Teletext Content on Othernet

AvroVulcanXH607 · 2024-05-02T14:05:26.437Z

Hi folks, I run NMS Ceefax (NMS Ceefax) which is a recreation of the BBC’s teletext service. It carries up-to-date news and weather data. I reckon the entire service of a couple hundred pages could take up less than a megabyte of storage - is this the kind of thing that could potentially be carried on Othernet?

Thanks

Syed · 2024-05-05T00:16:11.017Z

@AvroVulcanXH607 Yes, it could be.

Syed · 2024-05-05T15:03:02.244Z

@AvroVulcanXH607 Where does the Ceefax content come from?

AvroVulcanXH607 · 2024-05-05T16:16:50.705Z

It comes from various APIs - so the news all comes from BBC RSS Feeds, weather comes from the Met Office. It’s all referenced on the page

K3FTW · 2024-05-06T19:55:04.499Z

As a former Brit, I vote yes.

Mark_Phillips · 2024-05-15T17:36:33.873Z

A former Brit? Sir, you should should be whipped upon the steps of your Club!

One of the things I missed when I moved to the US was Teletext. 7mbps data signal buried in the vertical blanking interval of a PAL TV signal. Halcyon dayz!!

Can we do FastText too? Those of you who have a TV remote with red, blue, green and yellow buttons on it can thank Teletext for that. They were used to jump to pages stored in the RAM of the TV. FastText was an upgrade to Teletext that simply added 32K of RAM to the decoder thus allowing it to store “pages”.

I think this would be a great experiment and it shouldn’t be too hard to display that in Mode 7 somewhere (see what I did there?).

Mark G7LTT/NI2O

AvroVulcanXH607 · 2024-05-18T10:13:24.473Z

There are lots of possibilities once the data is up there - I’m just not sure how I go about doing that, hence asking here.

At the moment I distribute the service via the web, and folks can browse either using the interactive web viewer - or download it to a Raspberry Pi and ‘transmit’ it to a compatible TV, where they can use the remote etc exactly as it was back in the day

My thought was that it’d be awesome to remove the internet from the equation, so Ceefax could be accessed even where a connection is very slow or unavailable - as it was in it’s heyday.

Anyway… hopefully we can make this happen…

Syed · 2024-05-18T19:16:33.641Z

How much new data is available per day?

AvroVulcanXH607 · 2024-05-18T22:17:13.646Z

The entire service takes up about 600KB - I automatically update it every hour, but that’s only a couple of pages each time usually, so I suppose it depends how intelligent we can make updates?

Syed · 2024-05-20T23:31:44.477Z

How much new content (in kB) is available each hour?

The broadcast download speed is ~2 kbps. The maximum allowable file size is 20 kB. Is that something you can work with?

AvroVulcanXH607 · 2024-07-11T16:58:30.382Z

I could make something work with that.

I’ve purchased a Dreamcatcher to experiment with - could I send you a test file for transmission?

Syed · 2024-07-11T17:25:10.446Z

Sure.