For people of my generation, a great deal of history was seen on regular low-resolution TV. But a lot of it, up to the 70s or so (and often after) was shot on film, at higher resolution. Older generations saw some of this (once or twice) in newsreels at the movies.

So as HD sets become common, it would be great to see this old film footage of events like the wars, the Olympics, famous speeches, the moon landing and other space program material in high definition. I saw a DVD of the 1936 Olympics on a good screen and even that was surprising.

Some of this is already happening. HDNet is digitizing old sitcoms like Hogan’s Heroes, which was shot on film. Fun, but I think the life-changing events we’ve never truly seen (or rarely seen) at full resolution would be more important, and would also leave a legacy for education. And yes, that even includes that bad news, like the Challenger and the WTC.

Update: Discovery channel has an upcoming series of NASA footage coming up in HD. Now if only I could get discovery channel HD in a way that I can record without buying their proprietary box.

A short note, as I've been busy with a number of things including trying out PC based HDTV recording and mythtv, which I will write about shortly.

In a VoIP pricing debate, I calculated an interesting observation. Today we have voice codecs that can do very fine voice quality in about 25 kilobits. FM radio quality. Cell phone quality can be done in 7 kilobits. Anyway, that means all 200 million adult Americans could be on the phone at once and it would use 5 terabits.

Using DWDM -- dense wave division multiplexing -- where many colours of photon co-exist in an optical fiber, 5 terabits is now well within the range of a single optical fiber.

So yes, everybody could be on the phone at once, in FM quality, with just one optical fiber. Of course one fiber doesn't pass by every town, and multiplexing it all together costs money too and has overhead. But it should be clear just how silly the idea of per minute charges for voice are in the face of this statistic. And indeed they are going away.

Of course we are finding uses for more bandwidth. HDTV file transfers for example (which use 16 megabits but can be credibly done in about 6 with better codecs.) But how long before we can all have an HDTV videophone call at once over a moderate number of fibers?