[HN Gopher] Teletext on a BBC Computer in 2024
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Teletext on a BBC Computer in 2024
Author : susam
Score : 100 points
Date : 2024-01-28 12:26 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (linuxjedi.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (linuxjedi.co.uk)
| tempaccount1234 wrote:
| This should work fine on the composite output of the pi with no
| need for a modulator. At least here in Europe, where teletext is
| still very much a thing, it works from the external satellite
| receiver that's connected this way.
| LinuxJedi wrote:
| It does, the first part of my post shows this on the TV. But
| for the BBC Micro I'd need to physically hack the Morley quite
| a bit to take composite input. I also have an Acorn Teletext
| Adapter, this can easily take composite instead of RF via a
| jumper.
| paulcapewell wrote:
| Ah thanks for this clarification - I was wondering what the
| need was for the RF modulation and if it was necessary for
| just plain old TV use. Great project and thanks for bringing
| the possibility to my attention!
| flir wrote:
| I knew a guy who did that with a microcontroller and hung it on
| the wall in the office, before data dashboards (or Pis for that
| matter) were really a thing.
|
| I think a Mode 7 dashboard would really focus the mind on
| what's absolutely essential.
| izacus wrote:
| That's because modern digital standards
| (DVB-T/DVB-C/DVB-S/DVB-S2) actually added a way to encapsulate
| teletext data in the MPEG-2 TS stream inbetween usual
| MPEG2/H.264 and MP2/AC3/AAC audio tracks. Quite fascinating
| really.
| sverhagen wrote:
| Being from the Netherlands originally, I know _their_
| "Teletekst", not as much the BBC one. I couldn't possibly imagine
| it being of much use anymore. Similar to how the article started
| in past tense (before continuing in present tense):
|
| > Before the Internet, if we wanted to read up-to-the-minute news
| or weather, we had Teletext.
|
| I read this article from four days ago (link below, it's in
| Dutch) about how the Dutch broadcasting had recently made a
| significant investment to upgrade the old system, which was
| running on a local Windows 2003 machine/server, to a cloud-based
| solution that integrates with their other content-management
| system(s). It surprised me how many people still use this system.
| From the article: "the service still reaches a few million people
| per week through TV screens, and another 800,000 daily users via
| its app". (For reference, population of the Netherlands is 18
| million.)
|
| https://tweakers.net/reviews/11700/hoe-werkt-het-vernieuwde-...
| LinuxJedi wrote:
| I got to say, having using Teletext again when writing that
| blog post, I do actually prefer consuming my news that way.
| That surprised me.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Teletext is great. It's highly curated and you can read all the
| pages in the morning in a few minutes. It's part of my coffee
| and morning routine.
| TheFragenTaken wrote:
| Also mostly ad free, free of clickbait, concise, and really
| really fast. It's RSS before RSS.
| sverhagen wrote:
| Yeah, mostly... it depended on the station. Commercial
| stations in the Netherlands, to the extent they even
| bothered with Teletext, did at times do ads.
| anthk wrote:
| Yeah, same here in Spain. Just the same short news in any
| channel, neither left/right opinions from the journalists
| nor lengthy and unneeded details; next to it, some services
| mimicking newspaper sections.
| pjmlp wrote:
| In Germany and Portugal it is still used in some channels, for
| example for subtitles, although not much.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I worked on those systems and the joke was the TT100 really was
| the homepage of the Netherlands.
|
| It all ran on a couple of SGI Challenge-S servers, these were
| basically re-packaged Indy's.
|
| If you've been on the net that long you may also remember the
| original nu.nl which was utterly barebones and blistering fast.
| No ads, no eye candy, no opinions or comments, just the AP
| feed.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| > Being from the Netherlands originally, I know _their_
| "Teletekst", not as much the BBC one. I couldn't possibly
| imagine it being of much use anymore.
|
| I know quite a lot of people in NL, some under 50, who prefer
| teletext to other forms of news and use it all the time.
| lqet wrote:
| > I managed to get it running, despite Teletext being killed off
| years ago.
|
| It's still going strong here in Germany. The Teletext service run
| by ARD alone still had 19 M users 2 years ago [0]. You can even
| use it in a browser [1]. My father uses it heavily and with
| split-screen to get up-to-date sports results and news without
| all the BS he has to deal with on the internet as someone over 60
| (notifications, cookie warnings, usability changes every 6
| months, fear of accidentally "clicking somewhere dangerous",
| ads). I suspect he uses Teletext for the same reasons I visit HN
| for.
|
| Somewhat ironically, his Teletext (his TV signal) has been
| delivered via Internet for over a decade now.
|
| [0] https://www.rbb-
| online.de/unternehmen/der_rbb/rbb_in_der_ard....
|
| [1] https://www.ard-text.de/
| LinuxJedi wrote:
| I should have maybe clarified that it was killed off here in
| the UK, I will amend it.
| PodgieTar wrote:
| Is that true? I thought the protests in 2020 stopped the shut
| off?
|
| Teletext and BBC Red Button are essentially the same, just
| with quite a few lick of paints. I think you can still access
| Red Button to this day?
| jayflux wrote:
| They're not the same and I don't think they've ever been
| synonymous with each other (or at least not by people who
| work in the Broadcasting industry).
|
| Red Button is the service that replaced teletext/ceefax in
| 2012. Teletext was an analogue service, Red button was a
| whole new digital service offering similar information,
| it's entirely different infrastructure underneath, it's not
| just a "lick of paint".
| PodgieTar wrote:
| You're right. My bad. I worked on a modernisation project
| for the DVB version of this in 2018. Internally we used
| to refer to it as Teletext, hence my confusion.
| 15457345234 wrote:
| > Teletext was an analogue service
|
| Teletext was a _digital_ service provided over an
| _analogue_ bearer - the modulation of the signal is
| continuous, not discrete.
| Symbiote wrote:
| "Teletext" in this context is a signalling protocol for
| transmitting text content over PAL TV, for decoding by an
| appropriate receiver.
|
| The BBC's service was branded "Ceefax", ITV and Channel 4
| branded theirs "Teletext".
|
| The current 'red button' service is a completely different
| protocol running on DVB (Digital Video Broadcast, i.e.
| digital TV). Text packets are added to the MPEG-2 stream.
| PodgieTar wrote:
| Ah, my apologies then. My confusion was that I didn't
| think there was a difference between the current
| mechanism and the old one.
| phh wrote:
| FWIW you can still get Teletext over MPEG TS (DVB or
| IPTV), it's just already de-modulated, but even error
| correction bits are still there (and are useless).
|
| In France most IPTV operators still use teletext for live
| subtitling because it eats much less bandwidth than
| dvbsub
| razakel wrote:
| Teletext/Ceefax has been dead since the analog switch-off
| in 2012. Red Button uses MHEG-5.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Same here. The Dutch public broadcaster even switched to a
| brand new cloud-based Teletext system last November. The old
| system was breaking down too often and not many people still
| knew how it worked, so a brand new system was developed to
| replace the old one.
|
| Not only is Teletext still used very often, the public
| broadcaster is also legally obligated to have Teletext, and for
| aviators the law specifies Teletext as one of three legal
| options for pilots to check the weather on when preparing for a
| flights.
|
| The Dutch news site tweakers wrote a small piece about this
| upgrade last week (use your favourite translation tool):
| https://tweakers.net/reviews/11700/hoe-werkt-het-vernieuwde-...
| gpvos wrote:
| I understood that it was mostly because the software was out
| of support for a while already.
| gpvos wrote:
| I think it is used more via their website than via the
| television signal these days, at least in the Netherlands.
| scoot wrote:
| > You can even use it in a browser
|
| Interestingly an intern at a telecoms research company where I
| worked in IT was tasked with using an OTA teletext receiver to
| convert teletext to web circa 1995/96.
|
| I don't recall the details about it, other than that he got it
| working, after reverse engineering the (serial?) protocol the
| supplied software used. But nothing ever became of that project
| as far as I know.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| In the netherlands, one of the earlier internet companies
| created this in the 90s as well. If I remember correctly it
| was first a java applet and then ported to JS with a CGI bin
| talking to the input hardware.
| paulcapewell wrote:
| Yeah - it kind of blew my mind when I picked up a cheap DVBS
| satellite receiver box recently, tuned my dish to a satellite
| that carried German services, and found plain old Teletext
| running beautifully well on HD TV channels, rendered pixel
| perfect on my TV via HDMI. Mind boggling!
| hnarn wrote:
| The Guardian posted an article about teletext in Sweden less than
| a month ago, I posted it here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38957703
| jansenmac wrote:
| Dutch Teletekst is very much alive online.
| https://nos.nl/teletekst the mobile version is quite popular: +1M
| downloads on the Google Play store. Somehow news here is faster
| than regular sites, especially live sports scores.
| forinti wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it's still used in Portugal. Older people in
| the countryside seemed to enjoy it when I was last there.
| mhd wrote:
| I remember when TVs had special features regarding teletext, like
| some sort of page cache where you didn't need to wait for pages
| to load. Weirdly enough, contemporary TVs don't do this, despite
| memory and parallel processing power for this not being an issue.
| Or maybe I'm just remembering this as working better than it
| did...
|
| If your TV/VCR had this and ShowView/VCR Plus, you were riding
| the knife edge of the future...
| Ekaros wrote:
| They did, basically teletext iterated over pages so for one
| channel it was not that much data. I think teletext now is mvp
| feature that no one actually develops after it works most of
| the time. Thus worse user exeperience.
| jonatron wrote:
| Fastext?
| https://twitter.com/grim_fandango/status/857683620831604736?...
| LinuxJedi wrote:
| Fastext is basically the four coloured buttons that are
| basically shortcuts to pages. It isn't related to page
| caching.
| jonatron wrote:
| I think in practice, TV's that had Fastext also had memory
| for pages. I couldn't find much info so for any people
| searching in the future: search FLOF in https://www.etsi.or
| g/deliver/etsi_i_ets/300700_300799/300706...
| Symbiote wrote:
| I can't say my parents' TVs had zero memory, but it was
| at least very limited compared to my grandparents' TV.
|
| The former was maybe fast if you were on page X and
| navigated to page X+1, X+2, maybe X+3 and X+4 (is that
| how the coloured buttons were usually arranged?) but for
| everything else was slow.
|
| At my grandparents, every page was retrieved almost
| instantly.
| jonatron wrote:
| It makes sense given how expensive memory used to be. I
| also remember my grandparents TV having much better
| teletext than mine.
| NeoTar wrote:
| >is that how the coloured buttons were usually arranged?
|
| I think it depends on the system in use, but from my
| recollection it was a hierachical system - so from the
| home-page you may have links to News, Sport, Weather and
| TV Listings; from the News Page, the links may have been
| to National News, Regional News, etc.
|
| Maybe when you got to an individual story one would be a
| link to 'next page' (or story) and the other 'previous
| page'?
|
| One of the best uses I found was a low-fi daily quiz.
| Each page had a question and four answers, and you pushed
| the button for which you thought was correct. I _think_
| it also demonstrated that pages need not have a
| completely numeric id - I recall the quiz pages being
| something like '12;' - presumably to stop you cheating
| and jumping directly to an answer.
|
| For more info on the quiz:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboozle!
| bemusedthrow75 wrote:
| I believe Fastext was implemented with pre-caching. Since
| the page declared which the four page numbers were, the
| Teletext decoder was able to pre-fetch those pages while
| you read? This is what made it fast.
|
| Essentially if you spent half a minute reading a page, the
| four coloured fast text pages were already received.
| LinuxJedi wrote:
| The Sony used in this blog page caches everything. The Morley
| connected to the BBC does not cache.
| sverhagen wrote:
| Being at a local, amateur radio station in Belgium in the
| 80's/90's we read some of our "news" or sports results from
| Teletekst. (Who were we fooling?) Being the amateurs we really
| were, half the time the page would flip while we were halfway
| through reading it on-air, with the cache not working or not
| loaded yet, and having to improvise your way out of it. I don't
| think anyone was really listening to these (former-)pirate
| stations by that time anymore, but it still was embarrassing.
| Oh, I am so nostalgic for those days...
| nemo8551 wrote:
| I used to play the games on that when I was a kid at my grand
| house.
|
| I particularly liked on called bamboozle if I recall. It was a
| kind of quiz game.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Loved Bamboozle.
|
| I also booked a holiday from Teletext. It shows you the prices
| then you call to book.
| LinuxJedi wrote:
| From what I have been told, one of the other services
| supported by the software I used has Bamboozle still, but I
| haven't tried the others myself yet.
| vkaku wrote:
| This is so cool to discover people are actively running teletext
| services.
|
| Very good read.
| 0xEF wrote:
| There are quite a few! On Android, you can grab the TextTV app
| (may also be on iOS) and get feeds that are still operating. I
| used it while in Iceland (RUV) to correlate some weather data,
| and Germany seems to have quite a few feeds.
|
| I originally found it when I was trying to start my own micro
| Teletext service in the US for the fun of it, but the project
| got set aside to make way for more pressing things (aka life).
| I really should get back to it...
| vkaku wrote:
| Let me know once you build it. Cheers!
| zimpenfish wrote:
| McDonalds are currently running an ad campaign on UK TV with some
| fake Teletext pages and they haven't even bothered to get them
| half right. One of the pages is 53 characters wide, has (at
| least) two different incorrect fonts, and colours that aren't in
| the Teletext palette. Also I suspect the "MCTEXT" in the banner
| isn't possible to do with the control codes but my understanding
| of those is woeful.
|
| I did think the HH:MM/SS clock was another mistake but that turns
| out to have been there since 1974 going off stock photos I found.
| glxxyz wrote:
| Yes lots of things in that ad
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ2z1be2EXQ) are impossible
| with the UK teletext they're trying to emulate, generated by a
| Mullard SAA5050 (there were others). It also takes a whole
| character (for the control code) to switch foreground or
| background colours. The fonts and graphics pixel sizes are all
| over the place, the only 'pixel' art available used a 2x3 grid
| within each character..
|
| If they wanted a more faithful font there are plenty around,
| I've even done a couple myself:
| https://github.com/glxxyz/bedstead and
| https://galax.xyz/TELETEXT/
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Ah, I use your Teletext font for my fake football league
| tables and scores (don't think I've made any egregious
| mistakes.) Many thanks.
|
| e.g. https://social.browser.org/@wednesday_league
| landgenoot wrote:
| My wife grew up without television.
|
| She knows what teletext is, but her mind was blown when I
| explained what the colored buttons on every TV remote are meant
| for.
| LinuxJedi wrote:
| You can use f-keys for the coloured buttons on the BBC Micro
| too :)
| PodgieTar wrote:
| Edit: I use Teletext here when I actually meant the BBCs DVB
| version. We would still internally refer to it as Teletext.
|
| I worked on the infrastructure for Teletext at the BBC as late as
| 2018. We were charged with modernising the infrastructure for it
| so that in the future it'd be easier to deploy, and easier to
| Debug and modify in the future.
|
| As far as I know the service that ran Teletext is still running
| to this day. The Carousel still gets sent out. I know there was
| discussion of killing off the data service, but I'm not sure if
| this ever actually got killed.
|
| It should be noted that the Ceefax and Teletext of the 90s was
| replaced with a much more modern "Red Button" that ran into the
| 2000s. If Red Button still runs today, which by all accounts it
| might, it'll look vastly different than in this article. Much
| more like the following:
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/22/BBC_Red_Butto... -
| Some of the mechanisms (Carousels, etc) are similar.
|
| Regardless of whether or not it did this application will still
| be running. The Teletext infrastructure was used to also send out
| things like "Watch on iPlayer" for Internet Connected TVs that
| were not currently connected to the internet. It formed an
| important part of the marketing for HBBTV, of which the BBC
| helped form the standard.
|
| I only worked on this project for 6 months, but it was one of the
| most interesting projects I have worked on. It was myself and
| another developer, and it was completed and deployed. A lot of
| code I wrote now sends out these packets to millions of homes in
| the UK.
|
| Having to learn the low-level packet structure of DSMCC, and
| being able to efficiently pack these and send them out to
| multiple broadcast towers was incredible.
|
| I will say this. One of the big discussions from our team during
| this time was how poor a decision it would be to turn off the
| Data Service. The costs of this service are negligible. It is
| very efficiently ran. The broadcasting towers are needed for
| other services, and it is a single Java Application, and some
| hosted services that, again, are ran for other purposes too.
|
| However, for a lot of our more elderly users, this was a way to
| get them good quality news without having them rely on things
| like the Daily Mail. It served a public good, regardless of how
| little it was used. It is a one way service, a carousel of data,
| so we did not have good metrics on it's use.
|
| It was to try to encourage users to move to Hbbtv, which of
| course someone like my Grandma would never move to.
|
| If you're interesting in learning more about how Teletext works I
| used this resource extensively during my time at the BBC.
| https://www.tvwithoutborders.com/tutorials/dtv_intro/how-to-...
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Imagine the old people that wont get scammed online by keeping
| the service running so they don't need to go online.
| PodgieTar wrote:
| It was just a needlessly disruptive move to cynically try to
| get an audience that would never be able to use their new
| services onto a new platform.
|
| Someone using Teletext in 2018 was not going to be able to
| navigate the world of BBCs internet connected TV
| applications.
| redbuttontext wrote:
| It was a decision entirely driven by "Sign In" metrics
| (that's still in place). It's a prime example of Goodhart's
| Law, which apparently no product owner in the BBC has ever
| heard of.
| emmet wrote:
| God I miss Aertel. Only way to get cinema listings without buying
| the local paper on that day.
| _joel wrote:
| Now if only I could get a holiday to Lanzarote from there, for
| PS99 a person. That would be true nostalgia :D
| jebarker wrote:
| Your comment really triggered a trip down memory lane for me. I
| also remembered how crazy it is that we used to go and choose
| vacations out of paper catalogues at the travel agent.
|
| I also remember reading the football results for my dad on my
| grandparents teletext on Saturday afternoon so he could check
| them against his pools picks. Strangely prominent piece of tech
| in my childhood.
| boffinAudio wrote:
| The recently released ZX Spectrum NEXT, an upgrade to the
| veritable ZX Spectrum platform of the 80's, has contemporary new-
| school Teletext capabilities:
|
| https://dashboard.nxtel.org/Help/Topic/FAQ
|
| I'm yet to enable it on my ZXSpectrumNext yet (too much fun
| playing old - and NEW! - games) but its on my list for the next
| few weeks.
|
| There is also a thriving BBS community based around the
| ZXSpectrumNext .. everything old is new again, and we seem to be
| at a point in the road where _anachronistic computing_ may soon
| give rise to an entirely new user platform ..
| LinuxJedi wrote:
| I like what they have done with the NEXT, but unfortunately I
| have no nostalgia for ZX Spectrums, I grew up in a BBC Micro
| household. I do have a +2 in my collection here, but I rarely
| use it.
| boffinAudio wrote:
| The NEXT is capable of running other system cores, such as
| the BBC Micro. I was an Oric Atmos fan in the day, for me its
| quaint to be dealing with Speccie stuff now, but as soon as
| the Atmos core is ready I'll be booting that too ..
| wkjagt wrote:
| Very cool project. This hits two of my nostalgia vectors: 8-bit
| computers and teletext. I remember as a kid (growing up in The
| Netherlands), I could spend a lot of time typing in page numbers
| in teletext, waiting for the counter to reach the page and see
| what kind of information would come up. I guess it was like an
| early version of the internet for me. But more mysterious in a
| way because the page number didn't hold any predictive
| information on what would come up.
| ochrist wrote:
| It still exists in Denmark and other European countries. You can
| even access it via the internet: https://www.dr.dk/cgi-
| bin/fttv1.exe/100
| sjmulder wrote:
| This is a really cool project!
|
| I did a not nearly as cool project several years ago, a command
| line NOS Teletekst reader for Unix/Windows. Might be of use to
| someone: https://github.com/sjmulder/nostt
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