DTV Transition Mostly Smooth, Windows Media Center Problems

dritan writes "While most of the transition to digital seems to have gone smoothly, those who use Windows Media Center saw their screens go dark. Users are complaining that Media Center did not pick up changes to channel assignments that took place on Friday. Someone forgot to update the static channel lists distributed with the program guide. Users either have to wait for Microsoft to fix the problem, or manually edit the configuration files." Reports indicate that the FCC received upwards of 300,000 calls on Friday from consumers seeking late help with the transition, but they were prepared, with over 4,000 operators available to handle problems. The FCC's DTV website also had over 3 million hits on Friday. Both phone and Internet traffic have now tapered off, and supplies of converter boxes appear to have held out just fine.

Comments

Anecdote

[maxume]

One local station was completely dark for about 8 hours, another delayed the switch until after game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals and was off the air for about 2.5 minutes. The third had already switched in February after their analog transmitter blew up (or broke down in some more mundane fashion).

Still some teething problems here, for instance, guides not matching programming, the SAP being fed alongside the main audio programming, and occasional blank screens. Some stations are convinced that they have to broadcast SD in 4:3 (or they think it will help old people, or something, I wish they would use 16:9).

Re:Anecdote

[maxume]

Most digital tuners can crop the 16:9 down to 4:3, and the most common case of what I am talking about is SD programming being broadcast on a second subchannel, a channel that is often going to be received by a set that is 16:9. So the stations could give people with 16:9 sets the full video and everyone else could crop it down (I have a 4:3 set but tend to prefer the bars when the video was shot in 16:9...).

I guess there might be problems finding enough bits, but one station here is broadcasting two 16:9 channels, so I doubt it.

Re:Anecdote

[Patch86]

I feel that the UK has done/is doing the whole digital switch-over thing better.

Here, each region (roughly equivalent to each local-news region) has it's own switch-off date, with the whole thing spread over about 4 years (and this in a country with a smaller population, more densely packed, meaning the switch-over would probably be easier anyway). This means that, for one, the broadcasters and government agencies only have to worry about nurse-maiding small numbers of people over at once. For two, it gives people a lot longer to get used to the idea and upgrade (I just happened to need a new TV a year or so ago, and it just incidentally happen to be DTV-ready, without me needing to worry about it). For three, it means that the odds of broadcasters in any given area being up to speed with full-power transmissions is very high, meaning less chance of down-time or missing channels.

Why a large, sparsely populated country of ~300 million people would decide to do the switch-over all at once I can't figure out. Maybe THAT'S the easier way and the UK is doing it awkwardly, but it just doesn't seem like that to me.

Re:Anecdote

[VanessaE]

What drives me nuts is when stations just can't figure out the concept of letting the viewer's receiver and display hardware handle the task of properly displaying the video.

In my area, two of the 8 or so digital stations are broadcasting 16:9 1080i as their main channel, even when the programming is SD 4:3. They scale the 480-line video up to 1080 lines, add black bars to the sides, and mark the stream as 16:9. My display devices are all normal 4:3 or 5:4 ratio, like the vast majority of others in my area (and across the country, I suspect), so that means my receiving hardware has to add a second set of black bars (to the top/bottom) to resize that "16:9" stream to fit a normal screen.

Sure I could just use the zoom feature my boxes all have, but that means I have to sit there cycling through several zoom settings every time the ratio changes or I change channels. In a real life setting, this becomes very annoying, so in this most common case, some 20% of my screen space goes unused and the video looks "just OK" because of the doubled scaling (once by the broadcaster, and once by my display hardware). The overall video quality also starts to suffer from compression artifacts (because of the wasted bandwidth from the pre-scaling).

To make matters worse, this area has frequent inclement weather, which necessitates adding a crawler and radar display over the pre-mutilated video. If I zoom, I'll lose enough of the crawler that it becomes useless.

To compound the problem even further, the broadcaster will occasionally show a 16:9 program that was already letterboxed before they got their hands on it, which means a third set of bars is being added. In the worst case, 60% of my screen is wasted, the video is blurry from having been scaled down once by the content provider, up once by the broadcaster, and then up again by my display hardware. The crawler becomes almost blindingly sharp at times and more distracting than it should be compared to the rest of the video.

To top it all off, most of the 4:3 stuff the content providers are sending to the local broadcasters (here anyway) clearly comes from older NTSC video tape, or some other low-quality analog sources, and thus doesn't look any better in digital than it did in analog. What's the point of all this SD-to-HD chazarai when the source looks like shit to start with?

All I ask is that the content providers and broadcasters start using high-quality media and broadcast the programming in whatever aspect ratio and resolution it was originally meant for, as is usually done with other MPEG2-based formats. If a DVD can switch between 4:3 and 16:9 content freely, why can't a broadcaster do the same?

I brought this up (using much more pleasant language, of course) with both of the affected stations. I was given an answer more or less equivalent to "Your comment has been noted. Sucks to be you."

Real impressive people - it really makes me want to watch your stations.

I was pleasantly surprised...

[Urban Garlic]

I got eight new channels on Friday -- the MHz and ION networks went digital in my area, so now I can watch Bollywood movies, English-language Russian TV, NHK Today, and some Chinese thing, among others.

These actually can be quite interesting to browse -- the Russian take on the Iranian election was kind of interesting.

Re:Progress

[Anonymous Coward]

you can get a grey market dish, an al7bar.tk ROM and a viewsat. works fine in ontario.

Re:I made the switch. I switched to OFF

[wiredlogic]

Not all DTV is on UHF. The High VHF range was preserved. If you had such a station in your market, they had the option to remain on their old antenna. I have two in my area and they are now the strongest DTV transmitters I get. Even with a UHF specific antenna.

I was looking for a reason to give up TV

[brian0918]

Thank you, federal government, for imposing on me enough force to guide me in the right direction.

Re:Seriously, why should we care?

[DannyO152]

It was only nominally about the viewers. The converter box program was so stations and advertisers wouldn't suddenly see a huge drop in viewership numbers, impacting revenues since advertising is essentially charged on dollars per thousand viewers. As the whole DTV thing was an arbitrary government mandate to force an incompatible technology that the market was greeting with indifference, you best be sure that the lobbyists were there saying there had to be some return for the imposed cost. So, the givebacks were multiple channels which could be used for alternate programming (or paid services, ka-ching) and government cooperation in transitioning the audience. Throw in 9/11, as the analog spectrum will be partly sold and partly reserved for emergency services, and, mmmmm, can you smell what the FCC was cooking?

I did, I thought it stunk, so I gave up the tv.

Digital went to shit when analogue died

[WiiVault]

Here at my house in St. Paul MN I went from having about 18 digital channels before the transition to 12 now. I thought when they dropped analogue most broadcasters were going to boost their power. Instead it seems the opposite has happened, here at least. I'm pretty unhappy that I can't seem to get a signal from towers that are less than 20 miles away. If this is how it will stay than must say I wish we had stayed analogue .

Re:Seriously, why should we care?

[maxume]

Mine got better. I had good analog signals for NBC and CBS and FOX but poor reception for ABC (basically, between the transmitters that serve my market). The NBC station now broadcasts ABC on a subchannel.

Re:Wow manually edit configuration files.

[value_added]

What they type all day is English. What you're trying to get them to do is type in some weird computer-ese language that they don't understand.

Sigh.

Yes, what they type all day is indeed English (or their native language), but what they use their mouse for (the point of my post) is to click on menus, toolbars and radio buttons in configuration screens that are written in exactly that "weird computer-ese language" you're referring to.

Now that we both know what we're talking about, how about addressing the actual points I made, namely that interpreting instructions for the mouse are typically more difficult than "text mode" instructions, an exclusive reliance on the mouse-only method yields few (if any) benefits in the long term, and that the objections for using "text mode" are rarely valid, but the product of conditioning.

For anyone with similar knee-jerk reactions to my comments, allow me to remind you that middle-aged secretaries in the DOS era (and elsewhere then and today) had zero problems with ... wait for it ... typing.

Imagine that. Those secretaries were no less intellectually disinterested, technologically averse or lazy than anyone today. The difference is that there existed a general expectation you had at least the basic skills to use a computer. If that's too much too ask of anyone today, then by all means, ignore everything I wrote and continuing championing computer illiteracy. Hell, I'll start for you.

You don't need to understand anything.
Computers are simple things.
Consider your computer as you would a toaster or any other appliance.
Just click the button that says "Yes".
Grandma can't type 'patch' unless she's writing a Word document about sewing.

Re:Seriously, why should we care?

[Anonymous Coward]

But honestly, how many millions of our tax dollars are being wasted on this "dear god we need to drop everything and help everyone switch because lord knows we can't trust them to handle their own affairs!" game? Seriously

Seriously? The US made a net-profit. The cost of the switch was less then the profit made from auctioning off the spectrum.

You can make an argument that this should have been more efficient so the US would have made *more* money, or that the US is bleeding money elsewhere needlessly, but this transition was actually beneficial for the majority of the tax-paying Americans.

Tinfoil Hat Time!

[macs4all]

I live in the US State of Indiana, and on Friday morning, in amongst the rah-rah DTV ads, was ONE lonely ad that noted that if you lived in a list of about a dozen Indiana counties, you could expect NO SIGNAL AT ALL when the switchover occurred. here's an article listing at least 7 Indiana counties affected. Curiously, some of the Counties are in Northern Indiana, which is FLAT AS A PANCAKE, so what's with the "terrain" excuse?

I find it highly suspicious that that ad was:

1. Not aired until the DAY OF the transition

2. Not aired until AFTER President Obama publicly stated "There will be no more delays."

3. Was only aired ONCE (that I saw at least, watching for about 5 hours on the same channel that aired it) (meeting the legal requirements for "notice", but obviously intended to provide "notice" to as FEW people as possible).

I'm sorry, but a large chunk of American Taxpayers were instantly relegated to TV purgatory on Saturday, WITH NO SOLUTION OR EVEN A BACKUP PLAN IN SIGHT.