Silvatone recordings

[nbtv]

Are the Silvatone recordings really the earliest surviving recordings of a TV broadcast?

Can these be downloaded?

[Lawnboy]

ironically i had just pulled out Don McLean's book "Restoring Baird's Image" the other day. the restored recordings arent available for download, other than the clips on the website www.tvdawn.com but all the restored videos are included on the cd "The Dawn of Television Remembered". i highly recommend it.

[DrZarkov]

On the cd you can also hear the original Sound of the recording. Did anyone tried to display the cd on a real televisor? If this it not possible, maybe someone should talk with Don, if he can't make a CD with the original recordings for display on a 30 line televisor.

[Lowtone]

*****This site shop is temporarily closed*****

I have been told that the above price is too low for the scope and content of the product. There are two reasons why this is so: the Shiers Trust Grant covered part of the production costs and I want to make the product affordable and hence available to as many people as possible.

As an illustration of its perceived value, a used copy of the above sold on eBay for £36 [Item no 6192471290 sold 18th July 2005].

http://www.tvdawn.com/DOTR.htm

How to buy it ?

On the cd you can also hear the original Sound of the recording. Did anyone tried to display the cd on a real televisor? If this it not possible, maybe someone should talk with Don, if he can't make a CD with the original recordings for display on a 30 line televisor.

Can you take the picture and make the sound file off it ?

[Andrew Davie]

On the cd you can also hear the original Sound of the recording. Did anyone tried to display the cd on a real televisor? If this it not possible, maybe someone should talk with Don, if he can't make a CD with the original recordings for display on a 30 line televisor.

I did. I can't recall if they were already 32 line format, or if I converted them myself. But in short, I watched them on my club-standard televisor. I just wanted to get the feeling of watching TV as somebody in 1930 might have seen it. It was kind of special.

[Lawnboy]

when i bought the cd set a few years ago i emailed Don directly. the site shop apparently still down.

DrZarkov- the uncorrected audio recordings are part of the video for the phonovision discs only but they wouldnt be much use for a televisor as the framerate is 4 fps. the audio itself is also compressed as 96kbps MP2.

[DrZarkov]

Thank you, I forgot the fact, that they are recorded with 4 frames only. Of course it would be possible to re-convert the Mpeg files on the disc to 30 or 32 lines, but I'm afraid the loss would be too big. I've tried to convert some older films from the internet in very compressed, low definition resolutions to NBTV. It was looking bad in the original format, but it was looking terrible in NBTV format, because the losses are adding.

[Lowtone]

But is there a way to get all the original archives of nbtv of the 30's ?

[Andrew Davie]

Thank you, I forgot the fact, that they are recorded with 4 frames only. Of course it would be possible to re-convert the Mpeg files on the disc to 30 or 32 lines, but I'm afraid the loss would be too big. I've tried to convert some older films from the internet in very compressed, low definition resolutions to NBTV. It was looking bad in the original format, but it was looking terrible in NBTV format, because the losses are adding.

I recall what I did, now. Somewhere there are animating GIF files of these recordings. A woman singing, in particular. I converted the GIF files to WAV for display on my televisor. I'm sure the frame rate was higher than 4fps. In any case, I was able to see reasonable images on my televisor.

I still have the CD with the conversions hanging around somewhere.

http://www.tvdawn.com/movies/betty.rm

The above is one of the videos I converted/watched. This appears to be 15fps, though I'm not sure there are actually 15 different fps

Cheers
A

[Lowtone]

Thanks for the video
http://www.tvdawn.com/Disc98_2.HTM
According to this it was around 1932 to 1935. So 12.5 fps
15 is the format of the .rm file.

4 fps are the tests from 1926 with the Nipkow's linked to the phono

[gary]

Hi guys, there seems to be some confusion here (probably all mine) but I have the CD and don't recall there being any "unprocessed" video on it. I have it packed away somewhere at the moment due to my recent move, but when I find it I'll check on that, forgive me if I'm wrong.

In any account, if there is material at 4 fps there should be no problem converting it up to 12.5 fps with no loss - as "upsampling" (for want of a better term since this is NOT just straight sample rate conversion) always retains the same bandwidth of the original content (the reverse is obviously not the case).

Of course, even if converted to 12.5 the *motion* artefacts of the original 4 fps will be retained.

However, I doubt very much if you could get any sort of picture out of the unprocessed video by playing it straight on a monitor, not even Baird could do that. It required substantial computer based dsp processing by Don to get the images to the quality he has achieved.

If anyone DOES have the unprocessed video I would dearly love a copy to have a crack at processing it, but note that "unprocessed" would also mean NOT lossy compressed.

[Lowtone]

http://www.tvdawn.com/tvdiscs.htm
There are some sound files, but compressed

[gary]

http://www.tvdawn.com/tvdiscs.htm
There are some sound files, but compressed

Yes, I had played around with those before I got the CD, I didn't bother to process them too much as, as you say, they are compressed, worse still by real audio, but this (Man's Head in Motion) is an example of what you can drag out of them without any dsp work (assuming Don didn't do any):

[Lowtone]

Yes there is not good. Is there a way to access to the WAV remasters ?
Will they be released someday ?

As a side question, there are youtube videos, filmed on Nipkow disc, so the picture is round shaped. Do exists a programm ( for still pictures and/or video ) who can undistort the picture ?
Because, if i encode a rounded picture, and display it on MUTR kit, the picture would be rouded twice !

[gary]

Yes there is not good. Is there a way to access to the WAV remasters ?
Will they be released someday ?

As a side question, there are youtube videos, filmed on Nipkow disc, so the picture is round shaped. Do exists a programm ( for still pictures and/or video ) who can undistort the picture ?
Because, if i encode a rounded picture, and display it on MUTR kit, the picture would be rouded twice !

Well if you were not too fussed about the pictures handedness then just taking the mirror image of the video should do the trick, in fact you should end up with a straight (or straight-ish) picture.