An imprefect science

Fascinating insight into how things can go wrong in the broadcast chain from the BBC's tech guru, Andy Quested.

Yes, Doctor Who should have been in 5.1! Something the dubbing mixer pointed out quite forcefully on the Monday morning after transmission. Before he contacted me I had discovered the programme was only in stereo on the server but the delivered tape had the full surround audio. After a bit of investigation we discovered someone had routed one of the server ingest video tape players to another area and changed the audio replay options to a non-standard mode. When the machine was routed back to its normal role the audio set-up was not reset and the next programme in the stack for loading was Doctor Who."

[And yes, 'imprefect' was a joke]

More at the source. BBC - BBC Internet Blog: The Hitchhiker's Guide to Encoding: Before we start