Does that mean the loss of all those highly entertaining quizzes where you press 'reveal' to get the answers? And what about the fun of trying to decipher the TV listings when there's lots of letters missing? A sad day indeed.

Yeah, there's a whole channel dedicated to Digital Teletext, I believe. And a website http://www.digital-teletext.co.uk with a flash demo of what it looks like.
Digitiser wouldn't be the same without badly drawn cartoon animals when you press 'reveal'. The demise of civilisation starts here.

The digital version of Teletext still crashes my OnDigital box despite the relaunch and the recent software update. The BBC digital text seems much more reliable, if perhaps not quite as showy.

(The BBC news stories on digital text are exactly the same as the ones on analogue text, except that sometimes you get a photograph related to the story to look at).

We can fight this!
Do not go gentle into that goodnight!
Rise up with me!
The reveal-ution will not be teletext-ised........

Don't you think that there should be a program(tell me if there is) or something on their respective homepages that lets you view teletext, it would be better that having to search news archives, it would be handy to get information easily and in a familiar style. I have PCTV with teletext but my signal is so poor on the computer it goes way past fun trying to decipher it.

Does anyone know if the response time is faster on DigiText than Teletext?
If not, you'll have the same embarrassing problem you get on DVDs, where something LOOKS so flash you think it'll respond as fast as a PC, but, because it has to access individual hunks of data, it loads each option up so slowly you just end up frustrated.
I liked the monged, spliffed out feeling that teletext's sluggish response time engendered: "Ah, I've pressed the next page, time for some tea while it loads up..."

And of course with the old fashioned 'real-ale' Teletext, there's the conspiricy theory that pressing HOLD twice makes the next page appear sooner. I've heard more than one person actually believe this.

>The digital version of Teletext still crashes my OnDigital box despite the relaunch and the recent software update. The BBC digital text seems much more reliable, if perhaps not quite as showy.

Digitial Teletext is just so slow. It's painful to use. Every time I try to look for something, it takes so long, I give up.

BBC Text is very reliable. It doesn't yet have all the info that Ceefax does though :(

>>The digital version of Teletext still crashes my OnDigital box despite the relaunch and the recent software update. The BBC digital text seems much more reliable, if perhaps not quite as showy.
>
>Digitial Teletext is just so slow. It's painful to use. Every time I try to look for something, it takes so long, I give up.
>
>BBC Text is very reliable. It doesn't yet have all the info that Ceefax does though :(

It's the same problem normal teletext has - a lack of memory to store pages, it has to load a new one almost every time.

But why is that? 1 teletext page = 1kb, max 1000 pages = 1Mb. Since a meg of memory is very cheap these days, what's stopping TV manufacturers whacking a page cache in there?

>But why is that? 1 teletext page = 1kb, max 1000 pages = 1Mb. Since a meg of memory is very cheap these days, what's stopping TV manufacturers whacking a page cache in there?

I would have thought that integrated sets, ie with didital built in, would have. But I really don't know. Logically, it would seem top be a nice feature.

>But why is that? 1 teletext page = 1kb, max 1000 pages = 1Mb. Since a meg of memory is very cheap these days, what's stopping TV manufacturers whacking a page cache in there?

Some do. Often you'll find the next page to the one you are currently on plus those linked from the fastext keys are stored.

My Ferguson set from the mid 90's seems to look ahead through the fastext links - so you can look at page 102 on BBC (news index) then keep pressing red to flick through each of the news stories (each is linked to the next with RED) very quickly, only bothering to stop at the ones that interest you, without having to wait for each to be rebroadcast.

Very impressive and makes BBC Digital text look very poor in speed comparison. The digital boxes really ought to do some caching.

The picture in a small box thing is quite nice though, gives you something to look at whilst you're waiting for the digital text page you requested! And the FilmFour digital text is very detailed and informative, though suffers slowness like all the others.

Nicholas Negroponte in "Being Digital" has a right old go at the humble telly. He calls it "the dumbest machine in your home", claiming that a toaster has more apposite dedicated decision-making circuitry. He proposes that the TV and PC will merge soon to perform an integrated function - with memory caches etc.
However, it seems that progress is getting very confused. Rather than bringing the processing power of the PC into the living room so you can watch telly on your computer, the manufacturers seem to be making televisions ape PCs, and inadequately so - look at TiVO, digital teletext, TV internet surfing etc. Are we so attached to our tellies that we can't pass the duties over to a PC?

Yes, but there would be rioting in the streets when the cliff-hanger ending to Thursday's EastEnders gets interrupted by a 'General Exception Fault in MSGSRV32.DLL'.

>Very impressive and makes BBC Digital text look very poor in speed comparison. The digital boxes really ought to do some caching.

They do - apparently if you go to the news section, unplug the aerial you can stil go through the news stories at the same speed! Or so someone said!
>
>The picture in a small box thing is quite nice though, gives you something to look at whilst you're waiting for the digital text page you requested! And the FilmFour digital text is very detailed and informative, though suffers slowness like all the others.
BBC Knowledge Text is very fast and I thought FourText was fairly fast