standard definintion looks crap on plasmas and lcds. I’ve had massive issues with Foxtel over this.

Most standard definition programs show up okay anyways on these TV’s, certainly an improvement from CRT TV’s. But if you’ve got a dodgy production it’s going to show up twice as bad the bigger your screen is.

Definitely looking forward to when all the stations can get themselves together to provide consistent HD programming.

If you watch heaps of DVD’s, or are a gamer then they’re definitely worth it but the television industry in this country is still playing catch-up with the technology!

You’d think though that the Capital City of Australia would be able to have the same kind of options as our ‘big city cousins’!?!?!

Between broadband rollout and digital TV, the federal Liberals would have been ahrd pressed to have done a worse job on telecommunications…

Its dead annoying. Formula 1 is available live on 10HD in capital city markets but we get nothing = late night wait for it to come on.

I just gave Southern Cross Ten a call to ask about HD, “the best person to speak to” happened to be the nice lady who answered the phone. Wow, that was lucky!

Anyway, she reckons than SC10 HD will have full programming by the “end of the year” although no definite date has been announced.

Apparently they get quite a few complaints. Funny that…

If you feel like adding your name to the list of complainants, call SC Ten on (02) 6242 2400.

It appears that you get what you pay for. Since I don’t watch much Ch10, and when I do I fast forward, or at least mute, the ads, I don’t pay much for it.

Don’t start me on this one…

I don’t watch anything on WIN so I can’t comment on what they’re doing, but SC Ten is a textbook example of how to completely p!ss off your audience. Basically, they are refusing to retransmit the TenHD coverage into the Canberra region until every one of their stations around Aus (and they have a presence in just about every regional market, including WA, FNQ and Tas) is capable of taking the same feed and inserting local ads. SCTen only shows programs on it’s HD channel here that are broadcast at the same time on the regular Ten SD channel. This is in contrast to Prime, who at least provide the same 7HD feed as Sydney gets but with program promos instead of ads. So, here in the capital city of Australia, we don’t have access to the additional programming provided in all the other “lesser” capitals, including different movies, many sci-fi series, live motorsport and other sports.

TenHD first started up around Oct 2007. At that time SCTen said their network would be rebroadcasting TenHD around March 08. That got moved to the middle of the year. Now they say the end of the year. Pinch of salt anybody? There appears to be nothing stopping SCTen from following Prime’s lead and showing the HD feed while switching to a demo loop or promos as they do now for selected shows… except they won’t.

BTW I don’t want HD per se, just the access to additional programming through my HD set top box that I bought late last year in antici-pation.

Grrr…