If you haven’t seen it on the calendar, I’m presenting a two-part class on the analog bandwidth-compressed system used for transmitting HDTV in the 1990s in Japan. The first session (Saturday the 19th at 6 PM) will be theory, starting with the basics of analog television and related topics in signal processing. The second session (Saturday the 26th at 6 PM) will be live demonstration.
How is that possible, you may ask? As well as being used for satellite broadcasts, the MUSE signal format was also used for producing consumer high-definition videodiscs. I have some, & the necessary hardware to play them back ; since the decoded output signal format is 100% compatible with the “1080i” format, it can be displayed directly by the video equipment in the lecture theatre. I will be bringing in this equipment to support the first session also ; I plan to display certain waveforms on an oscilloscope.
As a note, the honorarium has been approved, & the committee portion will be going to Electronics.
The four items for the demonstration (second) session are :
“Romantic Greece”, a sort of video travelogue of the Aegean islands & Athens (music only, no speech)
“Imperial Wedding Ceremony”, a condensation of NHK coverage of the Crown Prince’s wedding (lots of Japanese narration & dialogue)
“Ursa Minor Blue”, computer animation based on a children’s picture book (small amounts of Japanese dialogue)
“Hills of the Seasons”, a sort of ballet performed by the landscape of Hokkaido (music only)
All of these are Japanese-market, so there is no English language involved. The segments from “The Test Disk” which will be played back have no dialogue.
I am interested, but have a conflict with something else. The other event may get rained out in which case I am coming to the class. I will not know until tomorrow morning.
I don’t know whether @Gus_Reiter is aware of this, but the Yamaha receiver (I checked its manual… after the fact…) will not accept high-definition video though the component inputs to send out via HDMI. This unexpected-to-me behaviour really put a wrench into my plans last night. Probably Wednesday evening, I am going to test whether I can use my RGBHV-to-VGA adaptor cable, in combination with the VGA-to-HDMI adapter, to circumvent this limitation. If not I may have to buy a component-to-HDMI converter box, which is not a prospect I relish.
It turns out that the VGA-to-HDMI adaptor will happily accept a component video signal, if it’s introduced with Y Pb & Pr routed via the G B & R pins respectively. I tested this Wednesday night, so everything should be copacetic for today’s showing.
Since I didn’t properly get to it last week, I’m also going to use the oscilloscope to show the MUSE signal, probably about 7.30.
Well, I’m surprised that more people didn’t show up to this program, which I thought was the attractive, interesting part. I shall have to repeat it some time, maybe after I’ve done some tune-up work on my player, & perhaps acquired another disc or two. Is there any particular day or time that works best?