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Domain: sbgi.net
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Comments · 6
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The Original Secret of Mana
I would like to see the origianl version of secret of mana released for the GBA. The fact that it was a multiplayer RPG it would make a good game that you could link up and play with friends. I remember having a lot of fun playing that game with two other people and all of us being able to control our own character. I have a feeling that this installment won't be quite up to snuff for Secret of Mana fans since it lacks a multiplayer feature
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Transmission StandardsOne of the problems for DTV, and the major reason that reception is currently spotty, is the current transmission standard. 8VSB, as the current standard is called, is flawed. See my earlier article for some information, and find more thanks to Google.
COFDM is clearly the better solution. This was a major topic of discussion at this year's NAB, and a demonstration by Acrodyne of a COFDM signal transmitted from ~17 miles away being received in the convention center without any problems showed this quite well, as did Sinclair's earlier testing in Baltimore, which I discussed in my article; see above.
This is seriously not a troll, but instead, I think, a wake-up call. Another poster asked if you would want to trust your data to spotty reception. There is no reason to. With superior "ease of reception" in metropolitan areas, or other areas with a lot of multipath, or "ghosting", and equal or better reception outside of the city, there is no reason not to go with COFDM.
A bit of the science behind it: 8VSB uses one carrier that carries all of the information, which is typically MPEG-encoded video. COFDM carries the exact same information split up into many carriers across the 6 MHz spectrum given to a television station. If one of those carriers is somehow damaged, other carriers containing duplicates of that information can be used. The amount of duplicate data can easily be adjusted at the transmission side, allowing for the most data during non-peak hours (for use by data and multiple virtual channels), but increased signal reliability during prime time.
By the way, some xDSLs (which?) use (C)OFDM. Many mobile communications systems either are currently or will in the future use a multi-carrier system like COFDM.
For a bit more information, see Sinclair's COFDM FAQ.
Kenneth
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Of course, if they can't agree on how to transmit:
How about the fact that there isn't even a consensus being reached on how to transmit DTV? The current 8VSB standard is known to be succeptible to multipath distortion (a kind of distortion caused by high frequency radio waves bouncing off of buildings and objects). Try the Sinclair Group's petition to allow broadcasts to be done in COFDM. Lots of information about this is available here.
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Re:What can we do?Sinclair have a model letter on their site:
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Re:Just me?There's a bit more to it. You can't set up both standards, they'd be on the same allocated frequency and so would not play well. You also can't set up just COFDM, because the government has required all stations to be broadcasting an 8VSB signal by a certain date (which I don't remember offhand, anyone wanna help me here?) Unless the federal government changes the legislation and/or regulation, we're stuck with 8VSB
Exactly. Sinclair etc are petitioning to be allowed the choice of which format to broadcast in. For more details (and who to write to if you want to support them), see http://www.sbgi.net/dtv/.
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Re:If you need it, you need it.
Still time to support Sinclair Broadcasting's petition on COFDM for digital TV.