A 02:01 1999-06-30 -0700, Michael Everson a écrit :
[Anomymously quoted]
>>Now, shall we debate video standards?)
That is a god question as video standards use character coding. MPEG (7?) too.
[Michael]
>PAL is better than NTSC, nyah nyah. :-)
[Alain] From one point of view, yes... Btw SECAM is even superior to PAL...
That said, there is one thing (corect me if I am wrong) where NTSC is more
democratic, and which brings a cultural goodie that PAL or SECAM do not
bring in practice: live subtitles for the program dialogs...
In North America, subtitles are in general use... for me, French-speaker
receiving all US networks by cable, this is fantastic, I can follow even if
the pronunciation puzzles me most of the time. It is a good way to learn
foreign languages, it is not only for deaf people... Similarly English
Canadians can see French subtitles for all the French-speaking networks in
Canada, brodcasted from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and also by satellite
and cable... I myself use these subtitles for some people speaking a very
bad Montréal French slang!!!
Most programs are subtitled and NTSC offers even something underexploited,
there might be CC1, C2, CC3 and CC4 (up to 4 languages, in other words). I
do not speak about teh other subchannels fort TV schedule, other info, etc.
All this character data is tarnsmited in the first 40 lines of the 425-line
while video is suppressed as scanning goes from the bottom of the picture
to the top. And the standard being old, it is low-speed character
transmission.
These use different coding standards, one which is teletex I believe. It
would be nice to enhance this to Unicode.
The European standard privileges teletex pages but it is used mostly in
hotels and is therefore not very democratic, not very practical... and has
no big cultural impact.
To be noted that with my Matrox Rainbow Runner video card on my home PC, in
addition to digitizing at full-speed and full-screen all video images (30
full pictures a second), I can capture the subtitles for a whole program
(24 hours a day if I want) and store all this in RTF format... What a
heritage, it is fabulous.
But it ain't Unicode, what a shame...
Here there would be transition problems... There are already some problems
with accented characters (to tehe point that in spiute of standards they
only use the "é" (LOWER CASE E ACUTE) in current French TV programs... It
annoys me already... The USA not being bound by legacy, I've seen "déjà
vu", "rôle", and some other words I do not recall precisely, being written
like this (and I captured them, it was on my VCR), in a Star Trek Voyager
program, at least once in the last year (all in the same program)... so
beyond the E ACUTE, and in English!
Alain LaBonté
Québec
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