goodbye standard def television?
 

i heard word the other day that plans are in motion for the HD conversion by 2009 and all television signals will be HD?? meaning that you'll need to buy a special adapter box if you want to keep using your non hd/widescreen tv otherwise you wont get any signal at all??

if all this is true....at least i know i've got another 3 years of using my cam before i have to upgrade with the trend of things..hahaha..ha?

is anyone else as sketched about this change as i am? personally i'm comfortable now and i hate change, sometimes...sometimes change is good..i'm just sayin'..

bah!

The mandate for 2009 isn't for HD, it's to shut off all analog channels, leaving only digital. SD lives on.

The conversion is to digital transmission NOT necessarily HD. THis is to save/reallocate bandwidth and allow for HD transmission. IF you are on cable it won't make any difference. Lots of information confuses digital with HD, not the same thing. Changing analogue frequency allocation to digital saves bandwidth allowing either SD or HD channels. IT will be some time before programming will all be true HD. A lot of the HD broadcasts at the moment are really still SD ( 4x3 ). I have Rogers cable here in Ottawa and almost half the HD channels I get are still 4x3 in a 16x9 frame. Source is obviously SD 4x3. If the source was professional SD format( or even consumer DV) it was always higher picture quality than could be transmitted and displayed by most TV's. These 4x3 pictures in the HD16x9 frame are HD quality but clearly created from SD equipment. Everything you get over cable digitalbox is digital, SD or HD all gets decoded by the cable box. Nothing will change for this in 2009. The change really effects those who receive TV from local transmissions. These will change to digital transmission and will require a new digital tuner. COuld be much like a cable box to convert to the analogue input for the TV sets. This change is US based I do not know the schedule for Canada.

Ron Evans

...i see. whew!

A lot of highly compressed HD I am seeing as well...If not all of it.

i thought that mandate was alot sooner than 2009

Here's a link -

http://www.dtv.gov/consumercorner.html#obsolete

Steve

Hey 2009 is only SEVEN YEARS after the original "switch to digital" commercial television deadline. At one point, I remember they were extending that fantasy deadline every six months.

Remember how the original "spectrum" giveaway was supposed to boost HD broadcasting? Here in Phx (now something like US's 5th or 6th largest city), only 1 local network affilliate (NBC) is doing siginificant HD local programming with the rest being pillarboxed SD content.

With such a sterling record of FCC guts when facing the commercial broadcast lobby, my suspicion is that small and medium markets will have analog legacy broadcasting for a LONG time to come.

Probably right up to the point some bastard child of Apple TV and Google makes broadcasting completely irrelavant.

here, we can only dream about HD broadcasting, we still have anolog television and Ive heard that they are planning sometimes to switch to digidal, but its far away I guess.

Anyway, is it possible to switch from analog broadcasting to HD broadcasting, without going first to just digidal and then HD?

For you it may be "he who laughs last, laughs longest."

We've had digital broadcasting in the UK for quite a long time now. It brought widescreen (though SD resolution) and a lot of extra channels. Only problem is that most of them are not really worth watching, and together with being MPEG2 compression, that's filled up the current bandwidth.

Countries thinking of switching to terrestial digital now are likely to use MPEG4 from day one, and then the possibility of HD terrestial becomes much stronger. In the meantime, people here are gradually waking up to the fact that the current UK digital terrestial system (Freeview) is sadly lacking technically, even before the first analogue transmissions have been turned off!! (see http://www.dtg.org.uk/news/news.php?id=2231 )

David, perhaps this was payback for you chaps enjoying the virtues of PAL all these years while we "pioneers" had to make do with NTSC...?!

Very apt, and you aren't the first person to say that! UK DTT also currently uses the 2K system whilst the rest of Europe uses 8K, I believe, though the plan is to go to all 8K working come analogue switch off. So not only will all the analogue tuners become redundant, but the early digital ones (which were 2K only) as well. That shouldn't affect very many people.

A move to MPEG4 (HD or SD) would be much more difficult, owing to the very large number of current digital boxes and TVs. They are mostly 2/8K compatible, but not MPEG4, even for SD.

It's conceivable that HD broadcasting via MPEG4 may coexist with SD via MPEG2 in the future on the terrestial platform. If not, the terrestial broadcasters fear is that terrestial digital will increasingly be seen as a poor relation to satellite. Hence the campaign in the link I posted.

I heard that is being done to accomodate the U.S. Military. Anyone know it this is true? SD rocks, HD socks.