Sony DTTV recorder

Paul D.Smith wrote:
TOT but expect PCs to get quieter. Pentium 4s (aka "room heaters")
were ridiculously inefficient and produced lots of heat, thus big,
noisy fans. The newer multi-core Intels run at lower clock rates,
more than compensated for by the dual core and better architecture. The
result produces less heat for the same performance so should
require less cooling.

Unfortunately, this outbreak of sanity in the central processing world has
yet to reach the graphics processing world. There, GPU power consumption
continues to increase at an alarming rate, necessitating ever more elaborate
cooling systems and bigger power supplies. The 1000 watt PC PSU is already
with us. It'll get worse before it gets better.

Pyriform wrote:
Paul D.Smith wrote:
TOT but expect PCs to get quieter. Pentium 4s (aka "room heaters")
were ridiculously inefficient and produced lots of heat, thus big,
noisy fans. The newer multi-core Intels run at lower clock rates,
more than compensated for by the dual core and better architecture. The
result produces less heat for the same performance so should
require less cooling.

Unfortunately, this outbreak of sanity in the central processing world has
yet to reach the graphics processing world. There, GPU power consumption
continues to increase at an alarming rate, necessitating ever more elaborate
cooling systems and bigger power supplies. The 1000 watt PC PSU is already
with us. It'll get worse before it gets better.


I was about to add something along those lines - it's just bonkers:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000662.html

Rob

In article
. co.uk.invalid, Alan
Pemberton wrote:
Jim Lesurf wrote:
[snip]

With the Sony, all the Philips recordings played back in 4:3,
regardless of what mode the broadcast was in when recorded.

Sounds to me as though the Philips is encoding a WSS signal on line 23.
This is part of the active field and should survive MPEG coding and
decoding. But another DVD player might strip it off.

This has been making me wonder if it would be best if I focussed on looking
at another Philips DVD recorder when I want a replacement. Perhaps this is
a 'European' thing where they regard this kind of feature via RGB scart as
'standard' but it may have passed by the consciousness of japanese
makers...

The annoying thing at present is that my Philips recorder 'mostly' works
well. Most of the time it records and replays excellent pictures and sound,
and has the features I want. It is also essentially silent in operation.
But it has two annoying habits.

1) Sometimes seems to stutter or pause when replaying discs.

2) Occasionally fouls up a recording.

(1) sometimes causes lip synch to be lost. Halting playback and restarting
restores this. Problems seem more common with some brands ('2entertain'
ones for the BBC seem particularly prone) than others.

Perhaps I should be prepared to spend another hour on the phone, trying toi
get the attention of Philips service people. Maybe there is a newer version
of the firmware that will help. I tend to suspect that (1) is a problem the
player has with physically being able to track/focus/read some discs at
times. But maybe updated firmware might alter the transport control
parameters and help.

Does anyone have one of the current Philips recorders (without a hard
disc)? Do they have external fans?

For that matter, does anyone here ever service Philips DVD recorders or
know if replacement transports can be obtained? Might be interesting to
experiment... :-)

Slainte,

Jim

--
Electronics http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm
Audio Misc http://www.st-and.demon.co.uk/AudioMisc/index.html
Armstrong Audio http://www.st-and.demon.co.uk/Audio/armstrong.html
Barbirolli Soc. http://www.st-and.demon.co.uk/JBSoc/JBSoc.html

Alan Pemberton wrote:

If I record something where the ratio switches during broadcast,
then upon replay the recording causes the TV to act just as it did
during the broadcast.

With the Sony, all the Philips recordings played back in 4:3,
regardless of what mode the broadcast was in when recorded.

Sounds to me as though the Philips is encoding a WSS signal on line
23. This is part of the active field and should survive MPEG coding
and decoding. But another DVD player might strip it off.

Another explanation might be that the Philips (possibly) records the
alternating aspect ratio information in the sequence headers of a
continuous MPEG stream. (Should be easy to check if you rip the MPEG
streams off the DVD and analyse them on a computer.)

Since changing the aspect ratio in mid-title is against the DVD
specifications it is plausible that many DVD players will just ignore
any aspect ratio changes indicated in the sequence headers. Philips, on
the other hand, might have deliberately made their recorder/player to
respect them.

--
znark

Jim Lesurf wrote:

Sounds to me as though the Philips is encoding a WSS signal on
line 23. This is part of the active field and should survive
MPEG coding and decoding. But another DVD player might strip
it off.

This has been making me wonder if it would be best if I focussed
on looking at another Philips DVD recorder when I want a replacement.
Perhaps this is a 'European' thing where they regard this kind of
feature via RGB scart as 'standard'

AFAIK, line 23 WSS signal was originally devised by the Germans for
their "PALplus" widescreen extension/enhancement to the PAL standard.
PALplus as such is a pretty dead standard by now, but the WSS signalling
developed for it lives on, and is now commonly used with "regular"
625/50 analog signals as well. The whole thing is officially defined in
ETSI EN 300 294:

http://pda.etsi.org/pda/AQuery.asp?q...NG=EN%20300%20
294&qSEARCH_Type=EXACT

Intersil has also published another PDF which describes the same system:

http://www.intersil.com/data/an/an9716.pdf

Line 23 WSS signal should survive all video signal types: composite,
s-video, RGB, and component. It is not tied to RGB SCART only. Even VHS
VCRs can record and play back the line 23 WSS signal. (They do not need
to "support" it in any specific way; they'll just record it, blindly.)

There is another, simpler WSS signalling standard that only works
through the SCART connector. This signalling method is based on setting
and measuring the voltage level of pin 8. You can find more inforemation
about that method in here (see the last table on the page and the "Video
status" row on it):

http://utopia.knoware.nl/users/epreb...ision/Engineer
ing/SCART.html

Some devices only support one or the other of the WSS methods. Some
others may support both. Since it is not often obvious which WSS methods
are supported by the end that sends the signal and which WSS methods the
supported at the receiving end, this can make things a bit confusing -
unless you actually test for the presence of the signals.

The presence of the SCART pin 8 WSS signal can be tested for with a
multimeter.

The presence of the line 23 WSS signal can be tested for with a video
capture card (for example, with a regular analogue tv tuner card with
additional composite or s-video inputs) since the captured frames, when
viewed on a computer screen, will show you the whole "active" area of
the video signal, all the way to the edges.

If you capture a frame from video signal that has the line 23 WSS line
embedded in it, you should see the WSS bits as an alternating
black/white pattern on the top row, like this:

http://www.saunalahti.fi/znark/mtv3-halloween-owl.jpg

(Note: that sample picture has an additional one-pixel black border
around it to make the WSS line more visible.)

but it may have passed by the consciousness of japanese makers...

I have not done any extensive tests, but at least Sony seems to support
Line 23 WSS signalling on all their consumer camcorders. (They already
do that on a DCR-TRV210E which I bought back in 1998 or 1999, and later
models would seem to have that feature as well.)

--
znark

Jukka Aho wrote:

Another explanation might be that the Philips (possibly) records the
alternating aspect ratio information in the sequence headers of a
continuous MPEG stream. (Should be easy to check if you rip the MPEG
streams off the DVD and analyse them on a computer.)

Since changing the aspect ratio in mid-title is against the DVD
specifications it is plausible that many DVD players will just ignore
any aspect ratio changes indicated in the sequence headers. Philips, on
the other hand, might have deliberately made their recorder/player to
respect them.

Which also perhaps explains why any attempt to make a copy (using Nero
or Roxio on my PC) of a mixed format DVD recorded on my Sony 710 DVR
results in a failure. DVDs of one AR or another copy fine.

Mark Carver wrote:

Since changing the aspect ratio in mid-title is against the DVD
specifications it is plausible that many DVD players will just
ignore any aspect ratio changes indicated in the sequence headers.
Philips, on the other hand, might have deliberately made their
recorder/player to respect them.

Which also perhaps explains why any attempt to make a copy
(using Nero or Roxio on my PC) of a mixed format DVD recorded
on my Sony 710 DVR results in a failure. DVDs of one AR or
another copy fine.

You can (legally) use multiple aspect ratios on a single DVD if you
split the content in multiple Video Title Sets. This can be done in
advanced DVD authoring applications, such as DVD-Lab Pro or Sonic
Scenarist (of which the former is just expensive and the latter
grotesquely so.)

Simple and cheap "My First DVD!" style authoring applications will
generally restrict you to one Video Title Set only.

A free alternative with multiple VTS support is "dvdauthor" [1] but I
have not tried that one myself so I don't know much about it.
"dvdauthor" is a command-line app, but there are GUI frontends for it.

_____

[1] http://dvdauthor.sourceforge.net/

--
znark