Digital TV Technical Discussion

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Just got notice this morning DVB-T2 trials coming to Sydney in the next few months.

Broadcast Australia to partner with FreeTV to do the trials, from Gore Hill, Kings Cross & North Head sites in Sydney.

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Free TV and Broadcast Australia partner on next generation TV trials

Free TV and Broadcast Australia today announced that they had agreed to conduct trials of next generation broadcast technology in Sydney. The SBS and the ABC will also be active participants in the trials.

The trial will assess the performance of next generation DVB-T2 technologies in the Australian environment. DVB-T2 is being considered as a technology to replace the current DVB-T standard for television delivery in the medium term. When combined with new compression technologies, DVB-T2 will have the potential to allow 4K TV reception—four times the picture quality of the current high definition standard.

Broadcast Australia CEO Peter Lambourne said: “Terrestrial free to air television delivers its service to 99% of the population and over 20 million Australians tune into television every week. This trial is an important part of ensuring that when the time is right, the terrestrial television platform is ready for the next stage of its evolution and that it can deliver the best possible viewing experience.”

Free TV CEO Bridget Fair said: “While our current platform has many years of life in it, this trial is about planning for our long-term future. Over the past 62 years, television broadcasters have demonstrated their ability to evolve with the times, from black and white to colour, analog to digital, standard to high definition. I’m very pleased to be working with BA to ensure that all Australians will continue to have access to the free news, sport and entertainment programs that they rely on and love.”

Laboratory trials are currently underway at BA’s premises in Chatswood. Wider trials will commence from three transmission sites across Sydney from April to June. Further information on the trial will be made available on the Broadcast Australia website.

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Awesome news

Just out of pure interest: Would it be worthwhile for any of Media Spy’s Sydney-based members to try and pick up something like an inexpensive USB tuner that’s capable of decoding DVB-T2 to receive a signal of the trials or will the transmissions be so low powered that it’s not worth bothering for enthusiasts to try and receive anything at home? :slight_smile:

Do all new tv’s have a DVB-tv2 tuner in them?

What frequency would the trial likely be on in Sydney, VHF 10, UHF 29?

Many TVs sold here in the last few years already have DVB-T2 capability

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I wonder if the Telstra TV 2 has DVB-T2 support.

My guess is that the DVB-T2 trial will probably be on the spare frequencies for each transmitter: VHF-10 for Gore Hill and UHF-29 for the Kings Cross & North Head sites.

In my opinion the main tv commercial networks are going to treat 4k ultra hd transmissions the same way they treated high definition and multichannels shortly after their introductions to the tv market

4K hasn’t been broadcast on freetoair terrestrial spectrum anywhere in the world yet. I really doubt it will ever be used for such, at least until compression techniques are vastly improved so that networks can fit 4K in.

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My understanding is that DVB-T2 is MUCH more efficient than DVB-T in terms of the number of channels it can accommodate, being the reason for its existence.

So 4K would be possible depending on how many channels they try to fit on on a single RF frequency.

But the likelihood is that they will cram in the same number of SD/HD channels into fewer channels with DVB-T2 so they can auction off more spectrum to telcos for 5G or 6G mobile tech.

My 2017 Sony TV is DVB-T2 compatible, so assuming that on VHF-10 it transmits at 50kw as the other channels do, then I should be able to receive it up here near Newcastle.

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4K broadcasts would be done via H.265 HEVC, which is quite efficient and is on the brink of market acceptance due to falling cost of computing power. It can deliver approximately 50% bit rate savings over H.264.

DVB-T2 also has huge advantages in that broadcasters can also choose to carry more data over the same bandwidth AND it has better equivalent reception coverage than DVB-T due to more advanced encoding techniques.

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Yep, you’d likely be able to get two HEVC 4K channels on a 7MHz DVB-T2 channel (at around 16Mbps - similar to Netflix) - or one and a handful of regular HD.

Are any broadcasters here actually commissioning content in 4K?

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Not exactly. The DVB-T2’s existence stems out of two desires - higher amounts of available bitrate and better reception (which is obviously a problem with DVB-T - portable receivers SUCK ASS compared to analogue). It’s technically meant to be the successor of both DVB-T and the flopped DVB-H standard which was a version of DVB-T with robust reception. It’s still up to the broadcaster what balance they want between reception and quality though with DVB-T2.

Most of the cramming of bitrate will come through adoption of the H.264 and H.265 standards, the latter of which was not really finalised until 2013 - long after the first DVB-T2 transmission.

However, that’s not to say that DVB-T2 doesn’t bring additional capacity - at present, DVB-T streams used by most broadcasters carry around 33Mbps of total bitrate in an entire multiplex. With DVB-T2 they can get 50Mbps (but I believe most broadcasters will choose not to go for the maximum bitrate due to reception concerns).

But that’s nothing compared to the bitrate savings that can be made with better compression tech like H.265 which was not part of the original DVB-T2 standard (which can save 50%).

The problem is that because H.265 is not part of the DVB-T2 standard, it’s actually quite likely that most TVs which say they are capable of receiving DVB-T2 transmissions will not be able to display any channel broadcast in H.265, as most DVB-T2 implementations use H.264 - and even ones that can display H.265 may not be able to display a 4K channel (like how we used to have HD and SD set top boxes).

It’s like the problem we have with TVs which can’t display MPEG-4 H.264 transmissions - the standard did not exist when the DVB-T standard was drawn up, and so many TVs are incompatible.

From what I’ve read, Germany has already switched to entirely using DVB-T2 and HEVC for all their terrestrial TV channels. They actually made the switchover this time last year, cutting off all DVB-T transmissions. The interesting thing is that the commercial TV channels (like 7 9 10 here) are encrypted and are a paid service in Germany, even over the air. You have to use a smartcard or whatever to pay for them. With the switch to DVB-T2 they also launched an extra 40 paid channels over 3 multiplexes, all in 1080p50. This is in addition to the 2 public broadcasters ARD and ZDF which broadcast on one of the multiplexes.

It was probably easier for Germany to switch over due to the extremely high rate of cable and satellite subscriptions - only 10% of the households actually rely on terrestrial broadcasts.

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UHD has been broadcast terrestrially in the Seoul area since April 2017, with all of South Korea covered by 2020.


Not a UHD TV, but the watermark is promoting that the program is available in UHD.

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does anybody know how old a tv would have to be before its not DVB T2 capable? my current tv is a 2013 samsung. no idea wether it would be able to get this.

At least in the last 2 years.

DVB-T2 has been mainstream in the UK since around since 2010, so it’s really a mixed basket ever since then. I would imagine that TVs from name brands would be more likely to feature DVB-T2 support (as they often use the same hardware as European models).

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If you have the model number of your TV, you can Google it and find the specs, that should tell you.

Having said that, I just Googled for their top of the line 2013 model, the F8000, and it only has DVB-T and not DVB-T2.

I also had a look at 2 of the STBs that are still available, the Laser STB 6000 and Teac HDB 850, and it doesn’t look like they support DVB-T2 either,