menuMENU    UK Free TV logo Archive (2002-)

 

 

Click to see updates

All posts by Briantist

Below are all of Briantist's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.


Aerialman: Good point. I've changed the logic so The Wrekin is now showing.

Good news - no changes!

link to this comment
GB flag

@Dale Rumbold: At **SOME POINT** the "temporary" services com7 and com8 will migrate to a single frequency network.

For this to happen, all the current uses of C55 and C56 will have to be cleared. Quite when this is going to happen isn't really clear from the schedules.

As far as I can tell this is rather like playing 3D Chess.

link to this comment
GB flag

Sorry about the "Select more comments" page bar not working. Seems I had finger problems when I was adding it. It's fixed now.

link to this comment
GB flag

I've updated the database of dates for the above table to include the most recent changes to reflect the quarter-, rather than half-year that the changes will happen in.

link to this comment
GB flag
UK Free TV site improvements
Saturday 14 October 2017 3:44PM

@Andrew Wood: There is another web server (which I know as "blue") that handles requests to the www.ukfree.tv domain and redirects them here to secure site (at ukfree.tv). It's been like that for a couple of years now.

I had to stop and restart the server and it didn't have what Amazon call a "Elastic IP" so the IP address changed when it came back up. I fixed it to an Elastic IP, but I neglected to tell the domain people.

So, it has been corrected, but it will take up to 24 hours to pass through all the levels of DNS caching.

Thanks for pointing this out.

link to this comment
GB flag

mal: It's not really the number of presenters that cost so much, it's the necessity of having lots of people working to produce the show, and the necessary overheads of having an office and a studio and all the relevant equipment!

The costs also stem from having to cover the whole of the UK in the level of detailed required. That's totally separate shows for Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, and 14 divisions of England.

BBC nations and regions - overview map

There are a number of money-saving oddities like the Look East "split" where the local teams for the Cambridge part take over for a while. Something similar goes on in the Channel Islands and Oxfordshire.

So, in summary, the regional news "presenters" are local news journalists and they are expected to present the latest news to viewers live.

From memory, most viewers like the developed presentation style.

link to this comment
GB flag

mal: It's worth remembering that BBC One is on air 24 hours a day, but just between 6:30pm and 7pm, it outputs a whole 9 hours of content!

link to this comment
GB flag

Johnny Foreigner: Just to let you know it has nothing to do with Brexit, and everything to do with DDOS attacks that every website has to put up with these days.

At the moment, you can't use the site outside these:

- GB/UK
- US
- IE
- CA
- DE
- IN
- NL
- AU
- ZA
- BE
- PL
- GR
- IT

If you use an anonymizing system such as a VPN or Tor, you might not be able to get in.

I know it's a pain, but there has to be a balance between allowing the site to be seen worldwide and being kicked off air for everyone every time there's another DDOS attack in progress.

It troubles me to have to do this.

link to this comment
GB flag

Johnny Foreigner: What I'm going to do is disable the DDOS system until the server gets overloaded.

It will automatically kick in again if/when there is another attack.

Sorry again for the inconvenience.

link to this comment
GB flag

@MikeB: Thanks for all your comments.

I did stick the calculate for the screen distances at the end of the article and you can use any form of measurement you like. In Excel format it's

=(8*SQRT(337)*C7))/(337*TAN(M2*PI()/360))

Where C7 is the screen size and M2 is 30 (mixed usage), 32 (Full HD), 40 (cinema) or 64 (Ultra HD).

@John Foster

The values of 30, 32, 40 and 64 degrees are well researched. [1]

The 32 degrees and 64 degrees relate the resolution of the human eye and the ability to see individual pixels (for "20/20 vision"). Remember that the eye actually sees very little and the brain makes up for what it can't see.

The 30 degrees and 40 degrees values relate to the ability of a two-eyed human to see the whole screen without moving the head. Movies are "shot" on film and designed for 24-fps playback and have always made the assumption of a big screen so film directors "expect" the viewer to be sitting closer.

For TV shows (that aren't movies) the idea is that you need to see the whole screen because a lot of shots will be "close ups" and/or fast panning that need the whole of the screen to "enjoy".



[1] TV Size to Distance Calculator and Science

link to this comment
GB flag