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- In the beginning was the word, and the
word was teletext, and it was digital, and everyone knew it was
digital.
- But then lo, then there was invented
by many Wise Men from the West, a new, powerful and wonderful
television system which was, strangely, much better at transmitting
still pictures than moving ones.
- And the Wise Men called this system
digital, for so it was.
- And some digits were ON and some
digits were not.
- But the ONdigital system carried not
the teletext but promised that a new and better system would appear
here.
- All four seasons came to pass and
finally some ONdigital set-top boxes could receive the teletext
service which the Wise Men also called Digital, remembering not that
teletext had been digital all along...
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A couple of
frames from the embryonic BBC Digital Text service, captured on 1-Oct-1999,
the day the teletext software was first made available for download to the
Ondigital set-top boxes. |
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Here's the first of a
few pages decoded using the first release of the Pace STB software |
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The software
allows you to hear the sound from the last BBC station you were tuned to,
and some pages also allow you to see the programme in a 'window'.
This introduces the aspect ratio
issue. It would appear that Digital text pages are composed with an aspect
ratio of 4:3 in mind.
Certainly if you stretch the weather map
pages below into 16:9 they look wrong, and yet BBC TEXT assumes the aspect
ratio of the BBC service to which the decoder was last tuned, or, in the
case of the windowed service, is tuned. If this were not done the
windowed service would not be displayed properly.
So on this page you can see frames
displayed in different aspect ratios, as appropriate.
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The weather maps are an obvious
improvement over Level 1 teletext. |
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Note Richard Baker, the
ex-BBC newsreader, appearing on the last edition of Backstage on BBC
CHOICE. |
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These pages
on the BBC KNOWLEDGE TEXT service trailed a change to the service on
6-Sep-2001. |
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