Anablog

So the broadcast industry took 20 years to come up with the digital TV standard and it sure does not live up to all the hype. I have been using over-the-air digital TV for about two years. As you would expect from anything digital, when it works it is pretty good, but when it screws up it “falls off a cliff” as they point out in this great article. .

I could only pick up about five channels, eight at most. And they were never the same ones. Twist the antenna one way and get ABC and NBC. Turn it another way and get CBS and Fox. I couldn’t get any PBS stations at all, which were the real reason I wanted to get a better signal in the first place.

And this;

A digital signal is affected by practically everything – where your TV set is located in your house, the walls in your house, the number of trees in your yard, how close it is to other electronic devices, birds migrating south in the fall. No kidding. A Washington Post story described how a woman who lived on the 20th floor of an apartment building would lose her signal for a few moments every time a plane landed or took off from Reagan National airport.

And this in a comment:

With my converter box the picture is crystal clear - when I can get it. I tried it for a while and the whole family agreed - snow is better than the picture dropping out completely every few minutes. I tried positioning an antenna all over the outside of my house but with no better luck than the indoor one. We had some success with the front door open and the antenna balanced and pointed in a particular direction but that did not seem like a good long term solution.

I told you folks about this last summer but everybody thought that I was a nut since they have been conned to think anything digital has to be better. That is false, and the promises of digital TV are a little suspect too. In short, if the TV station puts up 5 signals in the bandwidth of one, like our PBS affiliate does here, the picture quality sucks, it is full of JPEG artifacts, those blocky jerky crappy pictures. A commenter in my rant said DTV was MPEG2 but MPEG is just a JPEG key frame followed by frame change information for 64 frames and then another JPEG key frame. When you don’t have a lot of bandwidth you have to use low-quality JPEG settings and the picture looks crappy—this shows up any time there are fast scene pans or water or fire. Next up is interference. The government promised there would be less but that is a lie. Digital signals are far more sensitive to disruption. A few bytes lost means the whole digital processor loses sync and the picture (and sound) just disappears for a second. Pretty annoying. If you have cable or satellite don’t worry, this whole DTV scam was part of the deal to screw the broadcast industry so the phone companies can buy the bandwidth. Now that’s a fait accompli, so Google and Intel want to use TV whitespace to put up wifi up and screw the phone companies. Note that the public’s interest is not even on this list, it is only a question of whether the government helps the broadcast industry, the phone companies or the internet companies. You don’t matter, and sorry, you never have.