Teletext - remember that?

Today is 45th birthday of the teletext of Finnish public broadcaster YLE. Still over 600 000 views daily.


Birthday pages and greetings from abroad, incl. UK - Sivu 842 - Teksti-TV

Also anyone who has satellite dish pointing to Thor 0,8W, can search 12476 H 30000 and read YLE TekstiTV without subscription from YLE channels.

It s been on all my remotes. France ditched it a long time ago (It was called "Antiope") ,but the Germans keep and use it a lot. As German TV is freely available on sat all over Europe,the German traveler gets his news from teletext plus complete EPG on the EPG knob of his zapper. Simple is'n t it?Same with Italy,Spain,Switzerland,Portugal. And ex-Yugoslavia.I vaguely remember Ceefax,but it s long gone.

ORF2 Europe still has teletext on Astra 19.2E.

SimonE said:

ORF2 Europe still has teletext on Astra 19.2E.

Click to expand...

yes ,and if you press the TXT button, you get their live teletext!

The Hungarian channels on 9°E also have teletext

My VMA Transport Stream Analyser (not free) can decode teletext, show the underlying code and especially dump all pages in *.tti format. These can be loaded back and browsed off-line.

It can be used to preserve teletext services.



This is what a page looks like in an HEX editor:


Loading the whole dump back to VMA Transport Stream Analyser:


Rendering the page in RAW mode:


Different backup (TVR):


From the backup folder it is easy to find "weird" page numbers, which often belong to test pages:


My VMA Playout Package, a software for automated generation of complete transport streams with multiple channels, includes teh VMA Teletext Generator software:



This software can generate teletext pages automatically and dynamically for each channel.

It includes a teletext editor:



Teletext is not dead and will continue to exist for time to come: almost all TV's that are in use or being sold include a teletext decoder.

Interestingly, teletext is quite an art form! It is not easy to design good looking pages with the limitations imposed by the system and, on the other hand, it is quite a feat how teletext was implemented in the first place!

Here is a nice Wikipedia page on the subject: Teletext - Wikipedia