You were finding the wrong ears, Scott.
It's a little more complex than that, so I'll explain what I know. The NTSC defined the color of standard phosphor, and you should be able to find that online. Problem was, to get those actual colors from phosphors they would be both expensive and dim. That doesn't sell a lot of TVs. The expensive SONY and Ikagami studio monitors used a phosphor set that was close to spec, no consumer sets I ever saw did. Consumer SONY wasn't bad, better than most.So what did the consumer sets use? Green was easy, red and blue not so much. I don't remember what they did with the blue, except over drive it. With red they cheated and made the spectrum wider, instead of a pure red, the phosphor was more of an orange-red. You can see it if you pay attention. CRT wasn't the only one to cheat like this, early LCD was very bad. The reds were orange, not real red. I also saw an early laser projector that did the same cheat, an orange dye laser was used instead of red because it was brighter. Didn't look right, just like laptop LCD rarely looks right. (It's getting better)
On the other side of the "spectrum" are LED video walls. With LEDs the colors are extremely pure and the spectral peaks very tight. That, combined with the amazing brightness, means they always look over saturated to me. Material that was mastered on a CRT or good LCD is going to look super saturated on an LED wall. I usually have the LED tech turn saturation down by 40-50%. Even straight thru from camera to LED wall will look over saturated. The color matrix in the camera isn't designed for a display of that purity and brightness.
Tubelab: The coding technology has come a long ways since the days you are referring to (I'm involved in the work on ATSC 3.0, with uses state of the art technologies). I remember the "stealth" passes in football from the early days, where the ball broke up into a cloud of pixels when it left the quarterback's hand and coalesced back into a football when caught.
Many of the problems you see today in Cable (or satellite) is due to insufficient bandwidth allocation - trying to stuff too much content into a fixed pipe.
The new codec (HEVC (or H.265)) uses about 1/4 the bandwidth as MPEG2 for the same quality - and work is underway in MPEG for another generation which cuts that in half.
Even more amazing is what's been done with audio coding (Dolby AC-4 or MPEG-H).
Rich
Many of the problems you see today in Cable (or satellite) is due to insufficient bandwidth allocation - trying to stuff too much content into a fixed pipe.
The new codec (HEVC (or H.265)) uses about 1/4 the bandwidth as MPEG2 for the same quality - and work is underway in MPEG for another generation which cuts that in half.
Even more amazing is what's been done with audio coding (Dolby AC-4 or MPEG-H).
Rich
Since for work I look at uncompressed, or lightly compressed (ProRes) video all day, the poor quality of broadcast amazes me. As Tubelab says, too much going down the same thin pipe. Broadcast, or mostly cable/satellite TV, looks like lumpy melted plastic to me. Bring on the better compression schemes, I'm ready!
But if I stand 20 feet from the TV, it doesn't matter.
But if I stand 20 feet from the TV, it doesn't matter.
Pano: If you're within range, try using a simple antenna feed direct to your TV for over the air reception - much better quality than cable/satellite (today) - and free.
in a few years, will be even better, with 4K (or more likely HDR/WCG/HFR at 1080P). 4K UHD is currently being broadcast OTA in South Korea (and the next gen TVs are available at the stores there).
If you happen to go to Japan & can see what NHK is doing with 8K over satellite, it's quite amazing (although I question the practicality of 8K for home use).
Rich
in a few years, will be even better, with 4K (or more likely HDR/WCG/HFR at 1080P). 4K UHD is currently being broadcast OTA in South Korea (and the next gen TVs are available at the stores there).
If you happen to go to Japan & can see what NHK is doing with 8K over satellite, it's quite amazing (although I question the practicality of 8K for home use).
Rich
OTA was pretty nice in Miami Florida where one complete 6 MHz RF channel was used for a single 1080 stream. Here there is limited OTA. I can receive two RF channels but one transmits 3 video streams, and the other transmits 4 streams. It still looks a lot better than cable.
I watch a lot of 4K content from Youtube via the same Comcast cable that brings my poor quality TV. Their internet service varies from really fast to ridiculously fast. The test I just ran revealed a download speed of 293 Mbps. I can watch two 4K streams on two different PC's at the same time without stuttering or buffering.
The compression artifacts vary from minimal to undetectable on 4K at 60 Hz video. There is still the usual color banding in the color shading around some bright objects, particularly sunset / sunrise video.
As I have found out by making my own time lapse videos from a few thousand JPEGs shot on a decent camera (Lumix FZ1000), the banding is present in the original JPEG compression. I need to get a really big, fast memory card to eat a few thousand RAW images though.
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I haven't owned a TV in almost 5 years, tho I still occasionally get stuck in front of one. But I know what you mean and George mean, even in the old analog NTSC days, direct broadcast could be darn good. In Sweden OTA was always amazingly good, for whatever reason.
In australia OTA tv was huge and it was all PAL. Depending on weather or not the station was government funded or small time is what defined the picture quality. I'll talk mainly in the 90s for OTA and the 00s for Foxtel.
ABC (5A VHF) was fairly good in audio and video but there was always a constant high brightness level and ABC TV always had a smoother picture, I suspect to not offend the snobs who loved to watch it.
Seven and Ten (7 & 10 VHF in Sydney, 50? and 63? UHF locally) were both stations that were best for movies and in our family we had a few recorded OTA VHS tapes, I saw The Abyss for the first time on VHS tape recorded off the air from NRTV which was kind of an affiliate for Ten back in the old days.
SBS (UHF) was poor quality, foreign programming, lowest frequency on the UHF dial, channel 28. Extremely weak signal.
Then at about 2002-2003 stations started to air more depressing and cynical programming (such as All Saints and Big Brother Australia (yawn) and the joy and life went out of watching television, in addition to this they squashed the picture into Letterbox for most of the 4:3 Analog broadcasts AND they didn't even bother to adjust the brightness and constrast levels, so the picture on an Analog television looked like **** by this point.
And to make things worse the quality of the shows were HORRIBLE, you had Judith McGrath in All Saints which looks like an old had who's face and attitude towards others (bedside manner) has been beaten by a thousand year sand storm. In fact most if not all female Australian actors would fit this description. In fact their attitude towards others is more that like of a Prison Warden. Which has made watching Australian television from 1998-2003 an extremely depressing event.
I don't know why but most slim Australian actors all look like they are a Vulture stuck inside the deboned skin of a human being with extremely sharp noises and bald heads.
With Foxtel (Ku Satellite TVRO) however, you paid for garbage. The Ovation channel was horrible, so was TCM, what they did to the picture quality should have been considered criminal. I don't know if it was because of the conversion from NTSC to PAL or because of some other horrid early digital processing but the picture always had a horrible MPEG1 352x288 resolution look to it and as if you were constantly watching it on one of those little portable television sets with an early dot matrix display on them, you know the type, the ones with a metal wire mesh over the screen.
That is what Foxtel looked like in the 90s and 00s, and that was a digital technology, you could literally get a better picture pointing a video camera in front of any cheap CRT television ever made. It was that bad. And people paid for this service.
Nowdays its all garbage yet again, just now that we have 4+ low bitrate channels per transponder on the DVB-T system.
Australian television is like getting your mind and ears raped by a bunch of australian bikies with a baseball bat covered in sandpaper. It was kind of ok in the 80s and 90s but only because of Hey Hey It's Saturday and Beyond 2000 and american and european imported shows. I think the "best" thing that we ever had on air was Beyond 2000 and the best mainstream show would have probably been The Simpsons or Funniest Home Videos.
Needless to say I tuned out at about 2003 and started watching only SBS from then on, only because they broadcasted Top Gear. I kept up with the news up until about 2008 when I realized that the News is all owned by Rupert Murdoch and he biases everything and lies out of his teeth with everything, since then I've never had a need for any kind of television, it annoyed the crap out of me whenever a television was turned on in the area. To me now a "television" is a monitor with audio, nothing more nothing less.
ABC (5A VHF) was fairly good in audio and video but there was always a constant high brightness level and ABC TV always had a smoother picture, I suspect to not offend the snobs who loved to watch it.
Seven and Ten (7 & 10 VHF in Sydney, 50? and 63? UHF locally) were both stations that were best for movies and in our family we had a few recorded OTA VHS tapes, I saw The Abyss for the first time on VHS tape recorded off the air from NRTV which was kind of an affiliate for Ten back in the old days.
SBS (UHF) was poor quality, foreign programming, lowest frequency on the UHF dial, channel 28. Extremely weak signal.
Then at about 2002-2003 stations started to air more depressing and cynical programming (such as All Saints and Big Brother Australia (yawn) and the joy and life went out of watching television, in addition to this they squashed the picture into Letterbox for most of the 4:3 Analog broadcasts AND they didn't even bother to adjust the brightness and constrast levels, so the picture on an Analog television looked like **** by this point.
And to make things worse the quality of the shows were HORRIBLE, you had Judith McGrath in All Saints which looks like an old had who's face and attitude towards others (bedside manner) has been beaten by a thousand year sand storm. In fact most if not all female Australian actors would fit this description. In fact their attitude towards others is more that like of a Prison Warden. Which has made watching Australian television from 1998-2003 an extremely depressing event.
I don't know why but most slim Australian actors all look like they are a Vulture stuck inside the deboned skin of a human being with extremely sharp noises and bald heads.
With Foxtel (Ku Satellite TVRO) however, you paid for garbage. The Ovation channel was horrible, so was TCM, what they did to the picture quality should have been considered criminal. I don't know if it was because of the conversion from NTSC to PAL or because of some other horrid early digital processing but the picture always had a horrible MPEG1 352x288 resolution look to it and as if you were constantly watching it on one of those little portable television sets with an early dot matrix display on them, you know the type, the ones with a metal wire mesh over the screen.
That is what Foxtel looked like in the 90s and 00s, and that was a digital technology, you could literally get a better picture pointing a video camera in front of any cheap CRT television ever made. It was that bad. And people paid for this service.
Nowdays its all garbage yet again, just now that we have 4+ low bitrate channels per transponder on the DVB-T system.
Australian television is like getting your mind and ears raped by a bunch of australian bikies with a baseball bat covered in sandpaper. It was kind of ok in the 80s and 90s but only because of Hey Hey It's Saturday and Beyond 2000 and american and european imported shows. I think the "best" thing that we ever had on air was Beyond 2000 and the best mainstream show would have probably been The Simpsons or Funniest Home Videos.
Needless to say I tuned out at about 2003 and started watching only SBS from then on, only because they broadcasted Top Gear. I kept up with the news up until about 2008 when I realized that the News is all owned by Rupert Murdoch and he biases everything and lies out of his teeth with everything, since then I've never had a need for any kind of television, it annoyed the crap out of me whenever a television was turned on in the area. To me now a "television" is a monitor with audio, nothing more nothing less.
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The various versions of Quatermass are debated. The one I used for DivX was this one below. Interesting as they show colour TV in 1967 ( filmed 1966? ) in a pub which was years before it would have happened. I saw 819 line SECAM in 1966, it was experimental and I think never used. From my memory it was impressive. Mostly showing seascapes. Marie de Lilas area of Paris. I think it was cable TV.
YouTube
It's said the BBC borrowed the Moscow cable loop to test NTSC circa 1960. They reported it to be totally satisfactory and did UK test transmissions late at night. Some even say it was 405 line. Baird is said to have shown HD Colour before 1950. They who saw the Baird were impressed by the build quality, Modular for easy servicing. Baird is mostly seen as the nearly man or a complete fraud. The 1970's Mars vehicles used what was mostly a Baird type. The fact he had this brief time with CRT is noteworthy. Baird seems in most ways a failure and caused his family much grief. As far as I know NTSC is more HD than PAL. I was told Sony set the colour for CRT on NTSC and sold the same for PAL.Sony TV's were slightly blue tinged. I don't know if true. ITT were very good.
Piet's Home-built Television
YouTube
It's said the BBC borrowed the Moscow cable loop to test NTSC circa 1960. They reported it to be totally satisfactory and did UK test transmissions late at night. Some even say it was 405 line. Baird is said to have shown HD Colour before 1950. They who saw the Baird were impressed by the build quality, Modular for easy servicing. Baird is mostly seen as the nearly man or a complete fraud. The 1970's Mars vehicles used what was mostly a Baird type. The fact he had this brief time with CRT is noteworthy. Baird seems in most ways a failure and caused his family much grief. As far as I know NTSC is more HD than PAL. I was told Sony set the colour for CRT on NTSC and sold the same for PAL.Sony TV's were slightly blue tinged. I don't know if true. ITT were very good.
Piet's Home-built Television
I thought 405 line NTSC was a myth. Not so. It's a few days older than me.
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/reports/1956-23.pdf
The World's First High Definition Colour Television System
Philo Farnsworth - Wikipedia
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/reports/1956-23.pdf
The World's First High Definition Colour Television System
Philo Farnsworth - Wikipedia
Back in the day when I serviced CRT TV's my last step before closing up was to 'tune' the picture.I beg to differ - and made a lot of money doing just that!
First step was to cleanse the face of the tube with ammonia mixture.
I then set about fine setting focus and cutoff levels using a loupe to close inspect individual colour pixels.
Next step was to set white balance levels and then return to tweak cutoff levels.
Two or three iterations of this process yielded picture focus and colour balance far better than factory every time.
This was part of my standard procedure and included in the fixed cost plus parts repair price.
This gained many return customer and WOM repair jobs, and many such customers commented that their TV had never looked so good.
Blanking level, white level and colour balance are critical to good picture, and 'the great unwashed' do notice.
Dan.
At one time when I worked for TI, I was the lead engineer for the TISTAR PCS project which used a Motorola 68000 VME bus system as the main PCS system with TI PCs as terminals. Later they switched to ATs as terminals (ACER which were built by TI) and eventually HP RISC systems as complete systems.
We used to buy 21" crt color monitors with a resolution of 1280 by 1024 out of a company in Atlanta that I can't find any more. I think they went under.
Any way the monitors were rather expensive. One day I got a call from manufacturing complaining that the color was off on the monitors and they wanted to send them back to the manufacturer. When I went down to the warehouse where the systems were staged before shipment, I found a system on a steel table with color all awash.
a small paperclip on a piece of string confirmed my suspicion. The table was magnetized!
I had them replace the table with a wooden one, and then had to degauss and realign about six monitors.
We used to buy 21" crt color monitors with a resolution of 1280 by 1024 out of a company in Atlanta that I can't find any more. I think they went under.
Any way the monitors were rather expensive. One day I got a call from manufacturing complaining that the color was off on the monitors and they wanted to send them back to the manufacturer. When I went down to the warehouse where the systems were staged before shipment, I found a system on a steel table with color all awash.
a small paperclip on a piece of string confirmed my suspicion. The table was magnetized!
I had them replace the table with a wooden one, and then had to degauss and realign about six monitors.
I remember degausing using a small transformer ( 6VA ? ) on a TV where the automatic degausing had gone, I think it was a Sony. My brother said over the phone does the TV go clonk on switch on? No it didn't. The TV drifted back over a few days. I am pretty sure the transformer was not that good at it's job. Good enough to do what was wanted. Obviously something was causing this at the location. My brother said that it wouldn't need much, even the Earth's flux (??). He fixed the inbuilt one and all was good. It was fun watching the picture swirl when degausing. Never asked if I should.
I did the grey levels on the Trintron. It wasn't linear with green or blue casts in shadows depending on set up. I think green was nicer and only noticeable if looking for it when monochrome. The test card set up was metal sticks on the tube back. Quite crude I felt.
In the UK Snooker which is like Pool was used to demonstrate colour TV. It was so popular that the green gun went on TV's. If people didn't watch it then red went first. A friends Panasonic 16x9 also had a dead green gun. Football when him. We use to bounce the guns which sometimes got more life from them. My brother noticed ITT tubes might get 17 years use with an all valve TV and 12 years transistor hybrid. Same colour tube. The soft start of the all valve sets being prime reason. He preferred the ITT over any other. Picture quality was excellent.
I did the grey levels on the Trintron. It wasn't linear with green or blue casts in shadows depending on set up. I think green was nicer and only noticeable if looking for it when monochrome. The test card set up was metal sticks on the tube back. Quite crude I felt.
In the UK Snooker which is like Pool was used to demonstrate colour TV. It was so popular that the green gun went on TV's. If people didn't watch it then red went first. A friends Panasonic 16x9 also had a dead green gun. Football when him. We use to bounce the guns which sometimes got more life from them. My brother noticed ITT tubes might get 17 years use with an all valve TV and 12 years transistor hybrid. Same colour tube. The soft start of the all valve sets being prime reason. He preferred the ITT over any other. Picture quality was excellent.
What you can do is to just let the player play and let it flatten the pinch roller back out into shape. If that doesn't work....
Also it is recommended that you clean the pinch roller with some white spirits/mineral turps or some nail polish remover and a tissue and to rub off all of the black dirt from it then let it dry, this will make it stick better and grip the tape better. Wow and flutter will then be gone provided the pinch roller is no longer damaged.
For extreme circumstances where the pinch roller is visibly dented, you can steal a pinch roller from a printer and get a machinist to cut up some brass to make up a brand new pinch roller:
YouTube
Watch this video to find out how to do that.
If the rubber is visibly cracked you can get some stuff called Rubber Rejuvinator, it comes in a bottle, put some of that stuff on the pinch roller and let it sit.
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Capture in MagicYUV using Virtual VCR using YUY2 at 720x576 for PAL or 720x480 for NTSC.
I just use one of these cards, but it doesn't have an onboard soundcard which can give you audio sync issues which you will need to fix in Virtualdub, instructions below. PCI-E Internal TV Tuner Card MPEG Video DVR Capture Recorder PAL BG PAL I O6P0 | eBay
Capture cards with onboard audio capture are slightly better but are a lot more expensive.
Then using handbrake, re-encode the 80GB file back down to something manageable. I would recommend making a preset out of one of the H.265 presets and if you have an intel cpu with intel quicksync feature you can use the H.265 (Intel QSV) codec from Handbrake to make a really fast encode (30-60 FPS on my Intel G4400T CPU). I've had excellent results with this. My Constant Quality setting is 0 for archiving really important files which will get you a 60GB file for 3 hours of video HOWEVER you can go down as low as 15 before you get any significant visual data loss.
I would leave the audio settings alone and let it encode into AAC (avcodec).
If you have audio issues you will want to be using VirtualDub to fix those using audio interleaving and doing either a + or a - 1000ms adjustment on the audio. http://www.tutorialsroom.com/tutorials/details/vdub_adjust_sync.html?i=2
Good luck!
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Common fault was failed degaussing coil series PTC thermistor.
On most sets this was downstream of the mains power switch, but upstream of the remotely controlled power supplies......purity errors were corrected at hard switch on, but not soft switch on.
Dan.
Stupid 'advice'.
A mid age PR can be restored by grinding off the surface glaze with W&D sandpaper and then cleaning with suitable solvent....IPA/Shellite/Lighter fluid is optimal.
Older PR with excessive wear or dents or grooves are not recoverable and must be replaced - VIDEO PINCH ROLLERS AND ASSEMBLIES
Dan.
SECAM? Was it color? As far as I knew, the 819 line system was black and white only, never was in color. 819 line was dropped in favor of the 625 line system when color came in from what I heard. Were there color experiments in 819 line? Also didn't know there was cable in Paris that early on. Could have been a small system in the local area. The major cable install happened in 1988-89 and was fiber into the building, coax to each residence. Back then I had a big old Thompson (I think) dual system color TV. 625/819 line. What a beast to work on! The 819 line broadcasts were long gone by the time I got it.
SECAM was tricky, too, but a better color system than PAL or NTSC. It even looked better on VHS, which would make some posters here happy. :;
Turn Denoise off in Handbrake (Located on the Filters tab)
Deinterlace: Decomb Preset: Default Interlace Detection: Default
Everything else off.
On the Video preset:
H.265 (Intel QSV) if you can support it.
Encoder Preset: Quality
Encoder Profile: Auto Encoder Level: Auto
Constant Quality: anywhere between 15 and 0 depending on what final size you want to have, depending on how important the tape is and what quality you want to keep it in.
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