Marc,

On the list of HD Off-air Channels on CBC Television - The HDTV Picture (http://www.cbc.ca/hdtv/), CBOT-DT is still listed as "coming fall 2006." Are you still doing testing or is it now officially on air?

CBOT-DT is officially on air.

Was just looking at a bit of Above and Beyond. Something is wrong with the HD picture. Looks very stuttery. Stepping through frame by frame, every 4th frame is a repeat of the 3rd frame. But looking at the version on the SD channel, it looks fine, and there are no frames being repeated.

I saw the effect too. It only happened on the Toronto station. I haven't been able to reproduce the problem on the offline system. The main will be reset today.

Marc, there has been discussion in the "CBC HD Hockey - Split from Official CBC Thread (http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=50066)" thread about Saturday's hockey.

This weeks HD schedule (http://www.cbc.ca/hdtv/schedule/CBC_HD_nextweek1.pdf), the first Saturday game will be Toronto/Buffalo in widescreen - except in Ottawa where it will be Ottawa/Carolina in HD. Some people are wondering about the logic of this, and others think it may be a typo. Can you confirm the schedule?

There has been discussion in other threads about Saturday's hockey and Sunday's CFL playoffs both being in HD.

Does anyone know if CBC's second HD truck is now ready, allowing them to do 2 HD productions on the same weekend? Or are they using rented facilities?

Does anyone know if CBC's second HD truck is now ready, allowing them to do 2 HD productions on the same weekend?

On October 5, Marc said:

No word the second HD truck.

From what I gather, neither game this Sunday will be in HD.

From what I gather, neither game this Sunday will be in HD.

We're told the Sask at Calgary CFL semi-final is HD Sunday. The previous night is reportedly HD Leafs at Sabres. So 2 Mobile units in use.

When the second truck is ready, I will post something here. It's a safe bet it won't be ready for this football season.

Marc, is there a reason why letterboxed commercials aired on the CBC are not adjusted to fit the 16x9 screen on your CBC HD feed? I've noticed movie ads, DoD ads, Westjet ads, all are letterboxed, and being a 16x9 feed, it's a total black frame around it, rather than being full screen or close to it.

Thats the format the advertiser provides it in, if the advertiser provided HD commercials they would be broadcast.

On my PVR, the beginning of Friday's Air Farce was badly pixelated with lots of stuttering and also a little with Mercer Report. Was it CBC, Rogers, or my nearly full 320G ext. hard drive?

My Rogers PVR didn't record it, probably because the disk is full.
On ExpressVu, both shows are clean.

How come they are ALWAYS "fool" screen??? (4:3).

On CBC HD right now, is 72 hours mystery(?) on which I am receiving a digital stereo broadcast with only incidental music. My tv guide says two episodes of rumours are in this spot, by the way. Is this a problem with CBC, my cable provider, or my box? I tried my audio setup, but nothing made any difference.

72 hours is probably a DD5.1 programme which has been improperly encoded/aired as DD2.0 "stripping" the dialogue (center channel) out. I noticed this myself when surfing past.

It's very sad when this happens and it's happened several times on CBC. Marc, there should be some way to avoid this mistake, especially after it's been made a few times.

Also, the entire programme aired this way, so, no one is watching CBC's 72 hours in HD I guess, including CBC technicians? Or is it simply "too late" once the programme is encoded improperly and airing?

It was a DD coding problem. It's an ongoing problem related to the fact that DD switching is a manual operation in an area that relies heavily on automation to keep programming running on 22 channels. Some programming changes introduced a few days ago have added to this load. Having said that, the failure rate is not acceptable. Steps were taken over the weekend to improve sports coverage. Further changes are being considered this week.

Thanks again for your feedback Marc. We can't expect perfection, but we can hope for improvement. Thanks for reminding us that there are more than 1-2 channels.

The 1AM airing of Three Colours - White is in WS, but not shown as such on the Schedule.

Last night "Blue" was not shown WS, so the schedule was correct there.

Not sure about the airing of "Red" coming up at 1AM tonight...

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001425/

Edit - Red was not WS. Strange that one of the 3 movies was WS.

CBC HD on BEV is showing October 1970 in widescreen, but they're playing it with the decribed video audio track.