Freeview: The DTT Thread

As of 12:05am, BBC ONE and Channel 4 have gone from Winter Hill, ITV1 is still on with the on-screen message from Digital UK, and Five is still on.

12.07 and off goes ITV from Winter Hill too. Seems Channel 5 has outlived everyone in the North West in the end, with a nice big banner sitting over the top of it!

Edit: 5 more minutes and Channel 5 joined the graveyard of analogue too.

Switchoff order seemed to go:- BBC1, Channel 4, ITV1, Channel 5 (Not sure when Channel M went off in the grand scheme of things - though not from Winter Hill anyway)

12:12am and all channels have now gone. EDIT: It appears the NGW MUX that carries the Sky channels has gone off too.

12.17am, the other NGW MUX has gone off, quite convieniently at the end of Rocky II on Virgin1 +1.

12.20am all MUX's except the main BBC MUX are off-air now, at least they haven't wasted time and that they've just got straight to it.

One thing I'm curious over, which has doubtless already been answered somewhere, is how do (are rather did!) they insert the overlay captions onto the analogue broadcasts in the first place? The fact they were so specific, and on channels like 5 suggests they were being added at the transmitter site rather than just on a general broadcast, but I never thought they had tech that could create more than a blue sceen with white text on at those...

So I've retuned this morning, unexpectedly, I've got the bonus of BBC1 Wales, ITV1 Wales and S4C.
Living in Leyland near Preston I could always get a very grainy/snowy s4c and HTV.
Now I get them crystal clear.

Also got the Welsh Channel 4 on number 8 and loads of other duplicates.

Can anyone tell me why CNN was taken off Freeview in the Ulster Region and what happened to the Big Deal Live

anybody else on freeview not got ITV ch4 or 5 this morning (Granada area)

got everything else

I'm fine, but for some reason I had a lower signal from the NGW MUX (Yesterday/ITV4/4Music/Viva etc) where as I've always had a strong picture from it. Try CH59 for ITV/C4/Five on manual tuning.

Three TV's retuned, one's picked up bonus Welsh channels, one refused to pick up any BBC channels despite being there before I retuned, the 3rd didn't want to tune to ITV, so had to store manually.

Bet there's a lot of confused people today

Just because the kit there from the 70's could only produce a blue and white caption doesn't mean that no equipment can ever be added to the site!

It's not particularly difficult technically, all it needs is a caption generator added into incoming video feed. I assume that they just plumbed in 5 of them, programmed them with the specific message and set them to display it at certain times.

If that's the case I would have thought that the ones at Winter Hill will be taken to another site and used there (they're no good at an all digital site as there's no baseband video to use it with) Now that the analogue services have gone the old IBA blue caption generator, if it still exists, will soon be chucked into a skip!

I think that the switchover teams have a bunch of modern caption inserters that they move from transmitter to transmitter as required for DSO. With these devices, even dirt cheap boxes (costing next to nothing in broadcast terms) can overlay full 24bit graphics at broadcast resolution, and have been able to for a decade or two!

I suspect it costs more to install and remove them once (in engineering costs) than it does to buy them.

The captions are inserted at the transmitter site AFAIK.

I'd have thought they'd move the kit around between sites myself, but they'd presumably need quite a few sets to be able to do that due to the overlap. Digital UK suggests they start randomly playing the captions over the channels for the 6 months immediately prior to switchoff, which would mean there'd be a lot of overlap with dates at the transmitter sites. It seems like quite a lot for some captions, that they only then show sporadically.

Unless they only have a single generated caption at the sites until the very end and move more equipment in at the last point before switch. I don't think I've ever seen two analogue channels running captions at once, until late last night when they all seemed to be (I need to run over the footage yet ) but the graphics were slightly different depending on channel.