design blunders fix up on video capture card

[Wizard]

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...php?p=17835690

That's me.

BTW, I partially recapped my June 2003 DVD-S35 Panasonic player and added missing items that panasonic left out on SMPS board and D/A board.

Cheers, Wizard

[ratdude747]

Re: design blunders fix up on video capture card

reminds me of the mod on my happauge win tv go card. i HATED the external line out cord, as they were always getting in the way and broken.

so i took one of the short internal modem-to-sound-card cables, desoldered the line out jack, and soldered in the cable.

i wedged the cable between the pcb and coax jack as a strain relief.

works great, and now i have an elegant internal cable setup.

if you want pics, let me know, i can snap and post some anytime.

[Toasty]

Re: design blunders fix up on video capture card

OMG!!

That looks like a real ghetto fix! Gotta love the caps hanging off the end though!

YOU put the smd caps on the +12 & -12v? Any particular value? Decoupling I suppose?

"pulled offending traces off"
Could you have left them there after cutting each end and jumper/grounded each end to the surrounding ground plane? Or would that induce problems in the other lines?

Nice fix.

Toast

[ratdude747]

Re: design blunders fix up on video capture card

ghetto sometimes works!

ill post pics tm. mine is pretty ghetto too.

[mockingbird]

Re: design blunders fix up on video capture card

Do you remember how to remove the vertical lines of death on the coaxial input of the Hauppauge WinTV Pro?

There used to be a thread on that forum like ten years ago but it has eluded me for a while.

[i4004]

Re: design blunders fix up on video capture card

here is wizard again talking about things he doesn't understand...from avsforum link:

> Bt878 is so low resolution capture and too low bits that I chose the ATSC-120 after the fixes was applied.

meh...bt8x8 captures perfectly valid ntsc signal of up to 720x480, but wizard obviously doesn't know how to setup the capping program, so his perception is it's "low resolution".
only problem bt8x8 had was clamping of near black values to pure black, like demonstrated here
http://tinyurl.com/ybbrsdv )

also, are you not aware that your "new" chip(cx2388x) is practically the same as bt8x8...

and you would surely get better results with something with philips saa713x, which has much better comb-filter and processing overall than bt or cx(conexant is new name, but it's still mostly the same thing as bt=brooktree)

> At least support the capturing AVI stream from ATI Theater 550 Pro chipset since AVI is uncompressed stream thereby bypassing the MPEG2 processing, this chipset is gorilla verus the CX2388x and SAA741x due to 12 bit A/D converter processor and good tuner onboard.

more bollocks here...more bits doesn't make it "better".
infact it's probably worse, because there's no way to capture uncompressed with ati550...and THEN even if there was, probably nobody would see any difference because the resulting bitstream still must be 8bit, ie the past cards with 10 and 9 bit adcs also have to be downscaled to 8 bit just to be transferred via pci bus to ram, and then to formats we use to store footage on hdd.
and EVEN if the resulting bitsream was 12bit for us to see, still nobody would see difference beacuse differences fade beyond a certain point...
here that point is 8bit and more bits doesn't really bring more quality.

oh yeah, thanks for info on your "success" with d-vhs deck, i'll use it to update the original thead in vip section...those involved have the right to know...
<wink>

[Wizard]

Re: design blunders fix up on video capture card

Shield traces had to be wider. These signal traces were too thin to be good use as shielding if they were grounded.

I could order batch of SMD polymers from Joe after Feb and redo this. They were 100uF/16V on all of 5 and 3.3, and low voltages also (1.8V, 1.2V).

Cheers, Wizard

[i4004]

Re: design blunders fix up on video capture card

oh yeah, one more important thing, as you said in that avs forum thread:

"HTPC is necessary since must have closed caption working and good software that capture everything as much as possible for details and transmit video straight to the video card and on to the LCD TV in 1x1 pixel mode (read: no onboard processing!)."

you can't have 1:1 pixel mode, as that would mean 720(or 640) x 480 video window surrounded by blackness on your lcd tv. and that would be too small/weird etc.

so your best bet is dscaler(like you said) for live stuff, and for recorded stuff use ffdshow with scaling(resizer) set to lanczos, or so...

[mockingbird]

Re: design blunders fix up on video capture card

Regarding ATI "Theater" chips, a little tidbit from a while back:

I bought a Radeon "ViVo" (The first one that came out - the 7200) a while back with the intention of tuning TV through the composite input with my VCR.

ATI, in their infinite wisdom, decided to do mandatory bob filtering on that input. The image was so blurry due to the missing field, it was almost unwatchable.

I'm pretty sure they switched to adaptive deinterlacing with the Theater 200. The last card that came with the video input was the 2900xt to my knowledge.

[Wizard]

Re: design blunders fix up on video capture card

Dscaler is what exactly that.

Dscaler takes the raw capture from the capture card directly, deinterlace, processes the video according to the user settings which is powerful feature for a 2MB download and flexible in settings. For closed caption, Dscaler decodes the WBI and display closed caption these two checkboxes checked in that Dscaler's. Once done this Dscaler overlays image on the video card at specific resolution set by user on the windows itself as well. In my case I set video card's output at 1920x1080 and disable TV's processing (forcing it to do 1x1 mode). Using HDMI cable too. Yes, that image is still 4:3 but details is *preserved* as much as possible!

This is all in research I have done and other people have done this already. Big TVs tells EVERYTHING, this is biggest reason people had to buy expensive processors and and some people built HTPC boxens for certain tasks to remove & minimize some artifacts in the picture.

My goal was to cut out the unacceptable TV makers' video processing especially for on board tuner tuned to NTSC signal and to simply get around the missing S-video input: Samung, what the heck! I can't accept using a composite input since this is inferior quality. Also that composite input if used on particular TVs like samsung takes away one of component input (the green RCA jack of component input is circled yellow for composite). Again, not unacceptable.
Also, VGA, Component and S-Video inputs on many TV have deep bit depth A/D converter devoted to these analog inputs and this does show. When you capture anything that is analog signal (audio, strain gauge, voltages, video signals, etc) it is important to try to allocate enough bits to give enough resolution, less visible stair-steps on captured waveforms. Also how often signal is sampled per tick of time is usually 4x the given upper freq range of signal for good capture of the signal. It is easy to decrease data by throwing away certain things and keep decent quality and not possible to add anything to a low quality signal which is EXACTLY what happened with most flat panel TVs if using their onboard tuner and were ironically captured with too low resolution/low bit rate and over-processed that threw away so much subtle details/shadings that was supposed to be there.

Good TVs have 10 bit panel to prevent banding. Very noticeable on Bluray, upconverting DVD players and on 1080 inputs. My LCD monitor is 6 bit panel which threw away details by dithering and that does show in the images, yes I noticed!

That said,

This achieves the goal I set for years and paves the way to install a new LCD TV once samsung releases new line of high end 32" in March. Reason I nearly bought samsung LN32B650 last December, but Samsung closed down production on that model for nearly 9 months and stock of this ran out at my local store so I can't do anything till then. That store is what holding my line of credits because I returned a Sharp LC40LE700UN due to godawful processing that befits a low end TV but this is no low end TV at all. This is fantastic TV: 120Hz 1080 with backlight LED TV incredously ruined the cake; included mediatek chipset which is not good idea.

BTW, this is my first LCD TV owner-ship even was tempted by that for 7 years but was disgusted with this quality via certain analog route and I kept JVC 20" TV in that period and wanted to move on/up. Their TV makers best jobs is VGA, HDMI and ATSC (DTV), also to some degree component and S-Video if TV hardware is decent quality. There are vast majority of people with analog output devices (Wii, old game consoles, and remaining SD broadcasters (Some countries like Canada is yet to switch till Aug 2011).

Cheers, Wizard

[i4004]

Re: design blunders fix up on video capture card

>Big TVs tells EVERYTHING

wrong again.
they don't tell anything, their bad processing of sd signal aside.

it's not like flat panel tv is "revealing" some problems that didn't exist with crts.
it's just that flat panels have worse sd image than crt, because they do crappy processing.

obviously, some are better than other, and some come pretty close to crt for sd content.
find such tv if you intent to watch sd content.
that's all.

and no, limitation is not with the input circuitry, but with video processing chips.
no matter if you use composite, s-video or componnet, picture will be bad if processing is bad.
(main processing done to sd signal in order to show it on flat panel is deinterlacing and rescaling...both blur original image to some extent no matter how well they're done, so they're hard to do in a well way....so it'll probably always look worse than crt...as crt doesn't do that processing at all)

[ratdude747]

Re: design blunders fix up on video capture card

pics of my mod are here!

1: an overview



2: the solder joint (pic is a bit painful... gimp could only help it to a degree)

https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...id=13182&stc=1

3: the exit/strain relief (not inline for same reason as #2)

https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...id=13183&stc=1

[Toasty]

Re: design blunders fix up on video capture card

...mandatory bob filtering on that input...

[mockingbird]

Re: design blunders fix up on video capture card

I mean to say bob deinterlacing.

Bob deinterlacing if I am correct is just removing one field. Really degrades the image quality.

[i4004]

Re: design blunders fix up on video capture card

no, bob shows both fields in succession...(first one field is resized to full screen, then another)
problem of that approach is that it literally bobs up/down, which is esp. visible on graphics in the image...

[Wizard]

Re: design blunders fix up on video capture card

This is weave deinterlacing (bob version). My 40 dollars upconverting DVD player and this Sharp LC40LE700UN suffered from this because of cheap chipset used (Mediatek) and motion get clobbered badly and lot of combing/mouse teeth.

A *good* deinterlacer keep any artifacts to absolute minimum possible. That is reason cost is higher for best video processors and good upconverting dvd players. Expect that to be over 100 dollars and up for this good upconverting dvd player. And can go as high as 3,000 for top of the line video processors and as low as 800 (DVDO Edge by Anchor Bay). And you have to envaluate flat panel TVs to make sure built in video processor is good for analog inputs. 4, 5 and 6, 7, 8 and 9 series Samsungs tend to have better processing. I also checked out Panasonic G1 series. Not bad especially when I feed them the 480i via component.

But the tuner is given a sloppy treatment for NTSC processing which is shameful and this had been around for 10 years (yes, as long as TVs with 32KHz and 1080 capable CRTs are all video processed to upconvert to fit on their higher resolution deflection circuit (32KHz type). Same with LCD TV and Plasmas.

from 2001 to around 2007, RCA had rear proj CRT based on ITC222 had marginally good video processor which is not bad. Only issue is detail/sharpness is thrown away. *But* Feed that bad boy with 1080 turns into *fanstastic* TV. Best I ever had seen, only appoaches the 120Hz LCDs.
Plasma suffers from dancing pixie dust due to it's drivers design/plasma panel itself.

Cheers, Wizard

[i4004]

Re: design blunders fix up on video capture card

>This is weave deinterlacing (bob version).

uh...
bob is bob, weave is weave.
2 different things.
weave is essentially no deinterlacing, it's just putting 2 fields in one frame, so that "combs" appear when there's motion in the frame.