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Comment by jbb555 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting article but somewhat misleading

Please explain why it is misleading.

What would you think of an article titled "Steam locomotives are coming back from the deads" when someone restore an old locomotive in his garage?

Slightly OT, but a group in the UK actually recently built a steam locomotive and operate it fairly regularly[0], so steam is kinda back from the dead…

[0]https://www.a1steam.com

Teletext was never dead... it never stopped working. The digital switch didn't leave a gap in which teletext where no more.

Did it not die when the analog signal was switched off?

Not in some parts of Europe at least. It was just carried over to the digital signal. I honestly don't know how, but there must be room for it in the DVB-T/C/S signals.

In DVB (and IPTV systems that use MPEG TS) Teletext is sent in its own pid, along with the audio and video pids of the program being watched ( for the details you can check ETSI 300 472).

vlc btw contains a decoder for teletext pages, you can tune in to a dvb stream and look at them.

Trivia: in some countries (for instance in Switzerland) subtitles for movies are sent sometimes as semitransparent teletext pages (in CH it is on page 777) even if DVB supports natively subtitles.

One might naturally assume from the article title that at some point I'm going to be able to hit the teletext button on my tv and see ... teletext.

But what this is, is someone who has found a way to broadcast their own text service to their own tv. Kind of interesting of course, but not really the service coming back from the dead.

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