DeuxPix

Another video in the same vein as the previous Larsen Feedback piece. By artist "Rocketrobos" (Toban Nicols) from YouTube. It's pretty cool how it's been done but a bit more technical than I could manage. Very similar to my proposed glitch film for which I am still collecting footage.

Larsen Feedback

This is a composition by Maxime Merion involving a slightly psychedelic series of images, taken directly off a television screen. It's a little bit like what I would like to achieve and is reminiscent of Telegiffer in some ways. It is, however, a bit more considered and worked on.



Maniax Memori weblog

I like how this piece seems to have originated from the feedback generated from a microphone. Pretty cool.

Teletext is dead.

Misc. links

• Video cards were originally much the same resolution as teletext. However whilst Video cards advanced teletext's format remained the same.

• Windows 3.0, released 1990, utilised a graphics card with over 1600 colours.
• An article from 1987 about teletext in the US. Shows how behind the times the American continent was with teletext: televisions with appropriate encoders were not widely available in 1987.
• It's always worth a look at the Lektrolab Flickr stream.
• About the first video game -'Spacewar' at inventors.com
• Windows 95 was a pretty popular Operating System in its time. It helped Internet Explorer dominate the web browser market for ages. WorldWideWeb, meanwhile, was the first web browser and HTML editor.
  
• An important landmark in the history of the BBC and indeed television - the Queen's coronation. 22 million people watched.
  

Teletext remote control icons

Remote controls modified for teletext control have their own selection of icons that correspond to subtitles, index page etc. This could be a useful set of visual metaphors for the website.

The impetus for a more complex type of television remote control came in the late 1970s with the development of the Ceefax teletext service by the BBC. Most commercial remote controls at that time had a limited number of functions, sometimes as few as three: next channel, previous channel, and volume/off. This type of control did not meet the needs of teletext sets where pages were identified with three-digit numbers. A remote control to select teletext pages would need buttons for each number from zero to nine, as well as other control functions, such as switching from text to picture, and the normal television controls of volume, station, brightness, colour intensity and so on. Early teletext sets used wired remote controls to select pages but the continuous use of the remote control required for teletext quickly indicated the need for a wireless device. So BBC engineers began talks with one or two television manufacturers which led to early prototypes in around 1977-78 that could control a much larger number of functions.
-- Wikipedia entry on remote control

BBC interactive streaming/digital layouts

Every now and again, the BBC don't have enough channels to screen an event such as the snooker or football highlights. These are instead accessible via the 'red button', or through the BBCi interactive service:

Note that the familiar colour coded fastext keys have been kept for this new version of teletext. Essentially there isn't all that much content so it isn't really a true teletext service - only details on what's currently being streamed and what's coming up on the stream.

I hope that, by looking at some of these existing 'new' digital teletext layouts I can get inspiration for my website layout. Perhaps I can meld together elements of these different teletext services to create a new, web-friendly version. I kind of like the graphics on the BBC football:

Interactive TV - subtitles

I suppose they are encoded differently on every digital set top box but this is what the digital subtitles look like on mine:

It works in exactly the same way as regular analogue subtitles except that you don't have to key in the '888' code, rather hit a 'subtitles' button on the digital remote.

Weather Watch - part three

Digital teletext.

The maps have changed quite a bit since 2002 but have retained the temperature forecasts. Note than the Isles of Scilly are now included!