Standards converter rebuild.

[ppppenguin]

In the future analogue RGB and YCbCr will be rare in HD systems. All interconenctions will be HDMI for domestic systems or SDI for professional. I believe that HD satellite receivers and blu-ray players are not allowed to have HD analogue outputs. This is because of copy protection.

HDMI would be an ideal input for a standards converter except for the HDCP copy protection. This causes severe problems for any small scale manufacturer who wants to make something with an HDMI input.

If HDMI (strictly speaking HDCP) is commonly hacked then this is a possible solution. But it is not strictly legal.

[evingar]

Originally Posted by ppppenguin

This causes severe problems for any small scale manufacturer who wants to make something with an HDMI input.

If HDMI (strictly speaking HDCP) is commonly hacked then this is a possible solution. But it is not strictly legal.

It was a few years ago, but we hit into this problem headlong. We had designed a up / down resolution converter (HDSDI), but market research lead us to believe that a useful feature would be an HDMI port.

To cut a long story short, we had to shelve the idea due to stringent licensing conditions - At that time, the hardware was tightly held and it was difficult / impossible to get the ICs unless you complied with the full licensing conditions.... and signed in triplicate in your own blood to that effect!!! I'm not sure what the situation is like now, but given the vested interests in maintaining copy protection in the digital domain, I would be surprised if there was an easy way round it.

[German Dalek]

Hi Murphyv310!

What's a RT Russel converter for 819 lines?

Best regards,

German Dalek

[ppppenguin]

Originally Posted by German Dalek

What's a RT Russel converter for 819 lines?

Richard Russell designed a programmable test card generator which is no longer available. It is basically an address counter, a large flash memory and a DAC. It can be programmed with arbitrary data and he supplied software to support it. http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/tccgen/download.html

Richard Russell has never designed a standards converter.

PS: Thinking about MurphyV310's comment about an 819 picture from an RTR testcard being sharper than from an Aurora. This seems unlikely since I am pretty sure the RTR generator uses a 12MHz pixel clock so the video bandwidth is inherently less than 6MHz. The Aurora uses a 13.5MHz pixel clock for the 625 input and an even higher clock rate (over 17MHz) for the 819 output.

[Amraduk]

Hello Jeffrey,

Originally Posted by ppppenguin

Thinking about MurphyV310's comment about an 819 picture from an RTR testcard being sharper than from an Aurora. This seems unlikely since I am pretty sure the RTR generator uses a 12MHz pixel clock so the video bandwidth is inherently less than 6MHz. The Aurora uses a 13.5MHz pixel clock for the 625 input and an even higher clock rate (over 17MHz) for the 819 output.

I can confirm that the RTR generator does, indeed, use a 12MHz pixel clock.

Regards,

Dave.