The Eurovision Song Contest 2004

Nerdy Stuff

I watched this year's Eurovision on an ancient 14" colour television (that always shows to much 'red' and not enough contrast).
Reception was the old analogue method, from Astra 19.2°E. I tuned into NDR for the semi final and ARD1 for the final. The tunings are:

ARD1  11.490 H; audio 7.02 / 7.20 Panda stereo

NDR   11.594 H; audio 7.02 / 7.20 Panda stereo

This was received using a generic dual-band LNB hooked to an 80cm offset dish, the conversion into a video signal was performed by my old Pace MSS-200 receiver. As you can see, we're talking of cutting edge kit here!

The songs themselves were recorded onto VHS tape in long play mode. Nothing else was recorded due to a lack of available tape...

All of the images that you see were grabbed live as the event took place.
The hardware used was an HCCS Vision digitiser plugged into an Acorn RiscPC (40MHz ARM710 CPU). The digitiser is little more than a frame store, the computer must do all of the processing necessary to build up a video picture. It is for this reason that some of the images are only in monochrome - they process much more quickly than the colour images.

The images were originally in RISC OS sprite format (quite similar to BMP in general style, also uncompressed). They were created to JPEG using Sophie Wilson's !ChangeFSI which practically every RISC OS user has!

The HTML was written in !Edit (a plain editor, rather like NotePad only less fussy) and tested on Fresco 2.26/3.20.
The HTML is designed to be compliant to HTML 3.2 which I feel is the most widely understood version of HTML (across a variety of platforms - there is life beyond the realms of MSIE!)...

If you have any questions, comments, or queries - please contact me. You can reach me by email at:

heyrick -at- merseymail -dot- com

Thank you for reading.

Update!

(June 2004)

Several pictures have been added with thanks to a friend in Scotland. These pictures either have no DOG (hence BBC 1) or they say "BBC THREE". The sizing and colour balance is different because his pictures were grabbed with a TV tuner on a PC.
The images came from a Grundig Digibox (80cm dish) and were recorded onto an AIWA 6-Head VCR. Upon playback, the required images were captured via a Galaxy MM200 PCI TV card using the Microsoft vidcap32 software. The computer is an AMD Athlon XP (1533MHz) with half a gig of RAM and a 40Gb harddisc. Windows ME.

My friend used Irfanview to convert the BMPs to JPEG at 100% quality. The only post-processing that I performed was to shrink the size of Sertab's stuck shoe (we don't need a big picture of that, really!) and also to pass all of the JPEGs through ChangeFSI to cut the filesize to a third, recompressing to 80% gives no noticable drop in quality but a big drop in filesize.

Again, many thanks to my friend for supplying the pictures that I missed...

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