does anyone know of a composite to component switcher that has at least 2 inputs and is IR comtrollable with discrete codes?
I have a Key Digital HD Hanna that I am using to scale composite sources from a VCR and LD for a customer outputting component video to a Parasound Halo C1 (it does not convert to component). The HD Hanna is defective. KD makes a new piece that will do it but its kinda expensive to use for this purpose.
does anyone know of another solution? (besides trashing the VCR and LD)

Thanks

Probably not what you were looking for but ... Crutchfield has 28 A/V Receivers priced from $399 up that all claim to do it. I'm sure there are others that they do not carry.

Might be a chance to improve your customer's audio and get ready for the future.

Tim

I know of only one model that could help. It is an excellent quality Kramer electronics unit that converts S-Video and Composite to Component (and/or RGB) -

http://www.kramerelectronics.com/indexes/item.asp?name=FC-4044

It does not have remote control. Light-touch front-panel buttons.

I understand the need for this (same as yours) and the complete lack of acceptable solutions. I spent many hours looking into this about two years ago and this was the only unit I could find that would -
1) not force an early analog to digital conversion prior to the component separation and then a reverse digital to analog conversion. Such a process results in serious signal degradation (due to the cheap AD - DA processing) and unacceptable artifacts in subsequent scaling, and
2) Maintain proper luminance and chrominance levels.
Otherwise there is nothing else around. (And definitely nothing acceptable with remote control, unfortunately. :( )

As I no longer have a need for mine you are welcome to it at an attractive price :D (the list was pretty high - over $300.00). It's in excellent/mint condition with box, manual, etc. Since you're in Houston and fairly close by you are welcome to contact me. hlm3@att.net

Regardless, there is just nothing out there at this point for the use you need, unless you want to go for some off-market plastic junk that is low-performance. Even the best Pioneer Elite receivers introduce obvious noise/artifacts/color shift. Too bad.

Probably not what you were looking for but ... Crutchfield has 28 A/V Receivers priced from $399 up that all claim to do it. I'm sure there are others that they do not carry.

Might be a chance to improve your customer's audio and get ready for the future.

Tim

I'm not so sure that a $399 receiver will be an improvement on the audio side compared to the existing Parasound Halo C1 Controller ($6000).

He'll want something with a decent comb filter.

Yes, and that's one of the reasons why the cheap converters are unacceptable - the lousy video ADC's and DAC's produce obvious artifacts when followed by any scaling or even processing. Staying in the analog format for Y/C filtering is of huge importance.

Actually all of the good comb filters are digital. There is a chopping up of the analog waveforms into slices for pixels which is intrinsically the same as what we think of in terms of converting analog Y/Pb/Pr component video into digital Y/Cb/Cr. And the resulting separated Y and C after comb filtering is turned back into analog, becoming S-video.

True analog comb filters never developed past the stage where dot crawl was noticeable and horizontal color boundaries had a two line discoloration separating them. (Odd fields and even fields were comb filtered one at a time and the color boundary occurs in each.)

Since composite video is "on its way out" with analog broadcasting to cease in early 2009, not much is said about comb filters. A "sort of" plateau in performance that is reasonably good has been reached with digital 2 dimensional (3 line) adaptive and digital 3 dimensional motion adaptive comb filters mass produced on individual chips. Which brand chip you get in a TV or video processor or A/V receiver is luck of the draw. There is a buyer beware: notch filters and analog comb filters are still out there in new equipment.

Video hints: http://members.aol.com/ajaynejr/vidcomb.htm

I was probably not detailed enough in my response.

In a purely "technical" sense the best 3-D comb filters are indeed digital, when implemented properly AND when not input directly into a delinterlacer and/or scaler. Dot crawl on static images and test patterns is clearly reduced and such images improved.

But years of experience with all sorts of filters, scalers, LD and DVD sources and players indicates that the best technical solution does not produce the best acceptable viewable result, certainly when the circuitry is involved which is cheap, poorly-designed, poorly-implemented, and/or poorly chosen.

Example - the HLD-X9 LD player has the unquestioned best Y/C filter available in the format. It operates solely in the digital domain. When viewed on its own the image from the S-Video output is gorgeous and (apparently) superior to anything else. Run it through any of the 8 or so deinterlacers/scalers that I have used and the image becomes ruined with a checkerboard artifact pattern with many moving images.

The issue is even worse with cheaper digital filters.

Running the composite output through a superior analog Y/C filter and then into the deinterlacer/scaler and the artifacts vanish. Yes, the moving dots are there on fixed images, but such viewing rarely happens for most material so the trade off is worth it (at least for me and others). This is in addition to the noise, fringing and color compression that result from A-D and D-A filtering.

The Kramer unit, for example, proves this easily. Run the composite signal from the X9 into it, output it as component into a scaler, and the image quality is noticeably purer and less artifact-troubled. I agree that if a few test patterns from "Video Essentials" are displayed there will be clear dot-crawl. But very few LD and VHS movies present such static situations.

I specifically chose the Kramer after much research and experience for its analog filtering.

And it gets even better with an HLD-X0 (sorry - couldn't resist :D )

The LD player comb filter output might need analog low pass filtering if the final conversion back to analog leaves too much stairstepping (which is high frequency content).

The highest frequency legitimately present in the S-video C signal is about 5.1 MHz. For the Y signal from a laserdisk, about 5.4 MHz.

An ordinary analog TV probably doesn't pass frequencies much higher. A modern de-interlacer might pass more. Stairstepping from the LD player is the pixel footprint left behind, and moire patterns result if the pixel footprint (pixel count) is still there and does not match that of the de-interlacer.