Video player with analog output?
Hello.
I am trying to figure out if there is a device that would be able to play various formats and resolutions of video (until someone properly recomends me what format should I use for mastering in other thread) and has analog output of S-video and audio, connectors are irrelevant. Built in TBC is welcome. The analog output will be fed to VCR. Also, if there is a device that can work in both ways to playback video file and record analog to digital, that would be perfect. I was considering to use Blackmagic's Intensity, or Teranex and Hyperdeck to record, but what about playback of video masters rendered in PC? But the main goal is to avoid several machines and achive playback of video master and analog out withi one device. Playback from SSD or SD. Built in monitor would be a blessing, but ref output is also usable, maybe HDMI, so as not to use SDI with a converter to HDMI. |
Just use a hard drive media player with HDMI output and a HDMI to S-Video/Audio adapter, The problem is modern contents are 16/9 and S-Video is 4/3 aspect ratio, You will have to compromise, Either cut off the left and right sides of the 16/9 frame to fit it in the 4/3 frame or insert black bars on top and bottom of the frame to make it to 4/3. Squeezing the 16/9 horizontally for watching on an old 4/3 TV is wrong unless it is intended to be stretched again during playback on a wide screen TV.
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Other than the very cheapest ones, newer DVD, Blu-Ray and DVRs often have USB and memory card playback, and typically there are multiple outputs so you can easily hook up a monitor. You just need to find a slightly older one that has analog output, but not too old to lack support for USB and sensible video codecs.
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USB is too slow for uncompressed masters.
As for aspect ratio, I know how to render proper video, either letterbox, anamorphic, or cropped 4:3. I'll have to either lean towards Hyperdeck Mini and Teranex Mini, or player with HDMI and then Intensity. |
I personally use this media player and a HDMI to S-Video adapter to test and repair VCR's, The player plays every format and has a nice built in 480i downscaler over HDMI for analog complaint video signal, the best I've seen so far. I bought it few years ago, they are very expensive now.
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I always forget to mention that I am interested only in PAL-capable equipment. I'll add it to my signature.
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I do service both PAL and NTSC VCR's and my media player is a dual format PAL/NTSC, so does the HDMI to S-Video adapter, Not trying to recommend the player but most if not all media players are dual format in both SD and HD modes, in HD mode the only difference is the frame rate.
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Most might be dual, however the issue is still uncompressed/4:2:2 playback capability.
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In what uncompressed format?
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Appropriate for media player, render settings are refinable depending on player support, some operate on DNxHD and/or ProRes.
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HDMI sucks. Always has, Does now, Always will. The world should be able to do better than transmit video with the cheap/skinny off-spec Ethernet wire used for HDMI cable. Just my experience. |
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HDMI is just a display port and is compatible with 4/3 and 16/9. You hate 16/9 content which I disagree. |
Composite and S-video always carry 4:3 picture, the only way it can carry 16:9 is either letterbox, or anamorphic, still both are 4:3 images. I am not sure about component with 1080 and 720 signal.
HDMI from what i know carries decompressed signal. |
Yes, DVD is not true 16/9 for both NTSC (720x480) and PAL (720x576) that's why it's called anamorphic, meaning the picture is squeezed horizontally to fit a 4:3 or stretched horizontally to fit a widescreen TV.
Full screen DVD's made a lot of sense for old people back then because it was all compatible, 4/3 DVD, composite or RF output, CRT TV and all was dandy, not knowing that full screen DVD's (4/3) loose almost 50% of the original movie frame (a nice video about this), As soon as the widescreen DVD's started to appear when widescreen TV's arrived in an effort to preserve as much as possible of the original movie frame the same folks started to hate anything to do with widescreen because of the black bars on top and bottom of the old TV screen, They though they had it all before and now they are loosing two parts of their screen (an old co-worker really believed in it). So yes there are several modes you can choose without screwing the video frame based on what is the original aspect ratio of the disc and what is the aspect ratio of the TV with some compromises. Component (Y Pb Pr and RGB) can carry a 720ix1280, 720px1280 and 1080ix1920 HD signals, later DVD models used component and HDMI for upscaling purposes only. |
Nonsense. Meanwhile, recording to VHS is indeed limited to 4:3. Period. But DVD and SD-BluRay/AVCHD are 4:3 frames? No way.
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Yes way, unfortunately!
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DVDs are inherently 4:3 SAR, BDs support both 4:3 and 16:9 SAR. Anyway, I was tinking about that 4:3 for VHS recording and I was wondering should I use standard 720x576, or 768x576 because it is 4:3 SAR and 1:1 PAR, I am skeptical whether Intensity would properly adjust DAR for 5:4 SAR to 4:3 DAR. Not to mention I've read tons of stuff on this forum not to use Intensity ever to digitize tapes back to digital, even with proper TBC, guess I'm stuch with DV converter. |
You're right there is no such 720i, it's rather 720x480i. There were some players at the end of the DVD era who used HDMI to upscale to HD I almost bought one about 10 years ago, it almost looked like this, but I decided to go for a Sony PS3 for blu-ray and DVD playback with my brand new then LG LCD HDTV.
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I modified the HDMI/SDI and SDI/S-Video boxes to use one single power adapter by drilling a hole on the side of the Aja housing and fed a power cable thru and glued them together, both have the same voltage and amps, here is some pictures: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...1&d=1567412964 http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...1&d=1567412964 http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...1&d=1567412964 |
Pretty neat setup.
The Intensity Shuttle that was dirt cheap sold yesterday and I wanted to buy it today with VAT invoice, so that's not going to happen, it would have allowed me to feed video via USB to the device and output via S-Video and Audio. I guess I will have to get Hyper Deck Mini and SDI to Analog converter also with Audio output and separate Y and C BNC connectors. What about master file resolution? 768, 720, or should I use HD and let the SDI to analog do the downscaling? Also, do you know if I used widescreen SAR, would it be fed as letterboxed out of S-Video? Or should I specifically make 4:3 SAR with already letterboxed video? |
It's really hard to predict anything since you don't have the player and the converter yet, On my media player I use 4/3 contents and set my media player to Pan and Scan (this also cuts off the sides of a 16/9 picture), I set the output resolution to either PAL (576i) or NTSC (480i) the only two resolutions that the Aja accepts and was the only reason I went with this Aja model, like I said I had problems with HD devices down converting to SD, I set my media player to output an interlaced SD signal, the HDMI/SDI box just passes whatever it receives and the Aja processes the SD signal and converts it to analog for the VCR.
If I want to make an anamorphic VHS/S-VHS tape for recording 16/9 HD contents I set the player to 4/3, the 16/9 frame is squeezed horizontally and recorded that way by the VCR, when played back I set the widescreen TV to stretch the picture horizontally, the result is a true widescreen picture (offcourse with loss of resolution) but it looked pretty darn good even on my 65" OLED TV, S-VHS anamorphic looked way better than DVD since DVD has compression artifacts. I was interested in BlackMagic Intensity Shuttle before for this purpose, I opened up a thread over at videohelp and they advised against it: https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/...eedback-Needed |
So the cheap way of Intensity is rather poor choice.
I'll see on BM forum how will Hyperdeck Mini and Teranex converter work. Or i might try first going with displayport to S-video+audio converter, but this will leave me with a busy PC... However here: http://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/vi...hp?f=3&t=27353 They say it should work. |
S-VIDEO carries analog signals and was developed during the eral of SD TV, which was (for NTSC) 525 interlaced scan lines (485 of which carried image data) at a frame rate of 29.97 frames/sec. This translated to about 63 micro-seconds of image data and retrace/blanking for each scan line. The aspect ratio at which this is displayed depends on how the display (e.g., TV) interprets the signal; e.g., the width of screen used to display each scan line. The common image aspect ratio during the SD era was 4:3, but 16:9 emerged late in that era. TV sets had a horizontal width adjustment that could be used to tweak the display aspect ratio (and horizontal overscan amount).
Toward the end of the analog/VHS era 16:9 WIDE screen displays were introduced. S-VIDEO signal standards allowed encoding a WIDE/NORMAL aspect ratio flag in the chroma signal (as a DC offset). Some TV sets could use this information to properly display the image. FWIW: The AG1980 included the ability to record and output the WIDE code. Enter the digital age: NTSC adopted a 720x480 pixel image format. 720 horizontal samples because it could represent the analog scan line image data with sufficient sampling accuracy. If the image was a 4:3 aspect ratio this meant the pixels had a 0.9 aspect ratio. If the image was 16:9 the pixel aspect ratio was more like 1.2. (PAL figures are different). It is worth noting that with the introduction of the VGA display PCs adopted a square pixel standard (the earlier MDA/HGA/CGA/EGA displays were not square pixels) as an added complication. The more recent Blu-ray and DVD players often can "play" a variety of digital formats. Some (older) models also had S-VIDEO and component video outputs, but they are rare in current production models. IMO your best bet for being able to play a wide range of video formats to both HDMI and analog outputs would be a PC with the right software and an appropriate graphics card. When coupled with appropriate software the Black Magic Designs Intensity series cards can be used to output both HDMI and analog video and audio in both SD and HD formats. They can be used as capture cards as well for SD and HD signals in analog (composite, component, and s-video) and HDMI formats. They support both PAL and NTSC. However, the merits of the various Intensity cards for capture of VHS analog signals is discussed in other threads. A TBC is an important component in an the video chain from analog sources such as VHS/Video8/Hi-8/S-VHS/Beta players and perhaps game boxes. But is is generally not needed in the analog output from a decent digital source playback system. |
Thank you for informations. Have I not mentioned that I do not care about the very existance of NTS(hit)C?
I currently operate a laptop with a Displayport, so maybe AJA's DP to SDI and SDI to S-video+audio would suffice. |
You have to make sure the BM Intensity shuttle does convert a HD signal to SD, According to the thread I posted it doesn't it just monitor HD via HDMI and analog via an analog port.
If you got deep pockets you can try this. |
I already have Ninja2. I read the trick to output analog from Intesity is to turn on downscaling it then comes out as SD from both HDMI and analog.
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I only had a quick play but it looks like the Intensity Shuttle only outputs digital to component. I also tried the Ultrastudio Pro (mentioned over on VideoHelp) and that has an extra flag to "Convert Analog Signals", I was able to get S-Video output from HDMI with that.
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The question is will it have frame artifacts on the analog receiving device such as tearing, flicker ...etc ? I experienced those with HD devices doing a poorly downscaling/interlacing job.
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I'll take a look at the output sometime this week. I also have a CYP cm-388 that downscales from HDMI to s-video, I'll see if I can find that and compare results.
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I did a capture of the output and I'm not seeing signs of flicker or tearing.
UltraStudio Pro downscaling It was a right royal pain to get working though, it's a bit late to go into the details but suffice to say I wouldn't recommend it. I'll dig out that CYP box and give that a go. |
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The frame is stable, I couldn't understand however the black strips on top and bottom of the frame, That would still show up on the tape even with the overscan.
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I still don't know if I should use standard resolution 720x576 or use square pixels 768x576, to make matters more complicated Vegas outputs DV video as 786x576... |
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Playing around with the Ultrastudio I couldn't get it to cross convert from 1080i60 to PAL, it would only downscale to NTSC, I had to switch to 1080i50 on the Mackbook to get PAL output. The Ultrastudio was also very finicky with its settings and I had to keep the bundled capture application Media Express running and switch windows in it for some settings to take effect. On the plus side it was able to continue working with the USB cable disconnected, but didn't appear to retain the settings once the power was off. I've not found the CYP box yet, it's in cupboard or in a box under a pile of boxes somewhere. Hopefully I should be able to dig it out this evening. |
It seems like a pain in the arse to use Blackmagic no wonder why I was told to stay away from it.
SFtheGreat, Why does it matter? If you will be using a HD or UHD to analog downscaler then it will do the conversion on its own from any resolution. If you are making the videos yourself then just keep the same resolution you were working with before and let the converter do the work. |
I made three captures from the CYP box, these were a lot more straight forward than using the Ultrastudio Pro.
Inception Blu-ray Video Essentials Macbook The X-Capture-1 pre-amp is set to defaults, the captures are rather dark. The Macbook wanted to output at 1600x1200, which worked fine, but switching to 1080p gave the video more height but squashed the widescreen image to 4:3. The colours are out of wack though, not sure what's going on with that. Any colour setting I tried just reverted back to the washed out picture, especially evident on the Macbook's desktop. |
Ignore what I said about the Macbook video colour, I'd left f.lux enabled. :smack:
Macbook corrected |
The mabook has even bigger black bars on top and bottom of the frame, The first capture is letter boxed so it's hard to tell, The second capture looked close to full screen, still has tiny black bands. try native 4/3 SD materials like cartoons I bet you would get a perfect full screen.
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