As analogue TV slides from memory, there’s a facet of it that’s fondly remembered by a band of enthusiasts. Teletext was an electronic viewdata information service digitally encoded in the frame blanking period, and a TV set with a decoder chip would provide access to many pages of news and other services all displayed in the characteristic brightly colored block graphics. It went the way of the dinosaur with the demise of analog TV, but for [Nathan Dane] the flame is kept alive with his own private version of the BBC’s CEEFAX service.
He has a particular enthusiasm for analog TV, and as such has his own in-house channel served by a UHF modulator. He shares with us the story of how he arrived at a teletext service, before writing code to scrape the BBC news and weather websites and populate his modern-day CEEFAX. Behind it all is a Raspberry Pi, with a vbit-pi board injecting the teletext signal onto the video, and raspi-teletext creating the pages from source material derived from a set of custom scraper scripts.
We like this project a lot, because while it’s not the first Pi teletext system we’ve encountered, the use of a scraped live feed makes it one of the most creative.
Thanks [kwikius] for the tip!
Very nice, very clever, and took me right back!
I always admired the Teletext system for the utility they managed to get out of the technology of the era, all as a hack-on to the standard TV signal while remaining compatible with non-teletext TVs.
But I’m guessing this may be lost on our US friends?
Not entirely – they have closed captions injected similarly on line 21, and there was a version of teletext for NTSC but I think it never took off.
I forget the name of it, but there was something similar that broadcast web pages in the vbi for a while in the 90s. I had software for one of my wintv tuners that would pick it up off of certain stations. I think PBS was one? I think one of our local CBS stations had some news and weather on it too.
Found it, what I’m thinking of was called Intel Intercast.
Pretty much got all my information from Teletext from the late 80s until the mid 90s. Saturdays watching the football scores in the afternoon, looking up the news and weather, and TV guides. And the computer game review pages on Channel 4 teletext.
It got a lot better once TVs came with page caching.
Site is very authentic, the page generation layer (from the various web sources) is pretty good. Wonder if the output could be piped into a BBC Micro and viewed natively on the teletext mode 7?
There’s an interesting tool for recovering and recovering Teletext data: https://github.com/ali1234/vhs-teletext
888
I remember the days when it was “CEEFAX page 170”.
very cool !
Teletekst is still very much alive in the Netherlands – and has been accessible online for years (https://nos.nl/teletekst) and even has an official app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.eoffice.android&gl=NL).
Same in Austria! We too have a webpage and app. https://teletext.orf.at/ Very convenient on the TV, but sometimes on the phone too. Even has a bitcoin price tracker since a few weeks. I think we even have the same basemodel for our receiver from our cable provider (Horizon/T-Mobile/UPC) as you guys
mentioned for historical/geographic reasons:
“Captain system was a Japanese videotex system created by NTT [telecom]. Announced in 1978, it was trialled from 1979 to 1981”
I’ve got VTXforMac 1.1.1 ©1996 NTT working on a Macintosh here now. Their full machine is called the NTT CAPTAIN Multi-Station (MSX-based).
In Italy too the teletext is still active: both Rai (the national TV network) and Mediaset (the largest Italian private TV network) are currently broadcasting teletext over DVB. Rai’s teletext, called Televideo, can be watched online too: https://www.televideo.rai.it/televideo/pub/index.jsp
There was no technical reason why teletext should have been shut off with analog TV. It still survives in Germany, even on the HD channels. They even broadcast subtitles in both teletext and DVB forms. If you want to click and play, try this link to the internet version which offers a little simulator.
https://www.ard-text.de/
In the Netherlands teletekst is also still active and quite popular. It’s broadcasted with cable TV, via DVB-T and online ( https://nos.nl/teletekst ) or though the app.They beauty is that news items are reduced to their essence, and spare you the clutter ;)
Yes this is exactly why I miss “old” Teletext in the UK.
In the article link each headline takes up two lines. In original teletext this was never the case – each headline had one line (which included the page number).
Yes! It is news without banners, popups and all that crap. It’s mind blowing that it still exists but i’m happy about that.
I just love the 8 bit colors lol
Black #000000 , Red #FF0000 , Green #00FF00 , Yellow #FFFF00 , Blue #0000FF , Magenta #FF00FF , Cyan #00FFFF , White #FFFFFF
But there’s only 3 bits lol, Reminds me of the Galaxian Arcade game.
That’s because it’s effectively one bit per gun, ie 3-bit colour.
The system is actually still alive and kicking in the UK too but it’s only used to provide subtitles on page 888.
I have just emailed the page link to my smarttv, and I can’t wait to see it on the 65″ OLED 4k screen!
If you add “?noUI=1” to the end of the address it will make it full screen 👍
Dutch public television (NPO) still contains such pages. I don’t know how they embed it in the new HD video signal though. They also run a web server that renders those pages faithfully:
https://teletekst-data.nos.nl/webplus
Gathered from comments here, Ceefax, albeit named differently, still operates in at least Germany, Holland, Italy, and also in Finland, Sweden and Denmark.
A couple of small corrections, it’s Nathan’s private code that creates the pages for the service from scraped data, and vbit2 which turns those pages into a live datastream (https://github.com/peterkvt80/vbit2).
raspi-teletext is a software solution for injecting the signal in the vertical blanking interval, but that’s not needed in Nathan’s home setup since he has the hardware solution instead.
Now we need Notcurses for Ceefax.
SVT (Sveriges Televison) Swedish public service is still using teletext on their channels here in Sweden.
https://www.svt.se/text-tv/100
Iam using from time to time. Very handy and favorite is 377 for sport results.