[time-nuts] LightSquared gets at least some political attention

lists at lazygranch.com lists at lazygranch.com
Sat Apr 16 23:12:23 UTC 2011


You also have to wonder why cable was able to get their own HDTV standard. 

I did a bit of video design in the day. I was told SECAM was such a mess that the studios did everything in PAL and converted to SECAM for transmission. 

Also, NTSC was never a standard. It was issued as a bulletin, a level beneath a standard. I have "the book" (ITV?) someplace of world standards. There are all sorts of variants amongst the standards. 

I've read the original papers behind the NTSC system. It seemed like decent science to me, at least in the matrix design. PAL made more sense though. 

The only thing that really seemed odd in NTSC was the phase shift between the colorburst reference and the color difference signals. I think it was 30 or so degrees. It certainly didn't lend itself to simple digital frame grabbing. Obviously 45 degrees would have made more sense. 
-----Original Message-----
From: "Charles P. Steinmetz" <charles_steinmetz at lavabit.com>
Sender: time-nuts-bounces at febo.com
Date: Sat, 16 Apr 2011 18:45:45 
To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement<time-nuts at febo.com>
Reply-To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement
	<time-nuts at febo.com>
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] LightSquared gets at least some political attention

John wrote:

>IMO, your crack about NTSC is unjustified.
>
>IMO, NTSC color was a very elegant engineering solution to backwards
>compatability. Without that, we could well be still watching B&W.

The other contemporary backward-compatible solutions -- PAL and SECAM 
-- did not suffer from the color drift that plagued color NTSC.  So, 
there were superior methods of backward-compatible color insertion 
available and the FCC still chose the NTSC method.  Bad decision, 
which saddled the US with inferior broadcast video for 60 years -- 
just as choosing 8VSB has done for digital video in the US.

Best regards,

Charles






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