Roy Trumbull – Editor [email protected]

Marty Jackson will be our speaker this month talking about the MRC "Twinstream Radio" that will pass a conventional video/audio signal as well as a 19.4 ATSC signal.

As usual, our luncheon will be at Sinbads just south of the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero near the foot of Mission St.. Please RSVP to Carol Brahney at Zacks: 408-487-5514 ( [email protected]). We meet at 11:30 and are seated at 12:30.

July Network News Editing Systems. Rob Robinson of Philips Digital Video will speak on their news editing systems.

Oct 9^th - The "annual" SBE dinner and awards presentation at the Radisson Hotel on the Berkeley marina. Expect a mailing with full information.

Ive played host to three different makers of DTV set top boxes during the last month. They are coming here because they can test how their box responds to 5 different encoding systems. They see me because KRON-TV has the only encoder with PSIP implemented.

Company A came to town because their box lost it whenever it tuned our signal in and then would fail to tune in anything. We had a problem but they had a weak spot in their code.

Company B brought a full size tower computer with a CD-Rom burner so they could capture bit streams to take back to the lab. Wed had an upgrade in the meantime so they didnt see the error that company A saw. But we had a new error that wasnt fatal.

They gave us a CD to send to the encoder company and they said "Oops" and had me change a jumper.

Company C got my name from Company B. They arrived light but sent for the heavy stuff and captured all the off-air datastream samples they could.

I learned from B that all the companies had produced their initial DVD players to conform to the standard. Not a good move. The authoring systems are flakey as hell and violate everything. Step 2 was to make the software as tolerant as possible. Even so, an author needs a stack of DVD players to test his creation.

So, the set top box people are on the road to make sure they can tolerate the various encoders. Its as simple as that.

If you have an email address, please contact Warren Reese at [email protected]. Warren is in charge of our email list, which we use when we need to notify members when something has happened between newsletters.

Webmeister Tim Pozar has the current newsletter plus newsletters all the way back to 1996 at: http://www.lns.com/sbe