Prevue Guide Forums

I think the "1986 Warner Cable Channel Lineup" video is not of an EPG Jr.

It looks more like one of the earlier EPG units that was based on Texscan hardware to me.

If you look carefully at the shape of the letters, they don't look like the EPG Jr.'s letters, and the color bars above/below messages don't look like the ones in Amiga EPG Sr. video captures, or on EPG Jr. either.

WOW looks like you have a good spot there. Looking again, I see in particular, the shape of the "A" and that the top title bar are the same blue as the listings, in Atari EPG they are lighter. Furthermore the blocks either side of the time in the listing are striped like the EPG Sr, and unlike the Atari, although that's quite hard to see. Also the bars extend further than the Atari, which I did have a little tiny doubt about before.

Up to now I assumed the jerky problems were with the encoding of the (presumably) video tape onto youtube, but could it be that the hardware had problems and wasn't reliable enough? Makes me wonder why they bothered with the Jr or Sr seeing as it does the same thing? Or maybe it was a cost consideration?

tin wrote:WOW looks like you have a good spot there. Looking again, I see in particular, the shape of the "A" and that the top title bar are the same blue as the listings, in Atari EPG they are lighter. Furthermore the blocks either side of the time in the listing are striped like the EPG Sr, and unlike the Atari, although that's quite hard to see. Also the bars extend further than the Atari, which I did have a little tiny doubt about before.

Up to now I assumed the jerky problems were with the encoding of the (presumably) video tape onto youtube, but could it be that the hardware had problems and wasn't reliable enough? Makes me wonder why they bothered with the Jr or Sr seeing as it does the same thing? Or maybe it was a cost consideration?

The jerkiness is due to the encoding of the video, according to the video's poster, "willdav713":

All of these are recorded on a Pentium III 866mhz PC with 20 gb ram and 512mb sdram...

rudyvalencia wrote:I think the "1986 Warner Cable Channel Lineup" video is not of an EPG Jr.

It looks more like one of the earlier EPG units that was based on Texscan hardware to me.

If you look carefully at the shape of the letters, they don't look like the EPG Jr.'s letters, and the color bars above/below messages don't look like the ones in Amiga EPG Sr. video captures, or on EPG Jr. either.

It is true that it doesn't look all too much like our EPG Jr. software, but it is possible that it is just an earlier/later/different version. Apparently the Texscan EPG was quite different from the Atari- and Amiga-based EPGs, and I'm not sure it would look quite this similar.

Really, I'm not sure we can find out, but I'm not convinced.

I wonder, looking at it, if it was a very early attempt on some other hardware, probably texscan. Not saying definitely texscan, but it does look somewhat similar to the texscan stuff around on youtube. I did not even stop to think that it was texscan because it does look very different to almost everything else I have seen done with texscan hardware - usually these have a coloured background and so a very definite (garish) look.

What DOES make me think it might be texscan is:
- the scroll at the bottom, letters pop up and off at the ends of the scrolls, even though in the middle they scroll smoothly. It's a bit hard to see in the Warner video, but there's never a bit of a char at either end of the scroll - always a full char.
- the way that the coloured area and lines are coloured from edge to edge of screen (massive overscan). The atari version had a little bit of overscan that can be seen in the lines, and the Amiga none.
- The "2" "A" and "P" also single out one of the texscan's charsets.

Also though to make me think it might not be:
- I have NEVER seen e texscan do lower case letters

Although, as usual, massive conjecture. I'm interested in this possibility now

Another vid off a texscan. Possibly the same one?

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xcb45f ... shortfilms

This gives it away more, look at the scroll across the bottom and how it obviously uses the same char to turn flashing on and off, so different bits flash as it scrolls This scroll behaviour can be seen in this example where a texscan scroll has been overlaid onto a standard prevue guide http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iWZVDG86N4)

tin wrote:Another vid off a texscan. Possibly the same one? This gives it away more, look at the scroll across the bottom and how it obviously uses the same char to turn flashing on and off, so different bits flash as it scrolls (as can be seen in for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iWZVDG86N4)

I was referring to the actual 'guide' part running off Texscan hardware, not the crawl. The guide appears to be regular Prevue List; they're just overlaying a crawl.

Yeah sorry that's what I meant. The dailymotion video shows the EPG I am sure running off a texscan. The youtube video shows a Prevue guide with overlaid scroll - I posted it as an example of how you can identify the scroll is off a texscan but probably not clear enough

Actually, I'll edit the post to make it clearer.....

All I can add to this is that the basic design of EPG's grid was patented. Ari found some stuff on this earlier, if I recall. So if this was truly done with Texscan hardware, then it must have been through a deal. Because if it were just a knock-off, they would've been sued into the ground.

About the jerky video, that effect is definitely an encoding issue. I've managed to cause the exact same effect with mencoder while transcoding stuff... though of course now I'm drawing a blank on exactly what I did to make it happen.

swest77 wrote:All I can add to this is that the basic design of EPG's grid was patented. Ari found some stuff on this earlier, if I recall. So if this was truly done with Texscan hardware, then it must have been through a deal. Because if it were just a knock-off, they would've been sued into the ground.

About the jerky video, that effect is definitely an encoding issue. I've managed to cause the exact same effect with mencoder while transcoding stuff... though of course now I'm drawing a blank on exactly what I did to make it happen.

Actually, I have not found any patents relating to the EPG design. I am pretty sure that it is not patented at all, except for some aspects of the top half of the Prevue Channel (the "video promotion system"). The Texscan hardware was programmable, so essentially they bought Texscans and reprogrammed them. One interesting thing I found out recently was that early early versions of the channel, without scrolling capability, ran on the Apple II and had listings delivered to them via modem. UVSG apparently bought the Apple II software and transitioned everything to a satellite and Texscan-based system, until 1985 when they transitioned to an Amiga and an Atari system. Additionally, a few years later, perhaps in the early 90s, they transitioned the Prevue Channel data feed to a 9600 baud stream, while maintaining the Atari stream (on the same transponder as WGN) at 2400.