halcy 
a common affordance in scifi is that spaceships can just video call each other, even spaceships of different races who have never met before. this implies that there is a sufficiently mathematically obvious RTC protocol that all spacefaring races eventually discover
„but halcy, the computer simply adapts the signal“ try piping an opus bitstream into chatgpt, see how that goes
LisPi@halcy Headcanon: They're sending analog audio & crt linescans.
CubeOfCheese@cubeofcheese @halcy There's some synchronization stuff involved with radio television but it's plausible to make a dumb program to automatically handle it if one expects that format (especially with an operator actively directing the program).
Arbitrarily-complex digital protocols, not so much.
Arbitrarily-complex digital protocols, not so much.
Piko Starsider 
@lispi314 @halcy @cubeofcheese And a not-so-dumb program (or ML model) that looks for circles in the picture and other clues to adjust the aspect ratio automatically, as well as orientation. Although most automatically decoded transmissions would be black and white, since color is much more complex. Maybe the same model that detects orientation can also detect color signals somehow.
Galbinus Caeli@starsider @lispi314 @halcy @cubeofcheese
Also "color" has a very species specific definition. Unless you transmit many, many wavelengths, and hope to hit the right one(s)
Also "color" has a very species specific definition. Unless you transmit many, many wavelengths, and hope to hit the right one(s)
RRB@rrb @GalbinusCaeli @starsider @halcy @cubeofcheese Among other more simple or primitive options like "mechanical television" or SSTV.
@lispi314 @halcy @rrb @cubeofcheese @starsider Mechanical and SSTV have the same color/frequency issue. Unless you are transmitting simple greyscale across a broad spectrum, you have to pick frequencies (colors) that match the specific receptor cells of your audience.
Kevin Karhan 
@lispi314 @halcy @rrb @[email protected] @GalbinusCaeli @starsider given that any interstellar civilization will have Zettaflops of computational power in their ships and Petaflops in their communicators that sip Nanowatt, it's expectable to have some autonegotiation on speed -kinda system.
Kevin Karhan :verified: (@[email protected])
@[email protected] I guess that to an extend stuff like analog #NTSC or even #HiVision + #MUSE is not just trivial to modulate but also that basically any space-faring civilization will have a decently performant #SDR setup. - I mean, #Hamradio operators do #SSTV for decades so the only reason they don't do #TV at fluent frame rates is lack of #spectrum to do so. But in space, that problem isn't existing so quasi-optical links in like 24GHz & 60GHz bands are trivial to setup. - Compared to the challenges of superluminal or spacetime warping travel, [autonegotiation and frequency selection for bidirectional audio & video feed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhIEfxRLiPI&pp=0gcJCRsBo7VqN5tD) [if not compression] is an absolutely trivial problem that I'm confident elementary schoolkids in a *"Star-Trek" - esque universe* doodle in their free time like some folks nowadays do breadboard. Also a lot of #encoding / #decoding & #compression schemes can be broken down into mathematical formulas and that [is a universal languague](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCkD5GOjvx8) to the point that one could assume said communications to be like a sci-fi variant of [modem handshake](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDhyayQ_Rk0) within a second as computational power and speeds should be abundant anyway... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi-Vision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_Sub-Nyquist_Sampling_Encoding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-scan_television