Substack’s new TV app expands the platform beyond newsletters, offering subscribers an easier way to watch video posts and livestreams on Apple TV and Google TV.

The post You can now enjoy Substack on a TV, if that’s your idea of fun times appeared first on Digital Trends.

Lithium batteries have taken over as the primary battery chemistry from applications ranging from consumer electronics to electric vehicles and all kinds of other things in between. But the standard lithium ion battery has a few downsides, namely issues operating at temperature extremes. Lead acid solves some of these problems but has much lower energy density, and if you want to split the difference with your own battery you’ll need to build your own lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) pack.

[Well Done Tips] is building this specific type of battery because the lead acid battery in his electric ATV is on the decline. He’s using cylindrical cells that resemble an 18650 battery but are much larger. Beyond the size, though, many of the design principles from building 18650 battery packs are similar, with the exception that these have screw terminals so that bus bars can be easily attached and don’t require spot welding.

With the pack assembled using 3D printed parts, a battery management system is installed with the balance wires cleverly routed through the prints and attached to the bus bars. The only problem [Well Done Tips] had was not realizing that LiFePO4 batteries’ voltages settle a bit after being fully charged, which meant that he didn’t properly calculate the final voltage of his pack and had to add a cell, bringing his original 15S1P battery up to 16S1P and the correct 54V at full charge.

LiFePO4 has a few other upsides compared to lithium ion as well, including that it delivers almost full power until it’s at about 20% charge. It’s not quite as energy dense but compared to the lead-acid battery he was using is a huge improvement, and is one of the reasons we’ve seen them taking over various other EV conversions as well.

Sling TV remains one of the most popular and affordable streaming services in the U.S., but we have some bad news. In a move that should surprise no one, Sling TV is raising prices on some of its plans. If there's a silver lining, not everyone will get hit with the price hike, at least not yet.

How would Sony ceding control of its TV hardware business change the industry? The Verge has an optimistic take: [...] As of today, Sony already relies on different manufacturing partners to create its TV lineup. While display panel manufacturers never reveal who they sell panels to, Sony is likely already using panels for its LCD TVs from TCL China Star Optoelectronics Technology (CSOT), in addition to OLED panels from LG Display and Samsung Display. With this deal, a relationship between Sony and TCL CSOT LCD panels is guaranteed (although I doubt this would affect CSOT selling panels to other manufacturers). And with TCL CSOT building a new OLED facility, there's a potential future in which Sony OLEDs will also get panels from TCL. Although I should point out that we're not sure yet if the new facility will have the ability to make TV-sized OLED panels, at least to start. [...] There's some concern from fans that this could lead to a Sharp, Toshiba, or Pioneer situation where the names are licensed and the TVs produced are a shell of what the brands used to represent. I don't see this happening with Sony. While the electronics side of the business hasn't been as strong as in the past, Sony -- and Bravia -- is still a storied brand. It would take a lot for Sony to completely step aside and allow another company to slap its name on an inferior product. And based on TCL's growth and technological improvements over the past few years, and the shrinking gap between premium and midrange TVs, I don't expect Sony TVs will suffer from a partnership with TCL.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sennheiser's RS 275 bundle pairs lightweight TV-focused headphones with a clever Auracast transmitter to fix weak TV audio, without disturbing others or upgrading your entire setup.

The post Sennheiser’s new headphones can save you from bad TV speakers with a new transmitter appeared first on Digital Trends.

Unidentified hackers disrupted Iranian state television to broadcast messages from exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. Read about the economic crisis, the internet blackout, and the latest reports on the protest death toll.

Soon, YouTube TV will allow viewers to customize the multiview feature to watch any four channels they want side by side.

YouTube TV is kicking off the new year with a couple of features that are long overdue. The first is a much-needed expansion of the excellent “Multiview” feature, and the second marks a return to the original promise of streaming live TV services.

Sony is spinning off its Bravia TV business to TCL through a 51% stake sale, marking a major industry shift as Sony pivots toward entertainment IP and TCL gains a premium global brand.

The post Your next Sony TV may actually be built by TCL appeared first on Digital Trends.

Hijack, Pluribus, and The Morning Show are among the best shows on Apple TV this month.

Most big TVs are basically a black rectangle you tolerate until it’s turned on. The Frame is built for people who don’t want to tolerate it. When you’re not watching, it’s meant to blend into the room with Art Mode, so your living space looks finished instead of “TV-centric.” The Samsung 65-inch LS03FA The Frame […]

The post The TV that doesn’t look like a TV is $600 off right now appeared first on Digital Trends.

Netflix has begun asking filmmakers to adjust their storytelling approach to account for viewers who are scrolling through their phones while watching, according to Matt Damon. The traditional action movie formula involves three major set pieces distributed across the first, second, and third acts. Netflix now wants a large action sequence in the opening five minutes to hook viewers. The streamer has also suggested that filmmakers reiterate plot points "three or four times in the dialogue" to accommodate distracted audiences, he said. "It's going to really start to infringe on how we're telling these stories," Damon said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

YouTube TV's latest promo extends the free trial period to 10 days and slashes the subscription price to $59.99 for the first two months.

The post Wondering if YouTube TV is worth it? This new promo will help you decide without hurting your wallet appeared first on Digital Trends.

Fallout, The Girlfriend, and The Mighty Nein are just a few of the shows you should be watching on Amazon Prime Video this week.

Amazon is expanding the Fallout universe with Fallout Shelter, a ten-episode reality competition show where contestants face survival-style challenges and moral dilemmas for a cash prize. Engadget reports: Prime Video has greenlit a unscripted reality show titled Fallout Shelter. It will be a ten-episode run with Studio Lambert, the team behind reality projects including Squid Game: The Challenge and The Traitors, as its primary producer. Bethesda Game Studios' head honcho Todd Howard is attached as an executive producer. Amazon's description of Fallout Shelter is: "Across a series of escalating challenges, strategic dilemmas and moral crossroads, contestants must prove their ingenuity, teamwork and resilience as they compete for safety, power and ultimately a huge cash prize." [...] The name echos the free-to-play mobile game Bethesda released in 2015. Fallout Shelter lets people build and improve their out Vault-Tec residence, managing the resources for a growing cadre of underground survivors. It seems pretty likely that there will be some type of tie-in between the game and the show, but any details about that might pop up closer to when the program is ready to air. It's currently casting, and no release timeline has been shared.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Thousand Blows, Tell Me Lies, and Paradise are just a few of the shows you should be watching on Hulu this month.

It's looking to be a solid year for kaiju fans. Not only are we getting Godzilla Minus Zero in November—sequel to the critically acclaimed Godzilla Minus One (2023)—but Apple TV just released a teaser for the second season of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, part of Legendary Entertainment’s MonsterVerse, which brought Godzilla, King Kong, and various other monsters (kaiju) created by Toho Co., Ltd into the same fold.

(Spoilers for S1 below.)

The first season picked up where 2014's Godzilla left off, specifically the introduction of Project Monarch, a secret organization established in the 1950s to study Godzilla and other kaiju—after attempts to kill Godzilla with nuclear weapons failed. The plot spans three generations and takes place in the 1950s and half a century later. In the first season, two siblings (Kate and Kentaro Randa) follow in their father’s footsteps to uncover their family’s connection to the secretive organization known as Monarch. Naturally, they find themselves in the world of monsters and discover Army officer Lee Shaw (Kurt Russell), a longtime family ally.

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Apple says its services had a "record-breaking year," as Apple TV, Apple Music, and Apple Pay also soared.

As Netflix gears up to acquire Warner Bros., the streaming giant took home 7 awards at the Golden Globes last night.

Many projects on these pages do clever things with video. Whether it’s digital or analogue, it’s certain our community can push a humble microcontroller to the limit of its capability. But sometimes the terminology is a little casually applied, and in particular with video there’s an obvious example. We say “PAL”, or “NTSC” to refer to any composite video signal, and perhaps it’s time to delve beyond that into the colour systems those letters convey.

Know Your Sub-carriers From Your Sync Pulses

A video system of the type we’re used to is dot-sequential. It splits an image into pixels and transmits them sequentially, pixel by pixel and line by line. This is the same for an analogue video system as it is for many digital bitmap formats. In the case of a fully analogue TV system there is no individual pixel counting, instead the camera scans across each line in a continuous movement to generate an analogue waveform representing the intensity of light. If you add in a synchronisation pulse at the end of each line and another at the end of each frame you have a video signal.

But crucially it’s not a composite video signal, because it contains only luminance information. It’s a black-and-white image. The first broadcast TV systems as for example the British 405 line and American 525 line systems worked in exactly this way, with the addition of a separate carrier for their accompanying sound.

The story of the NTSC colour TV standard’s gestation  in the late 1940s is well known, and the scale of their achievement remains impressive today. NTSC, and PAL after it, are both compatible standards, which means they transmit the colour information alongside that black-and-white video, such that it doesn’t interfere with the experience of a viewer watching on a black-and-white receiver. They do this by adding a sub-carrier modulated with the colour information, at a frequency high enough to minimise its visibility on-screen. for NTSC this is 3.578MHz, while for PAL it’s 4.433MHz. These frequencies are chosen to fall between harmonics of the line frequency. It’s this combined signal which can justifiably be called composite video, and in the past we’ve descended into some of the complexities of its waveform.

It’s Your SDR’s I and Q, But Sixty Years Earlier

An analogue colour TV camera produces three video signals, one for each of the red, green, and blue components of the picture. Should you combine all three you arrive at that black-and-white video waveform, referred to as the luminance, or as Y. The colour information is then reduced to two further signals by computing the difference between the red and the luminance, or R-Y, and the blue and the luminance, or B-Y. These are then phase modulated as I-Q vectors onto the colour sub-carrier in the same way as happens in a software-defined radio.

At the receiver end, the decoder isolates the sub-carrier, I-Q demodulates it, and then rebuilds the R, G, and B, with a summing matrix. To successfully I-Q demodulate the sub-carrier it’s necessary to have a phase synchronised crystal oscillator, this synchronisation is achieved by sending out a short burst of the colour sub-carrier on its own at the start of the line. The decoder has a phase-locked-loop in order to perform the synchronisation.

So, Why The PAL Delay Line?

There in a few paragraphs, is the essence of NTSC colour television. How is PAL different? In essence, PAL is NTSC, with some improvements to correct phase errors in the resulting picture. PAL stands for Phase Alternate Line, and means that the phase of those I and Q modulated signals swaps every line. The decoder is similar to an NTSC one and indeed an NTSC decoder set to that 4.433MHz sub-carrier could do a job of decoding it, but a fully-kitted out PAL decoder includes a one-line delay line to cancel out phase differences between adjacent lines. Nowadays the whole thing is done in the digital domain in an integrated circuit that probably also decodes other standards such as the French SECAM, but back in the day a PAL decoder was a foot-square analogue board covered in juicy parts highly prized by the teenage me. Since it was under a Telefunken patent there were manufacturers, in particular those from Japan, who would try to make decoders that didn’t infringe on that IP. Their usual approach was to create two NTSC decoders, one for each phase-swapped line.

So if you use “NTSC” to mean “525-line” and “PAL” to mean “625-line”, then everyone will understand what you mean. But make sure you’re including that colour sub-carrier, or you might be misleading someone.