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All posts by David Talks

Below are all of David Talks's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.


Does anyone know about the BBC4 outage today, 29/12/15? I set my DVD recorder to record from 7 pm (Dr Who and the RI Christmas lecture) to be greeted when I played back by 2 hrs of the BBC4 black info screen that says it starts broadcasting from 7, which, in this case, it clearly didn't !

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Just to add , I'm in Camelsdale so we have the repeater in Haslemere which only relays a limited mux from the Midhurst tx.

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I have done some tests and I don't think this is a matter for this forum. This is why. When I record BBC4 after 7pm and the DVD Recorder is tuned to a default channel beforehand which is different from BBC 4, no problem. When the DVD is tuned to BBC 4 by default , the fault occurs. Also, even if it's tuned to a different channel beforehand and then I record BBC 4 from 7 pm, same fault. It's a fault with the BBC's transmission or my DVD Recorder such that it refuses to receive the program but still carries on receiving the info screen . The reason it's only just happened is probably when I interrupted a recording on BBC 4 a few days before and then my DVD does NOT return to the default channel but stays on BBC 4.

I will pursue the fault on another forum as it's not a transmitter fault as such , I think. It's more fundamental than that. I thought I'd close the thread by reporting this anyway.

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I'm in Camelsdale which is a repeater off the Midhurst transmitter to cover this valley. We get a reduced MUX and it's vertically polarised, so no chance of picking up other signals.

Anyway, the DVD is trying to record BBC4 and succeeding in picking up the info screen at 7 pm that says "BBC4 starts at 7 pm". But thereafter it continues to record that info screen and not the programme. It will, however, record the sound and occasionally it will pick up part of the video as a strip obscured by part of the info screen. If, as the screen says, you tune away and back again, it sorts itself out. But by the nature of video recording, you aren't there to read that or respond! If I try to record later, starting from another channel, it's fine, but not a) starting from the DVD tuned to BBC4 or b) staring at 7 pm. For some reason, the BBC transmit a programme on the guide called "this is BBC4" up to 18:58 and another one 2 minutes long to bring us up to 19:00. I don't know why this is but recording or omitting the 2 minutes makes no difference.

I see this as a fault to do with what seems to me to be a fundamental difference in the type of transmission data stream that provides the info screen and the main programme that somehow is not correctly sent to or correctly interpreted by the DVD. Hence, I think this is for another forum.

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