Cable Forum - HD Is it better to watch an HD news channel in the event of an imminent nuclear attack?

Cable Forum (https://www.cableforum.uk/board/index.php)

- Virgin Media TV Service (https://www.cableforum.uk/board/forumdisplay.php?f=11)

- - HD : Is it better to watch an HD news channel in the event of an imminent nuclear attack? (https://www.cableforum.uk/board/showthread.php?t=33706363)

Re: Is it better to watch an HD news channel in the event of an imminent nuclear atta

Quote:

Originally Posted by RichardCoulter (Post 35946207)

No, it's a light hearted look at how to get your full 4 minutes.

In which case, down 8 pints and make sure you know where your towel is.

Re: Is it better to watch an HD news channel in the event of an imminent nuclear atta

Quote:

Originally Posted by spiderplant (Post 35946264)

The answer is "it varies". But I think it's all digital these days.

Advanced codecs take longer to encode because they work on many video frames in parallel. The allows them to find common patterns across mutiple frames, and so increase the compression. But the more frames they scan, the more they have to buffer, so the delay increases. It's unlikely to ever get quicker, as this would reduce the compression or compromise picture quality.

Thanks for info.

Makes perfect sense. Key frames and only the differences between frames simplifies what happens a lot and knowing how encoding software can make multiple passes of the same data to get best quality, it's amazing how good some of the on the fly stuff is.

As for fitting more channels in freeview, they can just lower the bitrate of channels to fit more in. Some paid channels in the past looked terrible because they compressed it way too much.

The milliseconds between trading exchanges was a big thing due to the money involved. I vaguely remember a trading scam that relied on the small latency delays of connections between exchanges some years back. Maybe im thinking of some Ocean eleven movie instead :D

Re: Is it better to watch an HD news channel in the event of an imminent nuclear atta

They do lower the bit rate to fit more channels onto Freeview, but have improved encoding technology in the past, so hopefully this will continue.

I agree that some of the pictures are shocking though, which is why I think it's better to get Freesat. If I didn't use pay TV i'd get a PVR for both to get the best of both worlds. Having said that most Freeview channels are now on Freesat, so I might just use Freesat as it has more bandwidth available and, therefore, better picture quality.

https://www.tvbeurope.com/production...or-uk-freeview

---------- Post added at 02:03 ---------- Previous post was at 01:45 ----------

Quote:

Originally Posted by heero_yuy (Post 35946216)

I would think the first warning we'll get is all the TV and Radio stations go off air simultaneously quickly followed by all electrical power as EMPs take out everything electrical that isn't hardened including all mobile phones.

That's assuming you haven't already gone into orbit with most of your surroundings or been fried to a crisp.

Funnily enough we had a power cut a few days ago and the first thing I checked was to put the radio on battery and see if R4 was still on the air. Maybe it's having lived through an era when a nuclear exchange was a very real threat.

Unfortunately, I think with some of the leaders in the world at this point in time, that the threat is once again increasing.