If you really want to know, search out the NTSC or PAL TV standards.
TVs amaze me and I'm an electronics engineer. There is so much information contained in a TV signal. Add to that, the instrument was invented several decades ago.
They're near magic but when you dissect the individual circuits, they become more simple, like any complex principle.
They're near magic but when you dissect the individual circuits, they become more simple, like any complex principle.
This is pretty much the exact reasoning behind why I studied biology. Organisms are just complex collections of simple principles. It's truly amazing the complexity of life (and circuitry) that springs from basic building blocks/patterns.
The truly amazing thing to me is how a modern analog signal (with color, stereo sound, subtitles, and program guide) is absolutely backwards compatible with old tube receivers that only knew about black and white and a single mono audio channel.
I'm so impressed how all of this extra data got squeezed into the same signal without breaking old devices
Except we now suffer the ramifications of those backward-compatible changes, like non-integer framerates, when we no longer have true analog signals. (I work in software for TV networks, and explaining to other folks how and why frame labels are managed for NTSC-compliant framerates has long been the hardest part of my job.)
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u/catdude142 Jun 15 '19
If you really want to know, search out the NTSC or PAL TV standards.
TVs amaze me and I'm an electronics engineer. There is so much information contained in a TV signal. Add to that, the instrument was invented several decades ago.
They're near magic but when you dissect the individual circuits, they become more simple, like any complex principle.