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Ardiril, the sound control is at the lower left. Click it for the full multimedia experience.
Very cool! But do any tv stations use a test pattern any more? Is there even an end to the broadcast day, or just a sea of infomercials until the morning news shows start?
It's from a bygone era. Nobody uses them anymore. TV stations now serve infomercials.
cillit bang: I had it from a reputable source that these are the authentic colours! I don't know what the TV does to the signal... wouldn't it be the same as looking at it on a crt?
OMG the sound. I don't know why I wasn't expecting that sound when I clicked "Sound On," as it would be the logical sound to accompany the image, but OMG the sound.
That is awesome. I can hardly believe we didn't have something like it before!
Nicely done!
If anyone at MeFi is pissing themselves over the sound, they can go cry boofuckinghoo through a chainlink fence. These are the same people that will accuse you of "spam" if you send an email to them and CC another person.
love. As some others have said, it's nostalgic for me. At least one of the national Greek TV stations, it seems, still "signs off" for the night, and plays the Greek national anthem... maybe it's the parliament channel. Not sure, but I do see this (not the test pattern, though) sometimes and it tickles me.
I had it from a reputable source that these are the authentic colours! I don't know what the TV does to the signal
Black is stored on the video tape as 7.5% but a properly set up TV should map it to true black (0%). So if you're trying to simulate how the test card should look, the black bits should be black.
One guy complained about it in the MF thread, and it also happened once to me... opening it in a new tab on Firefox locked up my browser, required a hard restart of the machine.
Not sure there is anything to be done about it, but just wanted to let you know joelf.
The three narrow black bars at the bottom of the test pattern (below the big red bar) are the PLUGE pattern, and should be (left-to-right) blacker-than-black, black, and lighter-than-black. It should be up to your monitor settings to make the black look the same as the blacker-than-black. This setup doesn't apply to computer monitors, so I think it's technically correct that you should see a slight difference on the test pattern.
It should be up to your monitor settings to make the black look the same as the blacker-than-black
Not quite - the numbers Joel has started with come from an oddball video colorspace where 7.5% represents black. In the real world, black is 0%, so the brightness/contrast circuit in a video monitor monitor needs to do some conversion to display the image correctly. Similarly, in CSS, black is 0, so Joel should be doing the same conversion in choosing CSS values.
(Taking this a bit further, a proper composite video signal has the black level at 0.3 of a possible 1.0 volts, and for broadcast over the air the whole waveform is flipped upside down, making black 100% and white 30%. It wouldn't make sense to map these directly to CSS values)
(Yes, I'm aware I'm taking this far too seriously)