More 3D on BBC HD – Streetdance

If you thought that the final of Strictly Come Dancing in 3D was all you were going to get from the BBC over the holidays, you might have missed an unexpected treat on New Year’s Day, in the form of Streetdance 3D, on the BBC HD channel.

I watched this mostly because it features dance dreamboat Richard Winsor, whom I’ve seen several times at Sadler’s Wells, but also because I was a little curious about it being broadcast in 3D. It was only a few days ago I posted here that it would be inconceivable that 3D broadcasts wouldn’t, for the time being at least, be accompanied by a 2D simulcast for those without a 3D set. Yet the film was scheduled only on the BBC HD channel, so what was happening?

The clue, it turned out, was in the red button. Switching to the channel while the film was on showed the familiar double image of a side-by-side HD broadcast, where the picture is split down the middle, with an image for each eye on one side of the screen.

Repeated on each side was a red button icon labelled ‘Watch in 2D’, and pressing that switched to the 2D version. So far, nothing unusual there. And my first thought was that it was a simulcast, perhaps using one of the interactive streams that wasn’t needed for anything else.

Except that the 2D version looked better quality than standard definition, and I don’t think there’d be the capacity, even on a day when there’s no sports, to manage that. Another give-away was that there wasn’t any break in either picture or sound when switching between the two. Normally, if the box has to tune to another stream, there’ll be at least a momentary break in both.

Technical tricks

So, how was it done? My guess – I’m waiting for the BBC to confirm, but I’m 99% certain – is that it was all done with MHEG, the interactive ‘red button’ service. This was evident when the application was still available during the following programme.

Pressing Red simply turned on or off one of the useful features that MHEG provides, which is video scaling. Taking advantage of the side-by-side format, the application simply took the left side of the screen, and zoomed it to fill the whole screen; obviously there’s a small loss of horizontal resolution in doing that, compared to broadcasting a full screen HD picture, but it still looked better than SD, and meant there was no glitch on switching formats.

How do I know it was the left hand side? ‘A little Later’ was on after the film, and the application was still live for at least a part of that, with the icon appearing twice on screen. Pressing Red during that zoomed the left side of the screen, losing the right.

So, I’d say that on the evidence so far, it looks like it’s perfectly possible to provide a 2D/3D simulcast without using any extra bandwidth. The downsides are that resolution isn’t quite as high as for HD, and 2D viewers have to take a positive action to see the ‘normal’ version, unlike the Strictly simulcast, where they just tuned to a 2D version.

You probably wouldn’t want to use this for a BBC One programme, because it would end up on the standard def channel version of the channel (unless that can be fed separately from the HD version), and a lot of older set top boxes don’t have an up to date MHEG engine which can handle the video scaling, so wouldn’t be able to switch to 2D; all HD boxes should have the necessary software, as long as they are FreeviewHD certified.

Incompatible equipment

That means, incidentally, that users of the 3View box probably wouldn’t have been able to select 2D, as it doesn’t have MHEG built in, and the same would be true of people watching with a generic satellite receiver, rather than a Sky or Freesat branded one.

So, this is also potentially interesting from that point of view; whatever equipment you have, even a generic satellite or HD terrestrial tuner, you would have been able to watch in 3D. But only equipment compliant with one of the UK’s platforms – FreeviewHD, Freesat or Sky – would have given 2D viewers the opportunity to select that version of the broadcast.

This sort of thing is not going to happen very often, but nevertheless it raises interesting questions about exactly what equipment should be supported by the BBC, and might well be seen by some as pushing people towards platform-compliant equipment.

Wimbledon goes 3D

The Mens’ and Ladies’ Finals of this year’s Wimbledon Championships will be the UK’s first free to air 3D television broadcasts.

The BBC has announced that live 3D coverage of the finals will be provided on Saturday 2nd and Sunday 3rd July, on all the digital TV platforms that carry the BBC HD services. The finals will be broadcast in standard definition on BBC One, in high definition on BBC One HD, and in 3D on the BBC HD channel.

There will also be live 3D screenings in some cinemas around the UK, and I daresay a lot of shopping centres will be getting in extra sets of specs, in the hope of shifting plenty of kit on the day.

The BBC press release puts this firmly in the “editorial experiment” category, so it’s premature to expect any regular service at the moment; this is a test, and also a way to mark the 125th anniversary of the Championships as well.

How it works

The release is a bit short on the technical detail, about which I’ll see if I can find more information (Update: ‘side by side’ format is confirmed; see below). But since no special receivers are required, then my gut feeling is that they’ll be using the ‘side by side’ format to broadcast.

In ‘side by side’ 3D, a single frame actually has two images encoded in it, one for the left and one for the right eye. So it looks a bit weird to an ordinary receiver, but you can still make sense of it, as it’s just a picture, albeit with each half almost the same. A 3D TV, however, will spot the format and zoom each half to full screen, and ensure the left image goes to the left eye and the right image to the right eye, via whatever 3D screen technology it actually uses. The downside is that horizontally, instead of 1920 (or 1440) pixels, since there are two images, each eye only receives half that resolution.

It’s possible to broadcast in other ways, but unlikely, I think.

For example, ‘frame sequential’ 3D requires sending a full HD frame for the left eye, and then one for the right eye. This is Panasonic’s preferred format, because each frame is full HD resolution, but of course that means a lot more bandwidth; you at least have to double the frame rate as you need twice as many images. I suspect, at rates that a receiver understands, this wouldn’t actually break most 2D sets, but you’d get a nasty flickering. It’s really best suited to delivery systems like Blu-Ray.

And, since Freeview HD can only go up to 25p as a frame rate, it’s not possible to use frame sequential, on that platform anyway – you’d effectively be getting only 12.5 frames per second. And I think it’s unlikely the BBC will be using different 3D formats for different platforms, too.

The other way of sending 3D, ‘2D plus depth’ is, unless I’m a bit behind, not an entirely finished standard; it involves sending information about the details for one eye, plus that needed to make the image for the other. Ultimately, some variation of this may be used to create a ‘service compatible’ standard, which is one where someone with a 2D set can tune in and see a decent 2D picture, while a person with a 3D one will see the extra dimension – which will avoid the need to have a separate broadcast stream, as the BBC are doing this year.

So, based on what I know now, I’d say it’s most likely going to be a side by side broadcast; I’ll try to check this when I can, though there wasn’t time between reading the release and the end of the embargo.

Definitely a worthy experiment, I think, and it’ll be interesting to see what people make of it. And how many people moan that three channels were taken up with the same programme.

Update: This BBC blog post confirms that they will indeed be using the side by side format, and increasing the resolution of the stream to the full 1920 pixels.

Remotely viewing the Echostar Freesat box

My review of Echostar’s Freesat recorder is over on RegHardware, but I thought I’d add a few more words and some extra screens here.

First, the connectivity side of this was very straightforward – I fully expected configuration problems with remote viewing, but there weren’t any. While I can’t promise it’ll work fine for everyone, I did access it in fairly challenging circumstances.

The box was connected to my Apple Airport Express powered network; that puts it on a private network, behind NAT, and I didn’t so any special configuration of the Airport. The Airport itself has a public IP address, but is behind a firewall in the router, which is set up to pass limited traffic to the Airport from outside – principally HTTP and some instant messaging. In didn’t add any extra rules for the Sling functionality.

Viewing remotely was done in the Computeractive office, where all the machines are also on a private network, and present a single outgoing IP address. So, effectively, there’s NAT at each end, plus two firewalls – and the streaming still worked without a hitch.

As to picture quality, well if you want to catch up on stuff when you’re away from home, I suppose it’s reasonable enough. The limiting quality is your broadband upload speed – mine is 0.6Mbps, which is reasonable (and faster than quite a lot of people).

So, what’s it like? Well, you can watch BBC One HD remotely, but it won’t look anything like HD; it’s blocky but sit a fair distance from the screen an it’s perfectly watchable. What was more interesting was the difference the quality settings had on the presentation of the on-screen menus, which will be necessary if you want to view recordings remotely. here’s the recording list, with the quality set to ‘Auto’

Menu quality on 'auto' isn't great; click to view full size

Change to ‘Best’ and now the menus are readable; the speed shown in the bottom bar changed from 504 to 536kbps when I did this – and the sound started to break up. But unless you only have a few recordings, you’ll probably need this better quality to be able to work out which file you want to play:

At 'Best' quality, you can read on screen displays, but the sound broke up

Finally, one last pic; I mentioned in the review how bright the front panel lights were, and the Sling indicator, which comes on during remote access is particularly bright, and annoying – that arch of LEDs cycles off and on. This is one you’ll probably want to disable via the menus, if you’re at home when someone else is accessing the box.

All the LEDs are bright, but especially the remote access indicator

EU court decision could cut price of PVRs

For those who didn’t spot it, last week the excellent Broadband TV News site carried a report about a ruling from the European Court of Justice which may have implications for the pricing of PVRs – the hard disk recorders that many people are using for satellite and terrestrial services like Freeview, Freesat and Sky.

Until now, these have been classified as recording apparatus, and so attract a rate of duty of 13.9% when they’re imported into the EU, which of course makes them a little more expensive in the shops.

The ECJ has ruled that they should be reclassified as set top boxes with a communications function, which exempts them from duties (and that, ‘communications function’ element is why, for example, the iCan EasyHD Freeview HD set top box has a modem port on the back; it’s cheap to add, and reduces the import costs).

How prices work

Of course, the fact that the duty may not have to be paid won’t necessarily reduce prices – it could just be absorbed into the profit margin by distributors or retailers, and eventually eaten away by inflation over time, so don’t get too hopeful about a price drop yet.

It’s also worth looking at how things like this affect the pricing. Let’s suppose that a product costs a nice neat £100 to manufacture and ship to the UK.

Import duties of 13.9% take the cost at the point of import to £113.90. If we assume that the distributor of the product takes just 5% margin – out of which they’ll be promoting the product to retailers, perhaps advertising it, and handling repairs, warranty and so forth – the price that they can offer to retailers is £119.60.

According to people I’ve spoken with, some of the large retailers may demand a margin of 30%; sometimes they’ll work backwards from a retail price-point that they have in mind and say “We want to sell this at £179.95” so you have to sell it to us at a price that gives us 30% margin. But for this simple comparison, let’s assume that they just add 30% margin on, taking the final price to £155.47, but that’s before VAT is added, so the final price to the customer is £186.57, for a product that cost £100 at the point of import.

How much difference does the duty change make? If we assume everything else is the same, then the price after VAT is £163.80, or over £20 on £100 of imported product, so not to be sniffed at. And, of course, most PVRs are starting at around the £200 mark, or even higher, so potentially, there could be even larger savings.

Imbalance of power

Incidentally, going back to the point I made about large retailers having a price point in mind, if they did impose that price, then what happens is that the distributor – especially for smaller brands, who won’t have the same power as the large retailers, who can simply decide to drop the product – will be forced to cut their margin. With the figures I’ve given for the example with duty and a retail price of £179.95, that means they’d have to offer large retailers the product for £115.35, equivalent to a margin of 1%.

And after this duty change – which of course most punters won’t hear about – they could continue to sell at that hypothetical price, and if they paid the distributor his full 5% margin, the retailer would have a margin of 42.8%. Or, they could drop the price to £159.95, maintain their margin and the squeeze on the importer, and boast about having cut prices by £20.

This, of course, happens all over the retail world, not just in electronics – just ask a farmer!

Panasonic Convention roundup

I spent two days this week at the Panasonic Convention, held in London’s Excel Centre. The Convention is an annual event where Panasonic shows off its new European product ranges to both press and dealers, and happens in a different city each year.

Amsterdam in 2009 saw the launch of the VieraCast service, and last year’s event in Munich featured the first FreeviewHD sets. So, what’s in store this year? Rather than do lots of articles, I’m just going to do a roundup here, with some of what I think are the most interesting points from the two days.

• VieraCast renamed VieraConnect, adds new features

• iPlayer very likely to come to VieraCast platform

• Commitment to Freesat appears scaled back

• New Freeview HD recorder with 3D BluRay support

• Freeview programme guide still uses much-loathed Guide+

• New TV sets don’t have CI+ software, but are capable of supporting it

So, let’s take each of those one at a time:

VieraCast becomes VieraConnect

Panasonic’s VieraCast system, which provides YouTube, EuroSport clips and a few other things for people in the UK  has been rebranded as VieraConnect, and will have a better range of services on it in future – the UK has been particularly poorly served by VieraCast, in my view.

Additions to the service include an app store (and a free SDK for developers will be available later this year), and new categories, including more social networking with a facebook client, and even games.

However, not all content will be available on previous sets; last year we saw some services, like AceTrax movies and Skype, that wouldn’t work on 2009 models as they lacked either support for cameras, or DRM. And it looks like games probably won’t work on older sets. Where possible, they’ll make things backwards compatible, but don’t expect to get everything that’s coming on an older product.

iPlayer very likely

After a fair bit of prodding with questions, one of the Panasonic team told us that he’s seen iPlayer running on VieraCast (rather than via the Freesat/MHEG model used at present, and which I thought Panasonic would rely on). It’s technically possible, and “very likely” to be arriving. The impression given is that the issues delaying this are not technical ones, but ones related to the necessary agreements that will have to be signed. So, if there are lawyers involved, don’t hold your breath – they take longer than engineers to get things done. But it’s now looking pretty likely.

Whether this will come to all VieraCast/Connect sets, I don’t yet know; that will depend on the DRM situation. I would hope that they’ll simply stream it in the same way the various other services do at the moment, but if they decide that DRM is essential then that will effectively rule out 2009 model year sets, which lack the necessary chips (which is why they don’t get things like AceTrax).

The impression from the comments yesterday is that they’re also talking to other broadcasters, about their catch-up services too.

Not so committed to Freesat?

One brief comment in passing was that the GT and VT series sets have Freesat tuners built in; these are towards the higher end of the range, THX certified, 3D plasmas.

All sets have FreeviewHD built in to them (and should, though I have yet to confirm, transcode surround sound, as it’s mandatory from April this year), but if it’s correct that only two ranges have Freesat tuners, that’s a considerable scaling back in the support for the platform, which used to extend right down to the lower end sets.

The press announcement for the new ranges doesn’t mention Freesat at all, so I shall seek further clarification on this. A further interesting point to note is that there were no new Freesat recorders this year – last year’s model was being displayed instead.

Panasonic's DMR-BWT800 is a 3D BD player/recorder with twin FreeviewHD tuners and DLNA server

New FreeviewHD + boxes

One of the most interesting boxes I saw was the new Freeview+ HD recorder, the DMR-BWT700 (there’s also an 800, which wasn’t on display, but presumably just has a larger hard drive; the press release doesn’t give sizes).

Update: the 800 indeed has a larger hard drive, at 500GB, compared to 320Gb for the DMR-BWT700.

These are twin tuner FreeviewHD BluRay recorders with 3D support. There’s full DLNA support too, including as a server, which means that if you have a Panasonic TV in another room, you’ll be able to watch recordings over the home network (and, according to the staff I asked, you’ll need a Panasonic TV, as there’s no support for DTCP-IP).

They also feature VieraCast, with Skype support, wireless LAN, and can convert 2D films to 3D on the fly.

GuidePlus is still there

The Freeview programme guide on this year’s Panasonic sets still features Guide Plus, the almost universally loathed EPG that forces advertisements in your face and generates more comments than just about everything else whenever I review one of their TVs.

The impression from Panasonic staff is that they know it’s unpopular, and frankly they don’t seem to happy about having to have it either, but it looks as if their hands are tied. If I can find out who’s responsible for inflicting this rubbish on otherwise decent TV sets, I’ll let you know, as it’s long past time they stopped messing about with it.

Want Sky Sports?

As with all digital TVs, there’s a common interface slot on the new VieraCast models. But, of course, that’s not enough if you want to watch Sky Sports via Freeview any more, as TopUpTV will be using CI+ modules. (See here for more details).

So I asked if the new sets support CI+ and was told that they’re capable of it, but it’s not enabled yet; that’s something that Panasonic will be keeping an eye on and they update the sets if necessary, which will depend on the perceived demand for Sky Sports via a CAM, I guess.

That’s the main news, from my perspective, from the Convention. As and when I get products to play with, keep an eye out for information here or at RegHardware.

Coming to your TV in 2011

Last week, I wrote about whether or not you should buy Freeview HD this Christmas, and I mentioned that there will be some interesting new stuff coming in 2011, which some people may prefer to wait for.

Predicting things is always risky – perhaps that’s why it’s so hard to resist. You know that a little way down the line, you can look back and say “why did I ever think that would happen?” But still, there are certain things that you can be fairly certain about, and most of the things mentioned here certainly fall into that category.

I hope this may help some readers decide whether or not it’s worth buying new gadgets now, or waiting a bit longer.

Freeview and Freeview HD rollout

This is going to continue, as per the timetable, so if you can’t receive Freeview at the moment, you may well get it next year – some pretty large chunks of the country will be switching over. If you’re in a marginal area at the moment, remember that with the switchover comes a stronger signal. So, if you can put up with poor or no reception now, don’t spend money on a replacement aerial when it might not be necessary in a few months. Check your coverage details on the Freeview website to find out when switchover happens in your area.

Freesat and the ITV player

ITV has been talking about adding their catch-up TV service to Freesat for a very long time, and many expected it this summer. It’s likely that it will arrive shortly after the BBC finally removes the ‘beta’ tag from iPlayer on Freesat – and that seems to be down to when Panasonic finally updates some of their older sets. Essentially, the BBC is proving the technology, and when that’s done, it will be much more straightforward for other broadcasters like ITV to add their own catch-up to Freesat. I think we can pretty confidently expect this to appear during 2011, and hopefully sooner rather than later.

Freeview HD and surround sound

At the moment, not all Freeview HD equipment is capable of creating a surround sound signal that will work with older (or indeed most) home cinema equipment, which expects to receive a Dolby Digital surround signal. From April 2011, the test requirements for FreeviewHD will make ‘transcoding’ mandatory. That means that products launched after April 2011 for FreeviewHD will have to provide a signal that will give you surround – but whether they’ll be clearly labelled so that you know when they were launched is a different matter.

In fact, since many of the big manufacturers unveil their ranges for the year quite early, I’d expect that most of the products that we see in their showcases over the next few months will support surround properly.

For people who want surround sound, you can be much more certain that FreeviewHD kit launched next year will provide it than you can right now.

Streaming media goes mainstream

This year saw a few products – like Panasonic’s DMR-XW380 – that can record FreeviewHD or Freesat and then allow it to be played back over a home network on other devices, like TVs that have media players built in.

Humax is planning to introduce the same functionality on some of their products, including the FreeviewHD HDR-Fox T2 . It’s likely that this will start to become a more widespread feature next year, from a range of manufacturers. So, potentially there’s no need to run aerial cables to other rooms, as long as you have a connection to the home network (perhaps via power line networking). You’ll be able to watch stuff recorded in the living room anywhere else at home.

One fly in the ointment is that you may find it only works when all the equipment is from the same brand, for now, especially where HD content is concerned. That should improve over time – I’ll write more on that later – but for now, stick with one brand, or check compatibility very carefully.

No more HD channels

If you’re hoping for more channels on Freeview HD next year, there’s bad news. It’s not going to happen. There won’t be capacity for another HD channel until 2012. There may be auctions of space, and some of that might be bought up by broadcasters, but you certainly want get anything launching on Freeview next year – so it’s going to be BBC One HD, BBC HD, ITV 1HD and Channel 4 HD for now.

Freesat is a different matter, perhaps – but it’s always hard to know. It’s possible that some of the channels not currently on Freesat in HD will appear, like Channel 4 or Channel 5, but I’m not going to hold my breath. And, much as people may like it, I suspect that new HD channels from other broadcasters remain unlikely, unless we suddenly bound out of recession. I don’t think that’s going to happen, and so I don’t think anyone’s going to take the risk of launching a brand new HD channel on Freesat.

Internet TV

You’ll hear a lot about ‘Over the top’ services in 2011, I think. It’s an industry term that, essentially, means extra stuff delivered via the internet, on boxes that are primarily used for terrestrial or satellite TV.

I would expect that more and more TVs and set top boxes will include internet functionality, and that the existing ones will be improved – so we may see a better range of content from people like LoveFilm, and the service appearing on more TVs and other devices.

Dedicated media players like the Apple TV and Boxee will provide more internet content – as long as our creaking broadband can cope with it – so for an increasing number of people, watching internet video via their living room TV will become commonplace.

The new FreeviewHD requirements from April next year will include some related to the Ethernet port on all the boxes, so we may even see iPlayer come to FreeviewHD in the same was it’s available on Freesat.

YouView

And that leads us to the big event for 2011 in TV terms – the launch of YouView, formerly known as Project Canvas. This is a service from the main broadcasters while will initially be launched in a product that combines a twin tuner Freeview recorder with the YouView service. Expect it to be around the top of the price range for FreeviewHD kit at the moment.

YouView will provide access to all the free TV services, and also to the catch-up services of the broadcasters, via a programme guide that goes back in time as well as forwards. It will also provide access to other internet content, including services like film rental and other pay per view. Freesat versions of YouView boxes may come, but not until later.

Some of the companies behind YouView are internet providers TalkTalk and BT, who will probably be providing subsidised YouView boxes with some internet packages; other people will be able to just buy a box in the shops.

Why is this a big event? Partly because it’s got plenty of big names behind it and partly because it’s hoping to provide a common standard – at the moment, if someone like LoveFilm wants their rental service on different TVs, it has to be written for each brand specially, a bit like doing an iPhone, and Android and a Symbian version of a phone app. With YouView, there will be a single way of doing that, no matter who is making the boxes (or, eventually, TVs). So companies like LoveFilm, or other new firms, will be able to get their services on lots of screens with less effort.

Worth the wait?

Should you wait until next year, and buy kit that includes some or all of these new features? Only you can answer that question, but you might find some help in the previous article. And, of course, I’ll be trying my best to keep people up to date and informed about new products and technology both here and in my work for Register Hardware.

BBC One HD launches 3rd November, BBC HD changes channel no

The BBC has confirmed that BBC One HD will launch at 7pm on Wednesday 3rd November, across all the digital TV services where the current BBC HD channel is available.

You’ll find the new channel – which will be a simultaneous broadcast of the main BBC One – at Freeview channel 50, Freesat 108, Sky channel 143 and Virgin Media channel 108.

The exisiting BBC HD channel will move to Freeview channel 54, Freesat 109, Sky channel 169, and Virgin Media channel 187.

Eastenders in HD? Not yet!

While the recent burning of the Queen Vic in EastEnders has heralded a new set, ready for HD production, the show won’t actually be in HD until Christmas Day, according to the BBC. So while you’ll get to see the new Vic next week, you won’t see it in all its glory until then.

Wednesday the 3rd will see a raft of programming in HD, starting with The One Show, followed by Wallace and Gromit: World of Inventions. Programmes that aren’t yet made in HD will be upscaled.

The existing BBC HD channel will showcase the best HD material from the BBC’s other TV channels.

Gone Digital’s original announcement is here.

Update: Here’s some comment from the head of BBC HD, regarding the launch.

BBC ONE HD - The Apprentice, part of the launch night line-up. Thanks to the BBC for this image