Time to crown a new SDI DVD king! - Page 3  

Gary,

Finally got to playing with the 970. It is as you said, when I pull up the VP-50 info, it displayed 4.4.4

When I go into the Oppo's set up screen, I have three options for color space. 1) 4.4.4 2) RBG 3) Auto

I selected auto and now every time I put in a dvd and pull up the VP's info, it says RBG.

What's going on? What is the better choice? And what is the difference between 4.2.2 and 4.4.4?

Thanksmike

A bit slow to this thread, sorry, but I CANNOT believe I've caught Madshi out. He didn't spot Gary's deliberate mistake - 4:2:0 is of course what's stored on the disc, and is only upsampled by the decoder to 4:2:2, ready for the SDI output.

BTW, my DV79AVI outputs YCbCr 4:2:2 to my VantageHD, and looks good on it, and the Arcam DV79 and I think DV29 and Marantz 9600 do so as well. They all sound very good, too.

Nick

Gary, could you sometime in the future, put up comparison shots from upscaled HDMI, and/or crappy walmart DVD player to the SDI+video processed screencaps?

You can use this site for comparisons: http://imgc.rauch.co.uk/
Here's an example someone made of 5th Element blu-ray vs. hdtv broadcast: http://imgc.rauch.co.uk/36

Thanks Gary.

I'm curious to see how the 970 compares to the sdi 981. I don't watch many sd dvd's anymore. Now with a PS3 for BR and the X1 for HD, it's a rarity for us to pop in a sd / dvd.

But..I've got around 800 sd/dvd's, so if these SDI players make that big of a difference, I could be persuaded into having you mod my 981. Oh crap, that means my VP needs an upgrade too!

One down side that I'm seeing to using one of these universal SDI modified players. I use the 970 for SACD via HDMI so that I can use the receiver's base management and Audysdy EQ. I rout all my players into the AVR and then have one HDMI out to the VP - then out to the projector. How would one go about setting up the dvd player to recognize the SDI video output, but still maintain the HDMI audio output?? I'm having trouble visualizing how that would work, or if that might cause some handshake problems.

Have you tried this?

I have the Oppo971 SDI moded at home. It goes through a VPS3800.
I had a Pany XP50 SDI (close to the RP82) and a Denon 2200.

The Oppo 971 gave me the best results.
The PQ is top notch in terms of color and shapness, NTSC and PAL is handled no problemo in the chain.

I think Oppo players are a very good choice for SDI mods.
The MPEG decoder is very good, my guess the best available in a DVD player nowadays.
The sound quality is just perfect via the Coax output.
The drive is fast, layer skip and chapter skip are perfectly fast enough.
The price is one of the most attractive !

I do not know about what the 981 can give over SDI. I have one at home for my LCD TV. I noticed that Oppo improved few things, mostly the usability. I guess the 981 is overall better than the 981.

The reason the 981 is king is twofold- HDMI output for audio, and Discrete off IR code. The 971 was great but you could not include it in an off macro because OPPO designed it in such a way that discrete off was not possible. Also the 971 is discontinued.

I have a 971H and I'm thinking about SDI modding it. Being that the Mediatek decoder is slightly different than the 970, which one would give better SDI quality? What is discrete off?

What is the benefit of HD SDI being that HD pre-recorded movies are progressive with no deinterlacing needed?

Yes, but two points.

Part of the reason for using SDi is to get 480i from the decoder, rather than 480i from HDMI. This is to avoid any processing between the decoder and the output. It's not just about avoiding the players internal de-interlacer.

The other is that many HD players actually decoder 1080p24 as 1080i60. That is what's available at the output of the decoder, and is what the HD SDI output would give you. Again, it would generally help to avoid the players's internal de-interlacer. I've seen what this can do with an HD SDI modded Tosh HD-XA1, and it's very impressive.

A few HD players actually decode directly to 1080p24, and seem to be all the better for it. Don't get Gary started on that one! I dont't think the dust has settled there yet, and I think it might actually be a bit premature to start thinking about HD SDI. Even with direct decoding, I think there could still be benefits to be had from HD SDI and a (very) good VP. But you're getting to diminishing returns, and the costs are starting to look pretty high.

Nick

I am thinking a HD-SDI modded player into a HD-SDI pci-e capture card in a htpc, looks cheaper then a high end scaler, and for 9" crt owners, means we could get 72 Hz refresh rate.

Will this only play DVDs, or could I use it to upscale video from a replay tv or coaxial cable? What sort of inputs does it have?

Now I know I'm getting lost, but this for some reason makes alot of sense. With three HTPCs just hanging around, what have I to lose? Even 480 SDI sounds doable.

Ok, so who mods the Oppos for SDI these days? PM me if you feel it isnt proper to post. THX

What HD-SDI card have you seen? I didn't realise there were any realtime capture ones around.

There are many on the pro market. The question is making a scaler. Yes they have API kits available but it's a lot of code beyond that to get a working solution. The best bet would be to write a driver for DScaler.

www.aja.com
www.blackmagic-design.com

Software is the issue and there's nothing that I know of, yet... I was kind of looking to the future and thinking out loud. (Mark Rejhorn might be the guy to answer this.)

480i sdi is very do-able with a htpc. An Immersive Holo3Dgraph card with a PIII-600 system, or a PMS SDI capture card and Dscaler IV and a fast P4 system.

Don't understand - why not just an internal drive? Is the audio or OS too limiting?

Nick

Gary, if we had H3D type software for a HD-SDI capture card, things could be simple and rock stable.

Which one of the Oppos it the best for SDI?

Sounds interesting. Nice to know you're on the forefront of SDI. For now at least, I'll be sticking with my SDI Panasonic CP72 (..working nicely thanks to Gary, I might add). It's SDI, region free modded, coax audio mod and has a new calibrated spindle motor assembly. I also have a backup CP72 I used while the SDI unit was worked on. I haven't compared the SDI vs component picture thoroughly, but I admit that from what little comparing I have done, I can't see massive differences. I may compare a little more in depth some time, but quite frankly, I've worn myself out "comparing" audio and video over the years. I run my SDI CP72 into an iScan HD+ and run DVI into my Hitachi TX200 and the picture is amazingly sharp and clear. As far as future interests, my desire would be to find a universal 5 disc carousel player that has a tip-top MPEG decoder, does dvd-audio and dvd-video, sacd multichannel, has top notch DAC's, is region free and can be SDI modded. However, I think things are going to get a whole lot more interesting in the next couple years with the new format players and their sd dvd playback. Although I have heard that the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players have CUE which is a bummer.

Have fun with your quest for the best and keep us all informed!

I would be surprised to find any difference between the 970 and the 981. My reason for originally purchasing the 970 was the ability to output 480 over HDMI which is something the 981 cannot do.

The SDI mod levels the field and allows both players to avoid any additional conversions and output the stream directly. My only problem is that if I get the 981 and decide to scrap my scaler with SDI then I am left with being unable to output 480 over HDMi direct to my display device, new processor, receiver etc.. should I need to do so in the future.

Something happend to the HD-SDI card for the vp line. I think it got delayed to solve other problems. But the reason for this mail is to point to the one of the mod companies that does SEEM to ship a HD-SDI card for the vp line !!.

http://www.jvb.nl/jvb.asp?cur=1&leve...itle&title=475

Any idea about this Gary?

Daniel.