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WTNH's audio sync problem

It has been a few months Channal 8's audio is out of sync a couple miliseconds or two.Is this problem at channel 8 or at comcast headend.the other locals look and sound insync..any of you in the area notice this problem and contact the station to see what they have to say.Watching the channel is like watching a 1940's japanese dubbed film.
 
I just switched to the analog picture and I'm not seeing it. Checking WGGB DT1 now to see if it's possibly on the ABC feed, also not seeing it, interesting WTNH analog vs WGGB DT1 is about 1 second difference.

I don't have my antenna system set up to get WTNH DT at the moment as I already get it via Dish and ABC via WGGB DT1 (along with online sources I won't detail right now), but checking the Dish feed and the video signal is about 7 seconds behind the OTA (as would be expected with what that signal has gone through before getting here), and I see some very slight sync problem. Switching back and forth between the dish and OTA to see certain things twice to compare, and there is a difference. It could be your TV provider or maybe the sync issue stems from the WTNH-DT signal that all cable and sat systems should have already been down-converting for analog viewers.
 
WPPCProductions said:
It has been a few months Channal 8's audio is out of sync a couple miliseconds or two.Is this problem at channel 8 or at comcast headend.the other locals look and sound insync..any of you in the area notice this problem and contact the station to see what they have to say.Watching the channel is like watching a 1940's japanese dubbed film.

I noticed the same thing last week during their CT Style show. Their mouths do not match the words coming out. Also, that broadcast looks almost like it's being streamed over the internet. Something is totally off, and all I can compare it to is when they're out on the road in their Mobile Weather lab broadcasting via Skype. I also have Comcast by the way.
 
I noticed this on DirecTV as well. I haven't connected an antenna to confirm whether it's also with the direct off-air signal or not but it makes it very unpleasant to watch. It seems much more than a handful of milliseconds. Totally annoying.
 
Today at work at lunch time. I fired up the ole Zenith in the cafe. at 12:30 to watch a few minutes of CT Style and check to see if OTA was out of sync, and it was OTA analog,DTV I have to check with my new Magnavox boxes I got at Wal-Mart last week.So it's not comcast as I thought it was in the convertion chain the signal goes through.another thing this this reminds me about is the ordeal I had a couple of years ago when I had to do a job of converting my holiday special from videotape to digital
avi and edit through Adobe Premiere and output it to Mpeg2.The end results were, as I viewed my opening standup the mpeg2 copy was out of sync like you see with Channel 8,will I ironed that out with pain and less hair to have.
 
WPPCProductions said:
It has been a few months Channal 8's audio is out of sync a couple miliseconds or two.Is this problem at channel 8 or at comcast headend.the other locals look and sound insync..any of you in the area notice this problem and contact the station to see what they have to say.Watching the channel is like watching a 1940's japanese dubbed film.

This is actually a known problem with DTV right now. It can happen. Also, alot of cable companies convert the signal from 8VSB to 256QAM and to GigE, ASI, etc etc... and it can get munged anywhere in the chain.

Remember, DTV is only a few years old... we are seeing alot of the same, or very similar problems and trials your grandparents went through in the 40s. Give it a few years to get the bugs worked out.
 
Ron said:
Remember, DTV is only a few years old... we are seeing alot of the same, or very similar problems and trials your grandparents went through in the 40s. Give it a few years to get the bugs worked out.

A few years???!!! I thought they'd be able to straighten it out in a few weeks. How difficult can it be to sync the audio and video? I even emailed WTNH about this back in February. Here's my email to them and the response I got from Judi Mickmac....

"I've been watching Jeopardy in HD for awhile now and enjoying it except for one problem. The audio and video are not in sync. The audio is trailing the video by about a second. The lips move and then you hear the voice. This has been going on since the HD version of Jeopardy first came on. I thought it would eventiually straighten itself out but
the problems persists.

This isn't just on Jeopardy. I watched the ABC news tonight and saw the same problem. I just took a look at the SD channel for channel 8 and it has the same problem.

I live in Newington and watch on Cox cable. Ch. 7 for SD and Ch. 702 for HD. I occasionally see this problem on other stations, but after channel flicking a bit this evening it seems like only the Channel 8 SD & HD channels are out of sync. Channel 3 and channel 30 and most of the other cable stations I get seem to be ok."

Here's the short and uninformative reply from Judi Mickmac on February 25th (Over a month ago)....

"Yes, we have been experiencing this synchronization issue as of late. We are working on resolving the problem and apologize for the disruption to your programming." That was it.

This has been going on since the beginning of the year and has yet to be fixed. Now that's incompetence!
 
GreatCalloftheNE said:
Ron said:
Remember, DTV is only a few years old... we are seeing alot of the same, or very similar problems and trials your grandparents went through in the 40s. Give it a few years to get the bugs worked out.

A few years???!!! I thought they'd be able to straighten it out in a few weeks. How difficult can it be to sync the audio and video? I even emailed WTNH about this back in February. Here's my email to them and the response I got from Judi Mickmac....

Yes, a few years. There are way too many places where things can get messed up.

Many of them are beyond the control of the station. Cable operators split and reassemble the bitstream. I've seen the lip sync on the incoming network line change not between programs, but during a program. There have been cases where the lip sync will be messed up on some models of receiver but not others.

Add the economic downturn to the mix. Some lip sync problems require the purchase of equipment to repair. Revenues are way down; getting money to buy equipment is not easy these days.

I think the curse we face in the industry is that the presentation of DTV is not sufficiently different from analog for the audience to understand just how big the difference is behind the scenes. At least when we went from radio to TV in the 1940s, the TV receivers and programming were so totally different in appearance from radio that the audience really had nothing to compare it to.
 
My own personal hunch is it has something to do with their centralized Master Control located in Mass. I noticed it especially this morning during Good Morning America - 9 out of 10 times they most always blow the insert for the weather segment. I wouldn't be surprised if it has to do with jockeying the feeds around.

To me, this just adds to making WTNH one of the worst channels serving Fairfield County ... and there ain't a whole lot aimed at the market. Down in this end of the state we are getting short changed while the Hartford market enjoys much more professionalism with their over the air product.
 
GreatCalloftheNE said:
Here's the short and uninformative reply from Judi Mickmac on February 25th (Over a month ago)....

"Yes, we have been experiencing this synchronization issue as of late. We are working on resolving the problem and apologize for the disruption to your programming." That was it.

This has been going on since the beginning of the year and has yet to be fixed. Now that's incompetence!

You are welcome to improve upon MPEG-2 video compression vs AC-3 audio compression... I eagerly await your results. And while you're at it, fix every latency issue in every conversion in the chain from WTNH master control to your TV set. Again, I look forward to your efforts, since you OBVIOUSLY know better than the people who work daily at this.
 
Ron said:
You are welcome to improve upon MPEG-2 video compression vs AC-3 audio compression... I eagerly await your results. And while you're at it, fix every latency issue in every conversion in the chain from WTNH master control to your TV set. Again, I look forward to your efforts, since you OBVIOUSLY know better than the people who work daily at this.

I don't know better than the engineering people who work daily at WTNH, I'm not an engineer. But OBVIOUSLY there are people who work at every other TV station in the area who know better since they aren't having the problem.

The definition of incompetent: not having the necessary ability or skill to do something. OBVIOUSLY they're incomptent at WTNH.
 
I guess they have to iron the bugs out a little longer,as we see.As mentioned earlier,My grand parents day back in the 40s when tv hayday was starting up,and the late 50s early 60s when color tv come to life with all the tweeking that came with it.then in the 1980s when tv MTS stereo was born with more tweeking to do.Now DTV is here,and a lot of more tweeking.This must be embarrassing to WTNH.
 
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