Re: [SLUG] Re: DVB Card Advice

[Rev Simon Rumble <simon@xxxxxxxxxx>]

This one time, at band camp, Ben Buxton wrote:

> Interesting to hear this - I'd have thought that DVB would have
> eliminated the regional variations as there would be no more issues with
> PAL/NTSC or problems with audio/video channel separation. But anywaym
> the Nova-T cards work in oz anyway, dont know about other cards.

DVB is really a cluster of standards.  Some of them define 
transmission, some encoding, others still the format of the data.

As with all areas of government interference, a large amount of horse 
trading went on when Australia was deciding what standard to use.  
Packer et al lobbied successfully (does he ever lobby unsuccessfully?) 
to reduce the existing networks' costs by using a similar channel width 
to existing transmissions.

Similarly Australia decided to use Dolby Digital encoding of audio 
instead of whatever they use in Europe.  Not sure why this was, but no 
doubt there was some behind-the-scenes lobbying from someone with a 
vested interest.

These local variants have the effect of raising costs for Australian 
consumers because we can't buy off-the-shelf European kit.  Fortunately 
we stuck to most of the standards, so it's relatively easy for kit made 
for the European market to have the extra stuff hacked on.

-- 
Rev Simon Rumble <simon@xxxxxxxxxx>
www.rumble.net

Trickle-down theory--the less than elegant metaphor that if
one feeds the horse enough oats, some will pass through to
the road for the sparrows.

- J. K. Galbraith