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    A look at how the UK's analogue Teletext service operated. Document from 1994.

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    A look at how the UK's analogue Teletext service operated. Document from 1994.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    235 views14 pages

    How Teletext Works

    Uploaded by

    bobzee666
    A look at how the UK's analogue Teletext service operated. Document from 1994.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    of 14
    HOW TELETEXT WORKS Teletext Ltd provides a teletext service One of the strengths of this arrangement for the United Kingdom on ITV and is that regional and national pages can sit Channel Four/S4C. The services are side by side within a magazine (eg news broadcast from 25 transmission systems _and weather), there is no need for re- located at major television transmitters gional pages to be in a separate section. Tt would be possible to operate 25 com- _—_‘Regional pages can appear on both ITV pletely separate regional services, in and C4, practice the service is a mix of national and regional pages and the regions are grouped into 13 areas, corresponding to the ITV regions. ‘Teletext Ltd. - Transmitter Site Locations. ITV Region Yorkshire Scottish a (Godons ieee! Drags fer Droog rues UK Map (030 March 1984 FARM LANE SYSTEMS (rofer to Central System diagram) Editing Systems ‘The whole operation centres around a pair of MicroVAX 4000-400s configured as editing systems, known as Edimas and Edistb (EDIt MASter and EDIt STandBy), These VAXes hold all trans- mission and storage magazines, a page library and archive files. In all each VAX has 2Gbyte of disc storage. All page editing, whether regional or national, is carried out on the active editing machine at Farm Lane. Magazine Structure The editing systems hold 500 magazines, each containing 100 root pages (or sets) of up to 99 individual pages. In practice the total number of pages per magazine cannot exceed 800, ie an average of eight per set. Each of the 25 regional transmis- sion systems has a block of 10 magazines alloceted to it, numbered 1 to 9 and A and prefixed by the region’s code. Thus the magazines for the London region are called Lon] to LonA. ‘The pages trans- mitted to the viewers are a mix of the regional magazines and pages from national magazines, Natl to NatA, al- though only magazines 1 to 6 are usually seen, Fifty of the magazines are allocated to the storage of pages prior to transmission. ‘Many of these pages are copied from the storage magazines by automated batch jobs, normally overnight. Editing Terminals At Teletext pages are prepared and man- aged using specialist teletext editing software running on 386sx PCs, of which there are around 80. The PCs communi- cate with the active editing system over ethemet using DECnet protocols. The PCs are connected to the computer room by a series of thin-wire ethernet segments, isolated using DEC multi-port repeaters (DEMPRs), The PCs are also used for normal office applications, run from a pair of VAX PC fileservers, including accounts and order processing systems, External Contributors ‘Teletext has around 50 external contribu- tors, advertisers as well as news and information providers. There are two interface options, terminals may connect using the DECnet protocol used by the local terminals over ethernet bridges or ‘on conventional serial ines using a stand- ard teletext editing protocol called ASTET. Serial links can be supported on a variety of lines, analogue leased lines, BT Kilostream circuits (up to 19.2Kbaud) or dial-up over the PSTN (up to 9600baud). A pair of MicroVAX 4000- 200s, known as the Information Provider systems, convert the serial ASTET proto- col to the DECnet protocol understood by the editing machines, ‘The equipment used by external contribu- tors varies widely. Around 20 holiday companies use a single PC and dial up ‘modem, while the Press Association and ‘Computer Newspaper Services (News! Sport and TV Listings respectively) have developed their own mini-computer systems. Several bookmakers generate their pages directly from their racing and betting information systems. Archiving Each time a page is changed in the trans- mission or storage magazines a copy of the previous version of the page is stored in an archive file, Around 50,000 page updates per day are recorded. Pages can be recovered in the event of query or complaint — ten days are held on disc, up to a year’s worth are held on tape. Disaster Site Arrangements have been made for an altemative teletext system to be available should the main headquarters have to be evacuated. Additional editing and trans- mission systems are running at the disas- ter recovery site, and all page updates on the main editing system at Farm lane are passed to the backup system to ensure that an up to date database is always available. Transmission Distribution When a transmission page is added, deleted or modified on the editing system the change is passed over the ethemet to the active Transmission Distribution system, In order to reduce the amount of data which has to be distibuted a process known as filtering is applied to the page inthe TD machine. The new version of the page is compared to the previous version on a row by row basis and only those rows which have changed are sent ‘out. When, for example, a news story is updated only the modified rows of text have to be sent — the header graphic, trail lines and advert rows would not have changed so they are filtered out. ‘The active TD system maintains links with the 25 transmission sites over the BT packet switched network, GNS. When a page has been changed the filtered data is sent to the appropriate region if t is a regional page or to all 25 ifit is national. ‘The interface to the GNS network is via a pair of DEC Microservers (DEMSAs) which connect to the TD systems over ethemet. There are four Kilostream 48 lines running out of the building which are routed to two different packet switch exchanges. The whole process of updat- ing a page, from committing an edit on a terminal to the change being seen by the Viewers, normally takes less than five seconds. cn — mus See “DpeUIDYDS WaISKS [BAUD - “PIT IX9}9L, TRANSMISSION SYSTEMS (refer to Transmission System diagram) Access to the BT GNS network at the transmitter sites is via an analogue leased line, running at 9600baud, with automatic ial backup to the packet switch ex- change. ABT Packet Assembler- Disassembler (PAD) decodes the X25 signal to give two separate RS232 serial data links to each VAX. One is used for page update information and the other to allow console access to the VAXes from Farm Lane. Only one of the VAXes ‘maintains a link to the transmission distri- bution system, the active VAX passing updates to its partner as they arrive. ‘The transmission VAXes thus store the current pages for their region. At this stage the magazines contain the mix of regional and national pages seen by the viewers; there are ten magazines, referred to simply as 1 to 9 and A. ‘The VAXes nun a process which looks through the magazines and reads those pages marked (included) for transmission into memory. The pages are prepared for transmission (given headers, sequence numbers etc) and sent down the SCSI link to the inserter. The inserter converts the data to teletext format and encodes it onto a video signal. At this stage there are fifteen lines of teletext data in the ‘VBI, carrying the services for both ITV and C4, These will be separated later. ‘The output signals from the two inserters are fed into video distribution amplifiers and split five ways. One of the outputs from each if fed into a device called a ‘watchdog which monitors test packets in the teletext data and.uses the presence of these to determine whether the inserters are producing a valid signal. Normally both feeds should be good in which case the A side will be selected. If this fails and the B side is available the video switch will flip over, The four outputs from the switch are fed into four data bridges, two for each network. These bridges read the teletext data from the inserter, select the data lines for the appropriate network and place these on the correct lines of the vision signal incoming from the television broad- caster. The incoming vision already has the ancillary teletext service and subtitling data encoded onto it. The signal is now complete and ready to go into the trans- miter modulators for transmission to the viewers. resto SEH enn wosmmmce pg eM YOR 2Ur1 91+ 2084 aapuqeea BopuareAs aapuaeea| “~ “t v ¥ xp peuweyg, va g pouwey SYSTEM MONITORING PAGE Central System Monitoring User Activity The histogram in the top left-hand comer of the page gives an indication of the amount of recent activity by a number of selected users of our central Editing system, Page updates per minute are shown for up to seven system users. Each user is represented by a pair of bars. ‘The lefi-hand bar shows the number of page updates performed over the last minute. A peak value indicator may also be shown. This shows the maximum number of commands per minute that the user has produced over the last 60 min- utes, The right-hand bar shows the average number of updates per minute over the last 60 minutes. Central System Status ‘The upper blue box contains information about the central computer system at Fulham. ‘The following information is shown for the master and standby systems: Page 379 on ITV monitors the health of the whole Teletext system, Users the number of terminals logged-on to each editing system EDQ the number of updates queued on each editing system, These will be passed to the distribution system. EDDK editing syst space in K blocks database disk - free half MB) ESDK editing system system disk - free space in K blocks (ie. half MB) ‘TDDK distribution system disk - free space in K blocks (i.e. half MB) PRDK protocol server disk - free space in K blocks (i.e. half MB) The lower blue box carries a time-stamp. This is revised hourly and confirms that page updates scheduled in advance are being processed normally, Transmitter Sites Monitoring ‘The top right-hand side of the page shows information related to the operation of cach of Teletext’s transmitter-site sys- tems. Each site is indicated by a three- letter name, For each system, some or all of the following conditions may be indi- cated: Queue Size Updates yet to be passed to the site. Ifthe queue size exceeds 99, then the number will be in yellow. Ifit exceeds 199, it will appear in red. Ifthe value reaches 450 then the entry will flash. Disk Space If this is low (ie. less than 2MB free) on either of the site system discs, then the site name appears in magenta. If either system’s free disk space is exhausted, then the site name etc. will flash. Comms Check If time information has not been received at Fulham from a site during the last 5 minutes, then the site name will be in red and flash. ‘Transmission Check Ared ‘A’ or ‘B’ after the site name normally indicates that one of the two systems is not able to provide a teletext transmission. If both systems are af- fected, a red asterisk is shown and the entry will flash. Peak Queue ‘The highest queue to a site since midday. This figure is shown at the end of the site list under ‘CHA’. It appears as * Q’ in cyan. Response Time ‘The time in seconds taken to display a page on a terminal on the central editing system is shown to the left of the peak quene. (This page is intentionally blank) 10 TELETEXT TRANSMISSION ‘The PAL television signal broadcast in the ‘UK uses 625 lines to build up one still picture or frame. Frames are broadcast at a rate of 25 a second to give the effect of smooth motion. To eliminate flicker even further, each frame is broadcast in two parts or fields. Most of these lines carry picture informa- tion, but some are included to allow receivers time to generate the complete picture from the two interlaced fields - they form a short gap between fields. The period reserved in each field by these lines is known as the field blanking interval or Vertical Blanking Interval (VBI). Some of these spare lines are used to carry teletext information. ‘When viewed on a television set, a fall teletext page consists of 24 rows of 40 characters, Each row of a transmitted page occupies exactly one line of the VBI. ‘Transmitted teletext pages are grouped into sets. A set may contain only one page ~ a news page, for example - or it may contain several cycling pages, as in the case of the TV listings pages. Sets are grouped into magazines. The first digit of the page number a viewer keys in on his or her handset is taken from its ‘magazine; the second and third digits identify the set. So page 461, for exam- ple, is a page from magazine 4, set 61. ll Each row of each page in a magazine is transmitted in tum. The number of pages and the number of VBI lines available for teletext transmission determine how long isneeded to broadcast each magazine once - this is the magazine’s cycle time. Where there are several pages in a set, the next one in sequence will usually be broadcast each time the set number comes round in the cycle to be re-broad- cast - the viewer can select the page number, but not the page within the set. ‘The time a viewer has to wait for a page to be transmitted is, on average, half the cycle time. This is the page’s access time. The access time for a page can be im- proved by building memory into the TV set, so that it can capture more than one page at a time and display them on de- mand, Some expensive TV sets store as many as 500 pages, so that there is a good chance than any page requested by the viewer will be available instantly for display. A cheaper form of storage is known as. Fastext, TV sets with Fastext have ‘enough memory to store three or four pages in addition to the one displayed on screen. Each page broadcast includes instructions about the other pages to be captured and the viewer calls them up with the help of'a group of coloured keys on the handset. Red, green, yellow and blue prompts at the bottom of the screen indicate which other pages have been stored. Many Fastext receivers do not have enough memory to store the page associated with the blue prompt. THE USE OF LINES IN THE VBI ‘The vertical blanking interval (VBI) is used for a variety of purposes, teletext broadcasting, subtitling, data broadcasting and test signals. The line allocations on ITV and Channel Four are shown in the attached diagram and described below. Commercial Licences Three lines per field are allocated to commercial licences, intended to be used for closed user group data broadcasting. The data is formatted in teletext packets but need not be intended for reception on standard receivers. Licence A, on ITV was awarded to Data Broadcasting Inter- national; licence B, on C4, was not awarded, Public Service Teletext Lines 10 - 17 on field 1 and 323 - 329 on field 2 on both ITV and C4 are allocated to public teletext, the service operated by Teletext Ltd. There are a total of 15 fines per picture period, often referred to as ‘Taper field. Programme Related Teletext and Subtitling Line 18, 330 & 331 are allocated to the regional ITV contractors and Channel Four/S4C as part of their television li- cences. The use of these lines is restricted to a teletext service related to television programmes or adverts. ‘These lines are also used for the transmission of the Television Service Data Packet (TSDP) and TV listings and control codes for Programme Delivery Control (PDC). 12 ‘One line per picture, line 335, is used to carry teletext subtitles from the television broadcasters. Television Test Signals Lines 19, 20, 332 & 333 on both net- works carry television test signals, used by engineers to monitor the quality of the television distribution and broadcasting system. Line 22 is known as a quiet line, this line is kept blank and is used for measurements of electronic noise levels. Other Lines Lines 21 and 334 are allocated to the TV broadcasters, on Channel Four they are used to carry schedule information for internal use. At present they are unused on ITV. Lines 6, 318 and 319 are not used at present, itis likely that signals on these lines would interfere with some television receivers. Line 23 is the first line of the television picture. am oem RL oo a | Fa se kal a [ oo Oe eee Td oan earner Qty) Sey ao mee [OES (Greer nonmeroerew TE (Gamer imeem [oe (Gamer morenremnea [OT eo [ a ee Tiere BEI Fie sarees Toil) aT ET] oo Timea wonrimemiwmnrned [LTE oer Bi Gee einer be Treo [pil

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