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Originally Posted by grantsteve Why is this though?! Surely they have been around long enough to allow for all the glitches and shortcomings to be sorted? |
Well, you might hope so, but there are specs for things like DTT, and then there are the ways those are used by the broadcasters, curious transmission glitches, and people with 40 year old aerials and dodgy cabling.
For example, in some areas of the MHEG spec, there are apparently ambiguities; as a result there have been several boxes that had problems with MHEG, with things like BBCi applications, or Channel 4/E4 info boxes causing lockups and crashes.
The new MHEG standard is supposed to resolve those, and hopefully that means a test suite can be more robust.
Then there are other odd things that get done differently in different countries - like the way the Extended Information field in the Freeview broadcast EPG is empty, and everything is shoe-horned into the Description field.
Or the penny-pinching way in which mux operators fail to keep an eye on whether or not they're even broadcasting an EPG, with the result that people sometimes see no data for days on Mux2, until someone drops an email to the ITV engineering department, whereupon they notice it and pull their fingers out.
Or the problems in Australia where many channels don't broadcast an accurate time signal on their DTT services, causing missed timers.
Over time, some or all of these things get addressed; but most of the boxes - especially ones for DTT - are designed by people who don't have the end to end control that Sky does, and developed in countries far away from their target market, where the quirks and bodges of the DTT transmissions may not be apparent.
If you fed most of the boxes a perfect DTT stream, with good reception and all the correct information in the correct places, you would probably find they behave much, much better than they do now.
You can patch them up, but all too often you find things change again, when someone comes up with another way of showing adverts, tweaking their interactive services, or squeezing another bit of data onto their crowded multiplex.
Nigel.