Friday 23 March 2012

Interesting ORACLE pages

Here's some interesting pages from the ORACLE recovery currently running:

I think the 777 is correct here as this will have been through hamming, but the rest of the header has probably been falsely matched by the YTV finder. The purple blocks are probably wrong too and it shouldn't be in purple graphics mode! I wonder what this was for?

This page is linked to from the ORACLE user guide. Note the hexadecimal page number so that non-Fastext users can't get to it.  Note also the difficulty the convolution process has with the letter 'p'.


The IBA has gone, now replaced by the non-descript sounding "National Transcommunications" - or NTL, now Arqiva.  The engineering pages always seemed less informative post-IBA.

This is a status page of some sort, probably for teletext but could be for transmitters.  The red Fasttext link goes off to page 5FA; the other three go to page 8FF.  I don't know what's on either page yet.





4 comments:

  1. 777 is a test page fo some sort for DBI (Data Broadcasting International), who lost/handed back their licence at the end of last year. For the last few months they were broadcasting Teletext Holidays after Teletext Ltd had their licence revoked.

    There were occasional odd pages in the other 700s, but other than Teletext Holidays, DBI didn't directly broadcast any public teletext data AFAIK.

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  2. @Chris: That's interesting, thanks. I did wonder why Teletext Ltd was allowed to continue broadcasting after the licence was revoked. So I assume that DBI ran Teletext Holidays before the revokation?

    Did they also do the racing pages? I seem to remember that these also continued post-revokation, and still continue on CH4 DSAT.

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    Replies
    1. DBI broadcast Teletext Holidays, or maybe DBI subleased some capacity to Teletext. In either case the result was the same, and DBI were only allowed to use the 700s hence why Holidays moved from magazine 2 to magazine 7. Section 5.1 relating to ITV/C4 in this document is 'new': http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/broadcast/guidance/tech-guidance/itu_r_teletext.pdf

      Teletext ran Teletext on 4 (C4's ancillary service) so the racing capacity would have come from that (the racing service is still present on C4 Freeview too). I've just checked and apparently the 700s on C4 were being used for NHS Choices and DirectGov until they were closed down (can't remember if they were always there or moved there after licence revocation though), so that would have been using SimpleActive (the CAS provider on C4) capacity.

      Teletext didn't seem bothered about vacating page numbers they were no longer entitled to use though.

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  3. On the subject of DBI, just found this :)
    http://teletext76.no-ip.org/ytv-19900915/188.html

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