Colophon
Analog TV Simulator draws on primary engineering sources, and on the wider community of people who reverse-engineer, document and recreate analogue television. These are some of the open-source projects and references that inspired or informed it. Do go and explore them.
A free, open-source analogue-video effect written in Rust. It models much of the NTSC and VHS chain in the signal domain, deriving many of its artefacts from how composite encoding and tape recording behave, while handling some effects in the pixel domain. It runs as a standalone app, in the browser, and as plugins for After Effects, Premiere and OpenFX hosts such as DaVinci Resolve.
An open-source analogue-television transmitter by fsphil (written in C, GPL-3.0). It generates a real, broadcastable signal for PAL, NTSC, SECAM and D/D2-MAC, along with the older 819, 405, 240 and 30-line systems and the NASA Apollo colour and mono standards, then transmits it through SDR hardware such as the HackRF or an fl2k VGA adaptor. It also implements teletext, NICAM stereo, and the Videocrypt, Nagravision Syster and Macrovision-style conditional-access systems. It covers much of the same ground this app models, including the Apollo formats and the pay-TV scramblers.
FreeNBTV, by smeezekitty, generates Narrow-Bandwidth Television (NBTV) signals, the low-line-count mechanical-television format kept alive by the Narrow-bandwidth Television Association. Its novelty is in the output path: it produces the picture as an audio signal through an ordinary sound card, which can be looped back to drive a display. It aims to be highly configurable, generating arbitrary NBTV formats with adjustable line counts, frame rates and colour modes, and it is free, open-source and cross-platform.
Kacper "kFYatek" and contributors recreate the BBC's historical test cards as faithfully as possible, accurate enough to programme into a real engineering test-signal generator. The main source is a recording of the BBC HD shutdown on 26 March 2013, which broadcast a run of classic test cards; the project recovers the original standard-definition images from that HD feed and cleans up the remaining artefacts. It is a set of open Python and VapourSynth processing scripts.