I'm going to leave Virgin Media (and so should you)

I've been with Virgin Media since they were Blue Yonder and then NTL and have consistently upgraded as faster cable connections arrive. I like lots of bandwidth because sometimes I need to download large files quickly but I find that for Skype, iPlayer and the plethora of other bandwidth hungry apps you can never have a big enough pipe.
Several times over the last couple of weeks my connection has slowed to a crawl. This screengrab from my 'phone is typical - unusable for anything other than email or IM. Eventually I called tech support (which is often a painful affair!) to be told that I'd fallen foul of the traffic management cap. All the details are in the title link. Bear in mind I never signed up for this - they introduced it without fanfare last summer and the details are show in the table below;


So let's take the slot between 16:00 and 21:00 - if you pull more than 3.5gigs across your connection you trigger the cap and they slow you for five hours. "Hang on, who downloads three and a half gigs of an evening?" you ask - but it's not the downloads that get you. We're talking about an 18,000 second slot which (do the calculation yourself) means that if you run your connection at two megabits per sec (it's actually a tad less) you fall foul of the cap - ten percent of what you pay for (on my twenty-meg connection) will give them the excuse to slow you down.
So - in a household of teenagers it is by no means unusual for more than one person to be watching the iPlayer (Sarah and I on the TV using the Wii, the boys of their computers) - so that's 2 or 3 x 800kBits per sec, maybe a bit of Skype (around 400 kBits per sec) and add to that a download or two and you've fallen foul - and over recent nights I have every evening!
Part of the problem has been the dodgy DVB-T tuner in my PVR - I've been downloading BBC shows in HD rather than recording them!

Virgin's response is one of fairness - why should some people hog all the bandwidth? The implication is that their network (the only one that is 100% fibre-to-the-cabinets as their adverts remind us) isn't up to delivering the bandwidth we have been sold. This is bogus because when I raised this with them their response was to try and up-sell me to the fifty-meg package which has no restrictions! It's a marketing strategy. I bet when they launch their 100meg connection the fifty meg one will suddenly have limits introduced to 'maintain a fair usage model'.

The importance of a consistent earth with technical mains

This is a paragraph from my standard Scope of Works document that goes to customers of build where I'm not responsible for the technical power;

Electrical requirements for all rooms part of the installation
We recommend an MCB-protected 16A mains feed terminated in a Commando connector. It is vital that the customer’s electrician runs the earths for the rooms back to the same earth bus-bar as the mains feeds to the bays thus creating a technical supply for all production/editing equipment. Failure to observe this request will cause mains hum on all video signal distribution around the new facility.

So we're quite explicit about the need for the need for a proper technical earth and what will probably happen if it's neglected. One of our recent builds has been having niggling problems with corrupt video captures and despite me having twice tested the physical layer performance of all the cabling (using the eye pattern on a Tek WFM7120) the attitude from the customer has been "…it must be the cabling or the routers you provided". After lots of haggling I was there recently and I measured a full 400mV of hum between the 'technical'(!) earth in the suites and the power distribution in the machine room. Given that an HD/SDi signal is only a volt I'm amazed they weren't seeing more corruption.
Now it's the inevitable "..why didn't you test for this and spot it earlier"? Perhaps there's a lesson here in not splitting the job up into many parts and using the cheapest contractor for each. If they'd been my electricians I'd have briefed them and made sure they ran proper tech earths - and I'd have made sure they tested them before handing over to the customer. That's why we'd have been a tad more expensive. As it is we'll no doubt wind up fixing this for free.

Two more hardware standards Apple play fast 'n' loose with - DVI and Display Port

Another example of a customer splitting an equipment order into bits and not buying the monitors we recommended (saved a full fifty quid on each unit!) has combined with Apple's very poor implementation of 1920x1200 resolution to bit us in the backside.
The newest iteration of MacPro workstations ship with a display card that has a DVI and DisplayPort (with a DP->DVI breakout adapter). Aside from the problem of non-standard blanking as implemented in OS-X's drivers (see my blog entry about Kramer DVI routers) there is a very funny (but consistent effect) if you boot one of those computers with two monitors extended over fibre - you get one display at low-res and the procedure to get two monitors running at 1920x1200 is;

1. Boot the machine with a single monitor connected to the DVI port - increase resolution in increments to 1920x1200 @60hz
2. Reboot
3. Check the resolution sticks.
4. swap the monitor to the Display Port output
5. Reboot
6. Wind up the resolution as per 1. and if OS-X detects the extra monitor turn on display mirroring
7. Reboot
8. If both monitors come back up at 1920x1200 then turn off mirroring and ensure that both monitors are still at 1920x1200
9. Reboot
10. Make sure it's all sticking!

Compare this to the procedure for bringing up a PC-based Avid (running on an HP 8400/8600 workstation, nVidia card);

1. Set both displays for 1920x1200 @60hz

It is so clear that Apple assume you have the machine under your desk and you're using two of their monitors on the pre-made cables they supply. That's not how broadcast facilities are configured and if Apple wants to see FCP used more in film & TV they need to make their implementations of signal standards more robust.

Beware of your DVI's blanking width!

You think you know a certain signal standard but then some nuance of interpretation jumps up and bites you on the backside! Here are excerpts from an email conversation, mine are in italics, the manufacturer's in bold.

....we have a pair of VS-66HDMIs that pass signals fine at resolutions sub 1920x1200 but when you hit that resolution the output flickers and won't lock. Taking the router out of the circuit but using the same cables allows the monitor to lock to the signal fine. The two sources are; Apple MacPro with nVidia GForce GT120 graphics card Apple G5 with ATI Radio 9600 Pro graphics card. Suffice to say we've done the usual powering down etc and tried different cables in case something is on the hairy edge of spec but with different sources that seems unlikely.

Thanks for your e-mail, the details of which I sent off to our R&D people. I have now had a response, in which they said;

"When we mention 1900x1200 we mean narrow blanking. With regular 1900x1200 blanking the bandwidth is higher than the chipset capabilities."

When I asked if the VS-66HDCP matrix (6 x 6 DVI matrix) was any different the answer came back;

"They are the same and use the same chipset. You may be able to set the PC's output to narrow blanking."

So I guess the next question is whether you can adjust the PC’s to provide narrow blanking.

OK, thanks for looking into it xxxx. I had a chat with Apple Engineering late yesterday (we’re a re-seller) and they say that no stock graphics card that has shipped with either a G5 or MacPro in the last five years supports narrow DVI blanking at 1920x1200! In the case of nVidia cards that setting is exposed in the PC driver (I checked on a couple of Windows machines and that is indeed the case – although the installed default was standard rather than narrow blanking) but there is no way to get to it with OS-X.

It seems you should change your advertising to read ‘doesn’t support Macs at hi-res’ or ‘not for use with Macs & monitors greater than 23” display’ something like that. Given that an awful lot of people in the creative industries use Apple computers this isn’t an unusual requirement of a product and if someone reads the copy “Up to UXGA, 1920x1200, 1080p.” You’d forgive them for assuming that it will work with their Apple computer running at 1920x1200.

It puts us in a spot as we now have to source another pair of switchers to sort out our customer.

So there you go - I'm pinning my hopes on the Gefen equivelent. They seem to recognise that a lot of people in the TV industry use Macs!

BBC cuts HDTV bit-rate

Data rates on Freesat have been ramped down - now below ten megabits per sec for H.264 - this is likely to reflect what Freeview HD will look like when Mux-B gets fired up from Crystal Palace this December.

Danielle Nagler, the recently-appointed head of BBC HD, admitted that the BBC had reduced the HD channel’s bit rate. She claimed that there was no evidence that a reduction in bit-rate reduced the picture quality.

I have to say that if you're the head of HD for probably the most prestigious broadcaster in the world and you believe there is no correlation between bitrate and perceived picture quality then you got the job under false pretenses as you know nothing about the technicalities of DVB.
Why didn't they give me that job! I know pretty much everything about SD, HD, DVB-T, OFDM, QAM etc etc!

It reminds me of the facilities (oh, and Quantel!) that used to claim 8-bits was better than ten!

Big companies and small SI contractors, pt.2

I have lost count of the number of pre-sales or project meets I've been in where a staff project manager from the customer's internal projects or procurement department will say something like;

How are you proposing getting those fibre cables between these two rooms?

Invariably it's the first time I've been in the building (where matey-boy has been working for years) and I normally admit I don't know - it's their building and I was hoping they'd tell us how to route the cables between the rooms. My standard response is;

We'll be guided by you

Which in the case of a meeting yesterday didn't cut any mustard! It reminds me of a Not the Nine O'clock News sketch;

No no Grandad, no clues!

Behaviour of big broadcasters with small SI contractors

There are four big independent broadcast SI contractors in the UK - aside from Sony, Thompson and Ascent's in-house departments the big broadcasters tend to put their studios, OB trucks and transmission-centre builds out to TSL, ATG, Megahertz and Gearhouse. Smaller contractors (like root6) live in the shadow of these guys.

Those broadcasters (and large broadcast facility providers) tend to have in-house procurement departments that are very close to their favorite SIs. They've worked with those guys in the past and know them well - they probably had a few years together at the Beeb in P&ID (planning and installations dept).

Anyway - there have been several instances where we've been asked to quote for a good size job (>£200k) with these customers. Because it's someone of substance you make sure you've got all your ducks in a row - all documentation is complete and the tender (by request) tends to carry diagrams, schedules etc - the kind of stuff that smaller customers would assume comes after they've placed an order with you. Inevitably they wind up placing the job with one of their favoured pals (even when, in the case of one job we were £80k cheaper - but not enough for the in-house project manager to want to use someone he'd not worked with before). In the case of that job I got a call from one of the freelance wiremen who was taken on (who we use as well) with the question "..why have you specified that for the mains supply in bay 2?" - I was astonished - they'd passed on all the pre-sales work we'd done to the contractor they (probably) knew they were going to use all along. They hadn't even removed my name from the AutoCAD diagrams.

In a sense it's all legal - tender conditions specify that everything you turn in becomes the property of the client but if they always want to only have the choice of the previous two contractors this is exactly the way to go. If they want smaller contractors to be viable alternatives and/or keep the big guys honest this is not the way to behave. It's disproportionately hard on smaller contractors and (no doubt) saves the larger guys because they benefit from the pre-sales planning we've had to do. If you don't think your existing systems integration contractor is providing value then let someone else have a crack rather than just using their quote as a stick to beat the guy who sees your work as his by right.

There are other people (aside from the four mentioned) who have built and run systems that have many hundreds of hours of terrestrial television delivery under their belts!

These things should ALWAYS be opt-in

You may already have heard about this but early next week all UK mobiles will be on a directory which will mean that anyone will be able to access your numbers. It’s easy to unsubscribe but it must be done before the beginning of next week to make sure that you are ex-directory. You may want to suggest it to all your friends and family who have UK mobiles or they could be swamped by unsolicited messages and calls.
Click the title link to start the privacy-ball rolling!

Remove Microsoft .Net Framework Assistant From Firefox

The reason most people use Firefox is that they want to leave IE behind. The .net framework (along with ActiveX and JavaScript) are just some of the reasons IE has historically been the most unsecure of browsers. I use Firefox because it's trivial to blanket-block active content unless I allow it (on a per-domain basis).
To have Microsoft install (without asking me) .net support in Firefox via auto-update is unforgivable. I don't want unrestricted active content running on web pages and I don't want MS making less secure the alternative software I've chosen to use in the face of their poor security.

Established standards Apple play fast 'n' loose with

• RS422 - Of only minimal interest to the average user but RS422 is used extensively in television equipment. It is THE remote control protocol for driving VTRs/Telecines/effects machines etc. When Avid, Media 100 and IMmix VideoCube started delivering offline editing machines based on Macs in the early nineties they use the onboard RS422 serial ports to control the VTR and it works (just!). RS422 is a balanced serial standard where the Tx and Rx lines of an RS232 ports are balanced (either in a rep-coil or op-amp driving the line). Merely by providing a Tx pair and strapping one side of the pair to GND isn't good enough!
  
• USB - I know the iMac was the first machine to popularise this now-ubiquitous interface but why do Apple provide USB cables with that little lump on the inner edge of the socket? I have to reach for a set of pliers every time I use an Apple USB extension!
  
• SCSI - Apple have NEVER used the approved connector - from the very first Mac they used a 25-pin D type and when SCSI reached the v.3 spec (40MBytes per sec) with 50 or 68 pins for balanced working Apple pulled the same stunt as RS422 - balanced with one side of each pair tied to GND!
  
• PCI - it's why you have to buy an Apple-specific version of any card more complicated than a USB card!
  
• DVI - What was all that stuff with the Apple Cinema Display connector? It was just DVI in a different (more expensive) form.
  
• EIDE CD/DVD drives - I lost count of the number of times I had to buy an Apple replacement optical drive that was a standard Sony/LG part but with APPLE FIRMWARE! A £50 drive that costs £250!
  

The world has gone mad

Despite the lack of clinical evidence, homeopathy remains one of the most popular complementary therapies in the UK.

That's because Joe-public isn't as good at making medical descisions as the people who trained for many years! What is it with the NHS giving us 'choices' in treatment - I am not medically qualified and I certainly don't want a doctor shirking his/her responsibility by letting me make choices on a subject I know little about. The whole reason I go to the doctor is because they know better than I do!
That's a very dark road to go down - before we know it hospitals will be offering quack unproven remedies because they appeal to a lot of people. Oh, wait....

British Telecom tom-foolery!

Here's a question - has anyone ever had a pleasant experience at the hand of BT tech support? Here is a previous post with another example of their poor customer service.
Anyhow - a few weeks ago I'd set up an audio streaming server for a (non-technical) friend. All was well with him edge-serving the stream to another server that had a shed-load of bandwidth. Now, he has BT broadband and they offered him a free upgrade from his 2meg aDSL to their basic business offering (which is an eight-meg circuit). He jumped, but on the day that they upgraded him his connection went dead - well, the crappy little USB modem claimed it was connected but no traffic would flow. When I got to it I discovered that I could ping IP addresses on the internet but no DNS instantiation was going on. So - I called BT and after the usual 'is your anti-virus up to date' etc. I got to speak to a tech who seemed to know what he was talking about. Eventually he did admit that the fault must be in the BT network and gave me a fault reference number. Why he bothered is anyone's guess because when I'd gone another support rep called back and despite my friend giving him the fault reference number they persuaded my friend the fault must be with his PC!
Anyways - I returned a couple of evenings later with a Draytek Vigor 2600 router (it's the standard router we provide to clients for our remote access support). It has a superb status page and will happily detect correct Virtual Path and Channel Identifiers (VPI and VCI figures). guess what - when BT goes from two to eight megs you need to update the VCI to 38 - why do none of their tech's know this?
Anyhow - it's kind of interesting that with a VCI figure of 37 only some protocols worked - I think the difference is between UDP/IP and ICMP - DNS uses (by default) UDP to do look-ups. I should have forced the PC to do DNS look-up over TCP and seen if it made a difference.

Reasons to hate Black Magic, part 3

I have a long and proud tradition of criticising Black Magic Design - much beloved of the FCP crowd their products are built to a price rather than the signal spec. Read some of my previous rantings here and here. This last week I had the pleasure(!) of their new Intensity Pro card - HDMI & analogue component (at 1920x1080) capture. The reason they've launched this card is the slew of HDV camcorders that have an HDMI output. Now - we all know about HDMI's support for HDCP encryption. For most things the HDCP flag is set but no encryption is present. That's the way games consoles work (and foolishly we thought that this card would be good to capture the HD output of a PS3) - BUT, if the card sees even a hint of the HDCP flag it won't capture! Also - the card output is not the usual RGB feed you've expect, but whatever colour space the Quicktime clip is recorded in!

Never mind the quality, feel the width.

When will they start to conform to the specs rather than fobbing you off with "I'm sorry - that's not a supported configuration" - argh!

Annoyances

I've had a busy few weeks (which is good!) but I've had a few small run-ins with customers.

• I had to go and investigate a suite where all the laybacks (to BetaSP!) had visual disturbances. The issue had supposedly only started after we'd changed the video i/o card in a workstation. When I got to look at some of the tapes it was clear that the fault was either RF or tape damage. When I parked the deck on the offending frames and opened the tape you could see the scratch running the length of the lower edge. If memory serves it is TG2 and TG5 that guide the lower edge of an SP tape and so clearly the fault with mechanical and definitely located in the record VTR. I showed this to the editor who was adamant that it couldn't be the case and that it was us having done something when we fitted the new video i/o card - ¨Coincidence, I think not¨!
  His colleague realised the silliness of his position and apologised, but because I wasn't willing to back down I left under a bit of a cloud.


• Colour balancing monitors - I got booked to go and calibrate a monitor for a grading session that was about to start. When I got there (colour probe in hand) I found an industrial JVC display - NTSC-phosphored tube and no tweaks on the outside. I explained this to the editor and left. The next day they called to say how unprofessional I'd been and why hadn't I set up the monitor. Well - as a freebie - I'd set the black and white levels but they wouldn't accept that the display was un-calibrat'able (made up word). Why people believe they can make a £1,500 monitor look like an £11k grading display is beyond me. Also - did they think I was lying or stupid (it must have been one or the other).

I'm wondering if other industries have such huge egos? Someone knows they're wrong, the person they're shouting at knows they're wrong, they know that the person they're shouting at knows they're wrong BUT to smile, apologise and walk away with everyone's dignity intact ain't an option.......

Why do people have to have their say?

Last weekend was Sarah's fund-raiser for our medic friends who work for Hand in Hand for Asia and it was a great night - brilliant music and comedy and we raised a good sum. I was doing the PA - and if I say so myself it sounded very good! Outboard compressors and feedback killers as well as me riding the parametrics to find the sweet spot on every instrument! It's that old BBC training! Anyhow - one of the bands manager's kept sidling up to me to say things like "his guitar could be a bit brighter" and the like. On each occasion I'd just touch the knob and say something like "is that what you're after" and he'd say "yes, much better" even though no adjustment had been made.

It reminded me of when I used to spend a lot of time racking studio cameras. I'd make a point of making sure they were all colour-matched consistently and it used to annoy me when the director or the lighting guy would say something like "camera two looks a bit blue in the blacks" - I'd stare at the monitor, flick between the cameras - touch the OCP (making NO adjustment) and they'd say "ah, much better"! Talk to any racks engineer and they'll report the same.

All this put me in mind of an occasion when I worked at a facility where they had a studio and an audio department. I used to work a split shift across maintenance and studio operations and I got on quite well with the studio sound guy. One day during a coffee break I was in the studio's sound control room chewing the fat and one of us knocked a cup of coffee into the mixer - panic! It was one of those Soundcraft Venue models with the removable channel modules and so we quickly removed the three or four modules that the coffee had spilt into. While we were mopping out I noticed that the half-dozen op-amps on the channels were TL071s - I mentioned to the sound supervisor that there was a low-noise Mil-spec version of the chip, a TL061 which might buy us eight or ten dBs of better noise performance (which in the days of analogue recording was worth having). "Tell you what" he said, "buy a bag of them and whenever I'm quiet I replace a channel's worth and when I'm done you can put the Lindos on the mixer and see how better it sounds".

After a couple of months he'd finished and when I did squeak the signal path I reckoned we did have an extra eight dBs in hand - very nice. Later that week the dubbing mixer (who worked in the audio department) came to me and said "I heard what you did with the studio mixer - I've booked you in for maintenance this weekend and you're going to do the same with mine" - he had a similar model of desk. I was less than keen to sacrifice another weekend and so on the Friday evening when he'd left I went up to his suite and burred up a few screws on the removable modules and left a couple of the old TL071s out of the studio mixing desk littered about.

On the Monday morning he came to me and said that the mixer sounded so much better - in fact "night and day" was the expression he used! By the end of the week several of his client had come to congratulate me on how much better the suite sounded.

So, I concluded that some of the most senior people really have a limited grasp of technical quality and Lord Kelvin's quote (see the right-hand column) is as ever, very relevant.