When we all shifted our television broadcasts to digital, for a moment it looked as though we might have had to upgrade our sets only once and a set-top box would be a thing of the past. In Europe that meant the DVB-T standard, whose two-decade reign is slowly passing to DVB-T2 for higher definition and more channels. All of this might seem simple but for the DVB-T2 standard being a transport layer alone without a specified codec. Thus the first generation of DVB-T2 equipment uses MPEG4 or H.264, while for some countries the most recent broadcasts use HEVC, or H.265. [CyB3rn0id] is there to guide us through the resulting mess, and along the way produce a nifty upgrade that integrates a set-top box on the back of an older DVB-T set.
Simply bolting a set-top box to a TV is not the greatest of hacks, however this one takes matters a little further with a 3D printed bracket and an extension which brings the box’s IR receiver out to the front of the TV on a piece of prototyping board. Along with a laptop power supply plumbed directly into the TV, it gives new life into a set which might otherwise have been headed for landfill.
As long-time readers will know, we quite like a TV retrofit here at Hackaday.
I wonder which will be the dominant standard in the very near future: H.266 (Versatile Video Coding – patent pool that needs to be licenced and royalties paid to use) or AV1 (AOMedia Video 1 – royalty-free* video codec). Currently it looks like VVC will be used for the older media distribution channels (DVB,ATSC 3.0) and probably AV1 for Internet based media distribution channels (Youtube,Netflix,Amazon,Apple,Vimeo,Facebook,… https://aomedia.org/membership/members/ ). There is a lot of hardware acceleration support for AV1 being produced now ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#Hardware ) and very little publicly available hardware acceleration support for VVC ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Video_Coding#Hardware ), which could be due to additional costs or more likely due to the glut of NDA’s (Non Disclosure Agreements) for access to STB’s (Set Top Box) chips.
* Some trolls have setup a patent pool and are demanding payments. Which I would not be surprised if at some future date was in some way linked back to the owners of the VVC pool, just to create FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt).
Doesn’t beat torrenting.
Plug in a Kodi box and be done.
When is Europe going to replace the clunky, huge, ancient, SCART connector? At least make a Micro-SCART or something. HDMI has Mini and Micro versions. DisplayPort has a mini version.
SCART steadfastly continues to channel 1977.
Long ago. 3 TVs 3 satellite boxes not a scart on any of them.
I haven’t seen a (full size) SCART plug on anything since 2007. There were some manufacturers with smaller SCART plugs with an adapter, but I don’t remember using it. It looks like TechniSat and Samsung had a very similar design, maybe even the same.
SCART has been replaced – with HDMI
Even low-res devices just have an HDMI port now, because the connector is small and the chips are cheap (including my cheap 360×240 projector from the late 2010s) – common practice for low res displays is to pretend to be 720p/1080p, and then downscale it
There’s no point in starting a new standard for a small SCART when you can use an HDMI that’s already widely supported, and cheap
We are still using 20year-ish CRT TV with SCART or analogue video in. When I wanted to upgrade to Netflix+etc, I had to add HDMItoAnalog converter to connected set top box. That was fun. There wasn’t any reasonable set top box with scart output. But I can confirm, it runs OK 2+ years now.
SCART connectors have been obsolete in Europe for at least a decade now. There are some people, however, that will not send a perfectly good screen to the landfill, just because there is an unused connector at the back of the TV.
As someone who grew up using SCART, I can reliably inform you that SCART connectors were, at best, as unreliable as you say the mini and micro HDMI are. Most of the time simply walking into a room containing a SCART connector was enough to loosen it. That’s if they even worked in the first place. And in most cases the sheer weight of the cable and connector would, over time, pull the plug out all by itself.
Sorry, replied to the wrong comment and can’t delete!
Hm, strange. Then why my family’s 4k UHD TV with Android not only has several HDMI inputs, but alao has VGA, RF, SCART inputs? Maybe you guys just have a budget model? 😂
You with the Android have the budget model. It is heavily subsidized. LG for one is making more on the ads it is selling on the platform than it is from the sale of the TV
I went out of my way a couple years ago to buy a 1080p non-‘smart’ model. Because at my viewing distance I could barely see the difference from 720p, let alone 4K. That is not an option anymore.
Yeah, same here, as dumb as possible at TV, then get a custom Kodi box on it, in my case an Atomic PI running eLive linux (thing is fast).
Yep. Mini and Micro HDMI. Perfect for the person who hates reliability.
In my experience just breath on the cord with either of those and at least for a moment lose connection. It’s extra fun when that connection is to a phone since the phone then switches between desktop and phone modes wasting time, closing and re-opening apps and potentially losing one’s work. And all that for a tiny connector full of hair-like conductors that are sure to wear out quick leaving you with a device that is only fixable if you can solder by the atom.
I could only dream of having SCART connectors on devices sold in my part of the planet.
As someone who grew up using SCART, I can reliably inform you that SCART connectors were, at best, as unreliable as you say the mini and micro HDMI are. Most of the time simply walking into a room containing a SCART connector was enough to loosen it. That’s if they even worked in the first place. And in most cases the sheer weight of the cable and connector would, over time, pull the plug out all by itself.
I think the same, SCART as such was useful, but the connector was unreliable.
I wonder, if SCART wasn’t made by French men, bur Germans, how would it have had turned out? A proper DIN Connector, maybe? Anyway, RGB would have been part of it for sure. Many of our proprietary 70s video stuff had RGB on a DIN cable. But what about separate Chroma/Luma (S-Video), the source signals for CVBS (aka Composite)? SCART was never meant for this. SCART cables can carry one of them, but not both simultaneously.
They should have just used a 25pin sub-D connector. Good for thousands of cycles and can be screwed in place if necessary.
Kinda wish my country also mandated a CI slot when they required all TVs to come with a digital tuner.
That way we (probably) wouldn’t have to deal with STBs. Just plug a card into the TV, navigating channels is done with the TV’s native interface.
For expansion it should ideally be a standard m.2 form factor using PCIe. They can put it in a plastic carrier and make it a plug in port. (Instead of the usual insert at 45° and lever down, that PC/mobile use)
But then a new co processor would be easier to implement and hack around with on a PC as well.
We know there is a PCIe bus on some of these media processors.
CI slot is already a standard. It’s basically a PC card slot I think, that fits a smart card reader (provided by the TV service) that will read the pay TV card. The tuner/decoder/… is still inside the TV.
Fun fact: My 2017 Sony TV had the tuner on a M.2 card. Probably only used it for the connector though.
It also had provisions for the CI slot.
This perhaps not the right place to comment,
but there’s something digital that we lost in the upgrade process. Teletext/Videotext. The original one that hid in the vertical blanking interval.
Just recently, I watched old VHS from the early 1990s on a VHS player (no VCR) via CVBS and noticed with joy that the teletext patterns were still readable on a modern UHD TV fron ~2019.
At the same time, I felt incredible sad, too. Because we don’t have this ability anymore. Nowadays teletext patterns, if available at all, aren’t part of a video recording anymore. They’re a separate signal we can’t even save on an ordinary TV. They won’t be preserved if we record from free TV. It’s a pity. It’s an downgrade.
If you want to play with real Teletext on an old telly, you might want to try the analogue output on a DVB STB with a SCART connector. Many boxes can convert the DVB-Teletext stream to classic Teletext lines in addition to converting/downsampling video. That was necessary for the transition to DVB, as Teletext also provided captions.
“Nowadays teletext patterns, if available at all, aren’t part of a video recording anymore.”
Nothing is lost. TVs and STBs usually record all substreams that make up a program stream, including DVB-Teletext, because it is still used for subtitles. On playback, Teletext data is hidden, except the subtitles page.