We had heard it was possible, and quite easy, for people with the right sort of PC TV tuner and software to crack the BBC's high-definition trial broadcasts, and a recent article confirms that it's happened.
An 'audio-visual expert' (Martin Pipe) hacked the signal, apparently from well outside the London trial area. There were some problems with the sound and picture quality he received, though he said what he saw was an 'eye opener'. He doesn't say why, but I guess that's because he wants you to buy the next issue of What Video and high definition TV magazine, where a complete article will appear. Spoilsport...
OK, we know it's not exactly ground-breaking stuff - I expect there'll be comments of all manner of people who have 'hacked' the signals. I didn't try the hack myself, though I have a USB digital TV tuner for my Mac so I may have been able to find the signal.
Hmm - apparently it's transmitting on channel 31 from the Crystal Palace transmitter - I can't get iTele to pick up that channel on my Mac... Ho Hum...
(oops - forgot to say I'm near Shepherds Bush - that should be close enough, right?)
Seems to be a fair number of people doing this over on avforum and some have even posted screenshots. Sadly for me, although I can see the CP transmitter from my window, I run Linux and there seems to be no Open source H.264 decoder I can use at the moment.
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/201348
Please change the article. Nothing has been "hacked". It's FTA just like the rest of Freeview, even normal MPEG2 boxes can see the channel, they just can't receive/play it because it's h264.
So if you have an mpeg4/h264 terrestrial box (lie one pace makes) you'd be able to view it?
Yes. ALthough those Pace/Humax boxes are for satellite I believe, not for DTT/terrestrial. But the point remains that it's totally FTA, not encrypted at all. It's not some shocking revelation that people can view and record the stream.
Also, I might as well post the details here; during the day the channel shows an hour preview of the upcoming shows in HD (World Cup, Bleach House, Planet Earth, Galapagos, Supervolcano, Hotel Babylon, Later with Jools Holland). None of them are upscaled, they all look great.
Here's the kick; it's not full HD. The resolution is 1440x1080i, which then resizes to 1920. That's more worthy of a news story then anything right now, IMO anyway. Why aren't the BBC using 1920x1080, especially when they're using a ridiculous bitrate for h264 (~20Mbit/s)? Sure, it looks nice at 1440, but why do we have to cripple the specs immediately like they do in the US when we could be having full blown HD from the start? Hopefully ITV and the rest of the gang will use full res. Oh, and the audio is AC3 5.1 384Kbit/s
During the evening timeslot (at the moment anyway), they upscale whatever is on BBC1. Here's what they show; http://img512.imageshack.us/img512/2460/bbcupconvert1tj.jpg
The real programming doesn't start until the end of May, when Planet Earth and Bleak House are being shown... both marathons, I think.
would i be able to receive the HD signals in birmingham?
if yes, do i have to download additional software because i have a HDTV USB freeview stick.
let me know please.
Pace make sattelite and terestrial mpeg4/h264 boxes, however the latter isn't listed on the uk pace site for some reason.
As for the resolution i'm not sure, perhaps they are testing it out before upping to full hd? No idea why but its a theory.
Sorry Anon, I can se your point. It struck me as an odd word to use but the other articles used it - it got you to comment though, eh?
You're right it hasn't really been hacked but it wasn't the intention of the BBC or Ofcom to make these signals readily available.
They would've got away with it if it wasn't for those meddling script kiddies ;)
To answer Simons question:
The reason why its originated at 1440x1080 is that the Sony HDCAM storage format supports this as its highest resolution.
When the BBC and the originating content providers for this service move to HDCAM SR or other native HD format for 1080i then they can deliver native 1920x1080 material on the transmission.
considering this is a trial after all, do you think someone at the BBC tech could put a non MBAFF test program on for a few hours so we coreAVC/H264 could try and test that with the current codec's we have please BBC and CO :)
These Pace boxes that are capable of receiving the terrestrial HD signal - what's the model number and where can I get one?!
OK, so as I can't find any suitale equiptment for sale in the UK, would this work here?:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/tech-data/B00064L1AI/ref=de_a_smtd/103-0992779-7978232?%5Fencoding=UTF8
No its not DVB-T its for the US standard ATSC.
And MPEG 2