[mythtv-users] Large-scale myth farm

[Daniel Kristjansson]

On Tue, 2005-10-04 at 11:15 +0100, Illtud Daniel wrote:
> Daniel Kristjansson wrote:
> 
> > A note on the DVB subtitles, these are almost always images not
> > text.
> 
> Damn. Anybody know if that's the case in the UK, specifically?
I've read this is the case in "most" of the UK.
I can't check that myself...

> Isn't that a real step backwards in terms of accessibility?
Yes and no. The fonts on all DTV implementations I know of are
not so good, and are fixed to the device. If you render them
at the broadcaster you can buy/license/create better fonts,
add new character sets, etc. The downside is that it lowers
the potential for innovation on the decoder side. You can't
buy a TV with new fonts, or a full-res text zoom feature, etc.

Ideally you would transmit both, letting the user chose which
one to use. When your TV is new and renders better text you
use that, when new symbols (Euro anyone?) appear you can 
decide to switch to the broadcaster captions. This would
also allow text scanning code, allow you to continue to use
your TV when you move to another country with a different
character set, etc, etc.

I believe that DVB allows transmitting both.

-- Daniel