NASA TV HD Thread

[rdale]

DirectTV didn't make the switch either.

[psloss]

Well, I made the call to both of my providers.  Dish Network customer service said that their engineering department was already aware of the signal loss.

[Ford Mustang]

And, unfortunately, this is all you get for the NASA TV 1200kbps feed....

[psloss]

Well, I made the call to both of my providers.  Dish Network customer service said that their engineering department was already aware of the signal loss.

Sometime while I was gone, Dish Network got their equipment re-pointed.  Regionally, here in Atlanta it might be a while.

[Ford Mustang]

Well, I made the call to both of my providers.  Dish Network customer service said that their engineering department was already aware of the signal loss.

Sometime while I was gone, Dish Network got their equipment re-pointed.  Regionally, here in Atlanta it might be a while.

And the Yahoo 1200kbps feed is now working again.

[rsmath]

The move is complete!

NASA TV is now on AMC-3 (and the media interview and engineering channels, too, for you NASA junkies!).

Signal strength is much better on my 7.5 foot secondary c-band dish on AMC-3 than AMC-6 and the increased symbol rate means there is about 2 Mbps more bandwidth available to make the HD look better when present or help the HD channel become full-time when NASA is ready to keep it in the signal full time.

AMC-7 will definitely be going away in this transition instead of remaining for those in alaska/hawaii.   If you are in some parts of alaska or in ak/hi with no good low look angles, I feel for you.... you can watch SD on DISH or DIRECTV and I"ll post HD files when I know about events and am able to roll hard drive to capture it.


If you are having reception problems, I may be able to figure things out for you or give other advice so PM me if you want to talk things through.

[Andrewwski]

DirecTV seems to be back up.

[rdale]

DirecTV seems to be back up.

It came back Saturday evening.

[rsmath]

Gotta love NASA public relations!  They press released an media interview event and it had the wrong coordinates (using AMC-6) on it.

For fun, I just checked it again and it has been corrected for the AMC-3 coordinates.  I suppose someone had to tell them their media video channel moved satellites last weekend.

[ChrisC]

As rdale said in the first post of this thread, an NSF admin/moderator took the entire NASA HDTV thread (topic=11551), some 500+ posts, and merged them into the "Live NASA TV links" thread.  It was a mistake (they've said as much) but it's done, can't be undone, and we're moving on with life.  Personally I'm glad the posts at least still exist so I can dig them up, because I really was using that thread as a history / log of NASA HD TV evolution.

That merge happened in December, shortly after the last shuttle mission and the last appearance of HD in the NASA satellite feed.  I was going to create a new thread in time for the next mission, but have decided to just tag onto this one since it's as good as any.

So, over the next day or two I'll comb through the old thread and put together some basic info about NASA HD TV, in particular so I can fix the links in my sig below

I expect the HD service will come up by Friday.

[ChrisC]

Recent history of NASA TV's HD feed

July 2005:  Starting with the STS-114 RTF mission, HDNet makes their own separate deal with NASA, with their own cameras and commentators.

Oct 2007:  During the run-up to the STS-120 launch, NASA TV quietly launches HD service in their AMC-6 satellite multiplex as test, but we spot it pretty quickly; CNN does too and takes it to air for their launch coverage, much to the chagrin of NASA TV
(no link, those posts seem to have disappeared)

22-Apr-2008: HD views of Earth for Earth Day
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=19846.msg270176#msg270176
(and the first time NASA even acknowledges that their HD feed exists)

22-May-2008:  HD tour of ISS, Phoenix descent from JPL, STS-124 coverage
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=19846.msg279642#msg279642

The HD service has been up for every launch since then.

16-Nov-2008:  first HD from shuttle, live and playback, first HD highlights package
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=19846.msg333572#msg333572

16-July 2009: several HD feeds related to Apollo 11 anniversary, including restored video
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=19846.msg438626#msg438626

Summer 2009:  ISS hardware problems (or perhaps MCC problems) prevent HD downlinks for a couple months including one docked shuttle mission.  Fixed in time for early September's STS-128.

28-Oct-2009:  Ares I-X test covered in HD
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=19846.msg494610#msg494610

19-Jul-2010:  NASA announces that HD service will stay up 24-7!  Call your cable/sat provider!

[ChrisC]

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT THE NASA TV HIGH DEFINITION FEED

How can I see this live HD feed?

There is currently no way to see it via cable or satellite home providers.

There are two ways to see it via the internet:

1.  Via UStream at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-tv-hd , or

2.  Via SpaceVidCast; the direct link to their NASA HD feed is http://www.spacevidcast.com/livehd/ .

We suspect that these are actually the same feed -- that is, the #1 feed above is actually provided by the SpaceVidCast folks.

SpaceVidCast has been carrying the live HD feed during shuttle missions, however it is a Ustream web feed and at far lower resolution and framerate than full HD.  You can see the whole 16x9 frame though (although sometimes if they are having trouble receiving NASA HD feed they will take the SD feed, and sometimes even crop it to make it 16x9!)  They also will inset/overlay their own commentary in a corner.  Time lag is excellent, at most a couple seconds delayed.  If the above link doesn't work, you can also try http://www.ustream.tv/channel/spacevidcast .

OK, but that's not real HD.  How can I see the actual NASA HD feed live?

In short:  you probably can't.  It's a media feed, and you need a Really Big Antenna to get it -- aka a Big Ugly Dish (among other things).  DirecTV/Dish doesn't cut it.   More specifically, you need a C-band satellite antenna (typically 10 feet across) and an HD-capable MPEG2 satellite receiver.  If you DO have all that, then just swing over to AMC-3 at 87 deg West and tune to the parameters here.  That satellite transponder is only visible in North America.

When will NASA HD be available on cable / DBS?

As of 19-Jul-2010, NASA has the HD feed up on their satellite 24-7, just like they do with the SD feed.  It is now available for cable/DBS to take it and distribute it to your home.  So now is the time to call up your provider and ask for it!  (note:  "DBS" = direct broadcast satellite; in the US that means DirecTV and Dish)

HD video downloads

NASA makes a few of the videos available for download later at:
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/hd/index.html

Some users here at NSF record the HD feeds and make them available as MPEG4/H.264 downloads -- huge, multi-GB files, usually.  Look for them mentioned in the daily mission threads or sometimes linked from http://www.space-multimedia.nl.eu.org .

NASA also uploads some of the HD videos to Youtube, but they can be hard to find.  Look for videos by Youtube user NASAtelevision, then click on "Search Options" to reduce the results list to just "Features: HD", then limit further by "Upload date: Today".  Also you can try searching for the mission tag, like STS-132.  Note: after NASA uploads the video it will appear right away in SD but takes a few more hours for the HD version to become available.  Also we DO believe that these are real HD videos, with full 720p resolution and 30 fps framerate.

Joining binary files together

NSF user rsmath frequently posts video files of feeds that he's captured from this HD feed, but because the files are so big he has to chop them up.  You should rejoin them before trying to view them.  In Windows machines, it is trivially easy to rejoin binary files together, without special software like HJSplit.  In Windows, open a command prompt and do:

copy /b file1 + file2 + file3 fileresult

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_DOS_commands#copy

This will concatenate the files together.  I used to do it all the time with mp3 captures.  The result will be free of glitches.  Mac and Linux has similar capabilities -- open a terminal / command prompt and type "man cat".

Video format

NASA went with 720p, because the progressive format makes frame-by-frame analysis simpler.  NASA uses many of these camera shots for internal documentation, of course.  1080i is interlaced and creates a bit of a dilemma if you're scrutinizing the video for a particular instantaneous event. 

Also note that they don't use the common 59.94 Hz framerate, rather a pure 60 Hz, for the same reason.

Video bitrates

Typical bitrates up through Dec 2009, when the HD service was up:
HQ1 6-8 Mbps
HQ2 ~1 Mbps (slate) or ~3 Mbps (programming)
HQ3 6-8 Mbps
HQ4 6-8 Mbps
HQ5 12 Mbps

In Jan 2010 the NASA TV satellite distribution multiplex moved to a new satellite and slightly larger carrier (+2 Mbps), so it was expected that these numbers would change, and here's what they came up with as they started their STS-130 coverage:

HQ1 6.65 Mbps
HQ2 2.98 Mbps
HQ3 6.95 Mbps
HQ4 7.99 Mbps
HQ5 12.00 Mbps

In July 2010, along with the permanent addition of the HD service, these numbers evolved to:

HQ1   6.08 Mbps
HQ2   4.07 Mbps
HQ3   6.08 Mbps
HQ4   6.08 Mbps
HQ105 14.20 Mbps

[benjaminhigginbotham]

Is HQ5 back online on AMC 3? I'm getting HQ 1 through 4 right now, but not seeing HQ5 which is generally the HD stream. Usually we have an HD feed by now.

I'm trying to determine if there is a problem with our setup or if NASA simply isn't broadcasting HD yet. I would hate to see STS-130 go up without HD!

[ChrisC]

It came up at 9:53am ET with a slate.  I'll screenshot it later.

Yesterday after I started plowing through all the posts and building my two reference posts above, I realized that this thread screwup problem actually could be fixed very easily by the admins.  So I've been basically begging them to do it since yesterday afternoon (no point in relaying the details here, Mark and Chris have a detailed PM from me).  It'll just take a minute from them to rework and then we'll be set.

For that reason I'm holding off on commenting on the HD feed here for a couple hours.  The HD feed is up though.  I'll start commenting on the HD here at 5pm if the NSF admins haven't fixed the thread problem by then.  Would be a shame though.

[ChrisC]

OK, proceeding for now, hopefully we can fix these later, but it'll be a pain.

The HD feed came up at 9:53am ET with an info slate (screenshot below).

At 14:10 they went to our old friend, the static pad shot (screenshot below).

At 15:15 they started running a 6-7 minute HD package about the ISS, reviewing the capabilities of this beast as we near completion.  They ran it over and over a few times until 15:45.  First run was missing narration audio, as were some of the other runs.

Back to pad shot for now, getting darker!