29-09-2021, 05:00 PM
No, not the analogue vintage television we all know and love, with a synchronised, modulated scanning beam pursuing a raster... but the modern digital up-to-date sort, with flat screen and HDMI connection. My ignorance about this is really shameful. I must have just not made the effort to 'keep up' when the technology moved on.
You may remember that old 1951 film "How Television Works" (with TV22). Is there an equivalent video today, say on YouTube, that similarly covers the basics and which you would recommend?
I could always try guessing what's going on, I suppose... Apparently, television no longer 'scans', and we have all seen the 'blockiness' when things go awry, so maybe 'blocks' have something to do with it. But how many blocks are there, and do they change in size according to the task in hand? What controls this process? How often is it repeated? Is the mp2 technique akin to having lots of compressed jpeg images (which start life as uncompressed 'bitmaps', somehow linked according to how often bits of the picture is changed? But then, I don't even know how bitmaps are put together. It seems that modern television is going to be a lot harder to understand than the old.
Associated with all this seeming activity assigning information only to where it's needed in the picture (rather than scanning it in regardless 'like they used to'), would appear to be a 'rescaling' process. In today's world, 'standards converters' - once taking up a room - now appear to be everywhere. They don't seem to assign information to where it must go within the picture; rather they control the scale of the whole picture. And they can do this despite the 'logic' behind how the picture is put together and the painting of blocks, growing, shrinking, 'breathing' all the time...? And on your phone, all controllable simply by vee-ing two fingers.
Then there's still the RF side, with 'multiplexing' and also sometimes with 'OFDM' and multiple carriers to understand... but perhaps we'd best leave that to another time.
Well as you can see, I've got myself tied in right old knots by imagining how it may be done. Can anyone make it simple?
Steve
You may remember that old 1951 film "How Television Works" (with TV22). Is there an equivalent video today, say on YouTube, that similarly covers the basics and which you would recommend?
I could always try guessing what's going on, I suppose... Apparently, television no longer 'scans', and we have all seen the 'blockiness' when things go awry, so maybe 'blocks' have something to do with it. But how many blocks are there, and do they change in size according to the task in hand? What controls this process? How often is it repeated? Is the mp2 technique akin to having lots of compressed jpeg images (which start life as uncompressed 'bitmaps', somehow linked according to how often bits of the picture is changed? But then, I don't even know how bitmaps are put together. It seems that modern television is going to be a lot harder to understand than the old.
Associated with all this seeming activity assigning information only to where it's needed in the picture (rather than scanning it in regardless 'like they used to'), would appear to be a 'rescaling' process. In today's world, 'standards converters' - once taking up a room - now appear to be everywhere. They don't seem to assign information to where it must go within the picture; rather they control the scale of the whole picture. And they can do this despite the 'logic' behind how the picture is put together and the painting of blocks, growing, shrinking, 'breathing' all the time...? And on your phone, all controllable simply by vee-ing two fingers.
Then there's still the RF side, with 'multiplexing' and also sometimes with 'OFDM' and multiple carriers to understand... but perhaps we'd best leave that to another time.
Well as you can see, I've got myself tied in right old knots by imagining how it may be done. Can anyone make it simple?
Steve
