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Old 13th Oct 2020, 3:26 pm   #43
Semir_DE
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Join Date: Jan 2019
Location: Heusenstamm, (Near Frankfurt am Main), Germany.
Posts: 59
Default Re: My 819 line French TV project

Dear All,

Here is a short update to this project. A nice friend of mine who has a CNC machine kindly made me some really fancy front and back plates for my VGA 2 RF converter.

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I am planning to make one for the 405 line system as well. This one is for the French system. It uses custom made crystals for channel F3. Since I have crystals for UK channel 1 I will make a VGA 2 RF for that too.

Another update is related to the 819 line modeline. I have created one that has a 4:3 aspect ratio. This is easier to set up on more modern 4.3 TVs an VLC:

Modeline "984x738" 25.066 984 998 1060 1224 738 744 744 819 -hsync +vsync Interlace

It has a slightly lower clock rate, so I am not sure if it will work with Intel GMA graphics. It is working very well on my Nvidia card.

I have also found out that the Nvidia 710 card can handle triple outputs, so I now have the following setup:

- SVGA PC monitor for control on DVI
- HDMI to Video converter on HDMI this provides a PAL output
- 405/441/819 (selectable in Linux graphics management) monochrome output on VGA

The "monitors" are lined up horizontally, the arrangement is from left to right:

PC monitor - HDMI (PAL) "monitor" - VGA (405/819) "monitor"

So I can just drag the player window to the desired screen.

Audio output can be selected in VLC to be either HDMI (PAL) or Analog (405/819) modulator.

If I run two instances of VLC I can now output PAL and 405 (or 819) at the same time. Unfortunately there does not seem to be a way to synchronize two VLC players, so I have to do that by hand which is a little cumbersome.

I am also thinking of a possibility to create a 3D file with identical left and right images and then play them in one VLC. If I could drag one image to each monitor this might work for simultaneous output. I would like to have this for demonstration purposes to show the differences of the standards side by side.

I use this setup sometimes to watch old movies. Yesterday I watched "Sabrina" a classic with Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in glorious 819. This black and white film was shot in 4:3 so it is ideal for watching on an old set.

The original is from a Blu Ray and I converted it to 1440x1080 25p using "Handbrake" a very neat program that can shrink the very large BD file of ~30GB to about 3GB without any visible impact on image quality. "Handbrake" does not decrypt any discs it merely converts video formats and can change the resolution in the process as well. It uses all available CPU cores almost to 100% and thus slows down the PC notably this is probably why the program is called "handbrake"

Cheers

Semir
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