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Television Standards Converters, Modulators etc Standards converters, modulators anything else for providing signals to vintage televisions.

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Old 17th Oct 2015, 8:13 pm   #1
German Dalek
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Default Full HD to French 819 lines - question dedicated to Aurora

Hi,

I think this question was a part of a former discussion.
Because of the attack of HD television I like to ask for a solution. As far as I know, there is software available
to downsize Full HD to standard television size to playback with 625 lines and 4/3 ratio.

Just to get the maximum out of a French or Belgian TV set it is necessary to use the high definition.

Germany has started to replay old programs converted with 16/9 ratio by cutting the top and the bottom.
HD aired programs are visible as a small 4/3 picture in reduced quality on standard satellite receivers/TVs.

And now the question, are there any converters, Aurora or others, available to solve this problem?
Anybody with experience?

Best regards,
German Dalek
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Old 18th Oct 2015, 6:06 am   #2
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Default Re: Full HD to French 819 lines - question dedicated to Aurora

It's an interesting question because those in the rest of Europe would probably like to know what the French were seeing on their TV sets with 819 lines...for example was the picture remarkably improved over other systems?
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Old 18th Oct 2015, 9:32 am   #3
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Default Re: Full HD to French 819 lines - question dedicated to Aurora

Good morning,

I am to young to got the chance making experience with that system.
Belgium stopped in 1976 with their 5.5 MHz 819 lines AM sound system.

France ended their wide bandwidth television in 1981.
see: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/819_lignes
(no english version)

In the beginning I wanted to change my 1,2,3,4, sets to 625 lines.
But with some sets it doesn`t work well.

In between I have 5 belgian 819 lines TVs for french reception only (Lille).
Belgium started the production of television (1949-1953, summer) before
they started their own 2 standards in fall 1953.
I count more than 20 french TVs with the 819 lines standard.
Most of them are roundies.
But it should be an awful work to transfer them with an excessive change
in the wiring.
So I decided for an Aurora to upscale a 625 lines picture.

From an elderly TV repairman I heard that these 819 lines pictures were
looking "line-free".

Yes, we in Germany had in the beginning sixties TVs with a line-free support.
But because the production stopped after a few years, it couldn`t has
been the big shot!
see:
http://translate.google.com/translat...L6etlDWpVTqH3g

What a luck, I have a good big file of good 625 lines broadcastings collected.
But in our days it is getting harder and harder to collect 4/3 ratio
pictures.
And for historic reasons and my personal interests I like to have now
a Full HD > 819 lines downscale converter!

Regards,
German Dalek
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Old 19th Oct 2015, 12:25 am   #4
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Default Re: Full HD to French 819 lines - question dedicated to Aurora

Quote:
Originally Posted by cheerfulcharlie View Post
It's an interesting question because those in the rest of Europe would probably like to know what the French were seeing on their TV sets with 819 lines...for example was the picture remarkably improved over other systems?
The 819 line system might be regarded as HD today, 770i, I suppose. However getting IF strips with required bandwidth of around 11MHz was difficult and required an extra valve stage. Most manufacturers didn't bother and used normal 5Mhz wide strips, so though the vertical resolution was good the horizontal was very poor. The Belgium version was only 5MHz wide anyway.
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Old 20th Oct 2015, 12:51 pm   #5
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Default Re: Full HD to French 819 lines - question dedicated to Aurora

I watched 819-line TV in Lille in the 'seventies. I'm not sure if it was French or Belgian, but the vertical resolution was astounding. The set was of around 17", and (unsurprisingly) resembled the PYE 'Continental' CTM17 I remembered from childhood.
I remember wondering why the French had decided to go backover.
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Old 20th Oct 2015, 3:31 pm   #6
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Default Re: Full HD to French 819 lines - question dedicated to Aurora

Unfortunately, standards conversion of broadcast HD video by an Aurora is unlikely to ever be feasible. Broadcast HD video is always presented as a digital data stream via e.g. a HDMI interface with HDCP copy protection / encryption applied. See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-b...ent_Protection

The same applies to BluRay.
The costs involved in adding any receiver devices and paying an annual licence fee to allow HDCP protected video to be converted would be prohibitive for a low volume product such as an Aurora.

John
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Old 20th Oct 2015, 4:32 pm   #7
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Default Re: Full HD to French 819 lines - question dedicated to Aurora

There were CRT sets made with HDMI inputs. You could use most of the guts of one of those to get the analogue RGB video (from the CRT grid drives) and the timing (from the line and field scans). Then you could downscale it to whatever standard you like.
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Old 20th Oct 2015, 5:14 pm   #8
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Default Re: Full HD to French 819 lines - question dedicated to Aurora

There is another very widely used HD digital video standard: HD-SDI. It's used in the broadcast industry and by CCTV cameras, uses a single coax cable, and can be run over large distances unlike HDMI. There exist converters from HDMI to HD-SDI, though they won't output copy-protected material on the SDI output.

If a version of the Aurora supported an HD-SDI input, it would be possible to set up vintage HD (or 819-line) demonstrations relatively easily. It doesn't solve the copy-protection problem though.

Chris
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Old 20th Oct 2015, 6:34 pm   #9
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Default Re: Full HD to French 819 lines - question dedicated to Aurora

Hi,
sorry to hijack this thread. I just wondered what means of conversion the French would have used to convert from 819 to 625 ?
since my much earlier posts about modulators [ sorry if they weren't helpful ] I have now acquired [ not quite planned ! however ] a couple of multistandard sets.
So a VHF modulator would now be useful.
regards Peter B
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Old 20th Oct 2015, 10:27 pm   #10
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Default Re: Full HD to French 819 lines - question dedicated to Aurora

Quote:
Originally Posted by cmjones01 View Post
There is another very widely used HD digital video standard: HD-SDI. It's used in the broadcast industry and by CCTV cameras, uses a single coax cable, and can be run over large distances unlike HDMI. There exist converters from HDMI to HD-SDI, though they won't output copy-protected material on the SDI output
Chris

The issue is that it is effectively forbidden to provide either digital or analogue HD video content in the clear from broadcast or other copyrighted sources in a domestic environment. Hence the requirement to either output nothing or down-convert to SD resolution with devices such as the HDMI to SDI converters you mention or a BluRay player with analogue outputs.

John
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Old 20th Oct 2015, 11:41 pm   #11
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Default Re: Full HD to French 819 lines - question dedicated to Aurora

Quote:
Originally Posted by winston_1 View Post
However getting IF strips with required bandwidth of around 11MHz was difficult and required an extra valve stage. Most manufacturers didn't bother and used normal 5Mhz wide strips, so though the vertical resolution was good the horizontal was very poor. The Belgium version was only 5MHz wide anyway.
Some clues as to French 819-line receiver IF bandwidths, at least in the single-standard days, may be gleaned from the attached Wireless World item, 1959 October.

It would appear that at the time, vision bandwidth was a typically published parameter, with 9 MHz being common, and some examples at 10 MHz. (The transmitted vision bandwidth was, I think, 10.4 MHz.)

In the early colour era, with dual-standard receivers, the excerpt from Carnt & Townsend, Volume 2 (1969) provides an indication. Apparently 9 MHz was the norm on 819-lines for more expensive receivers, whilst lower-cost receivers used the same bandwidth on 819- as on 625-lines, whatever that happened to be. 6 MHz was then the transmitted 625-line bandwidth, but I suspect that receivers typically had a bit less than that. Possibly dual-standard colour receiver practice was carried over from monochrome dual-standard receiver practice of the early 1960s.

The Belgian choice to shoe-horn the 819-line system into a 7 MHz CCIR channel, with 5 MHz vision bandwidth, was as far as I know in part due to the requirement that the transmitters had to be able to handle both 625-line and 819-line incoming signals, even though they were nominally assigned to one or the other. Whether, with the Belgian four-standard receivers, much effort was made to provide a wider vision bandwidth with System E than with System F is unknown. One suspects that there would have been some minor gain in that the 33.4 MHz sound carrier trap could be switched out on System E.

Cheers,
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Old 21st Oct 2015, 10:21 am   #12
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Default Re: Full HD to French 819 lines - question dedicated to Aurora

Quote:
Originally Posted by jjl View Post
The issue is that it is effectively forbidden to provide either digital or analogue HD video content in the clear from broadcast or other copyrighted sources in a domestic environment.
Presumably only if the broadcast is copy protected - as far as I can tell, it isn't in NZ. I can record 1080i from the free to air HD channels, and then just transcode the WTV files to a more useful format. Nothing fancy, just Windows 7 Media Center (it's the only PC in the house not being upgraded to 10!) recording off one of four DVB-T tuners (all Hauppauge, two single and one double) and converted with MCE Buddy.

Are all UK channels actually copy protected? If not, you could easily just use a tuner card and output something the Aurora could pick up - here the PC is HDMI to the TV, but VGA can easily 1080 or 720.
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Old 21st Oct 2015, 11:37 am   #13
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Default Re: Full HD to French 819 lines - question dedicated to Aurora

It's not necessarily the case that the over the air video is encrypted, what is the case is that HD video data transported over HDMI to e.g. a television has to be protected with HDCP. It is forbidden to record or perform analogue conversion of this video data in its HD form and present the recording or whatever in a user accessible form, other than a display. It is not possible to do anything meaningful at all with the HDCP protected data unless the receiving device has a HDCP decoder with valid decryption keys.
UK HD satellite receivers, set top boxes etc. have HDMI outputs with HDCP, so the above rules these out as a source of video for a notional HD Aurora.

Using something like arjoll's setup sounds feasible, it does sound against the spirit of HDCP though

John
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Old 21st Oct 2015, 12:06 pm   #14
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Default Re: Full HD to French 819 lines - question dedicated to Aurora

HDCP -- or for that matter, any copy-prevention scheme* -- is inherently flawed anyway. It's like enclosing the decryption key in the same envelope as the encrypted letter. And anyway, the playback device has no way to know that there isn't a camera pointing at the screen .....

It will be hacked wide-open sooner or later, if it hasn't already.

Still, if you know anyone who still has such a rare beast as a HDMI-capable CRT TV set, tell them not to scrap it! It could be a useful weapon in the struggle!

* Possibly excepting systems based on performing the final decryption in the viewer's brain, under the influence of a mind-altering drug; I am not convinced that this is practicable outside a laboratory.
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Old 22nd Oct 2015, 12:43 am   #15
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Default Re: Full HD to French 819 lines - question dedicated to Aurora

Quote:
Originally Posted by jjl View Post
It's not necessarily the case that the over the air video is encrypted, what is the case is that HD video data transported over HDMI to e.g. a television has to be protected with HDCP.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jjl View Post
Using something like arjoll's setup sounds feasible, it does sound against the spirit of HDCP though
HDCP isn't an integral part of HDMI, it's an add-on for digital interfaces like HDMI, DP and DVI. Not all HDMI is protected via HDCP, and what I was meaning was that there is content out there on HDMI that isn't protected like this.

Ignoring the HDMI issue, analogue RGB signals on the DE15 connector on the back of my media centre are unencrypted 1080p60. No HDCP to be found. And the .wtv files that Windows Media Center creates don't appear to be encrypted either.
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Old 23rd Oct 2015, 6:28 pm   #16
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Default Re: Full HD to French 819 lines - question dedicated to Aurora

I thought Karen O had cracked HDMI ages ago?
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Old 24th Oct 2015, 12:17 am   #17
Karen O
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Default Re: Full HD to French 819 lines - question dedicated to Aurora

I cannot lay claim to that particular accomplishment! I have an HDMI to SD converter to defend against the future but that's as far as my HDMI involvement goes.

I can't walk on water either, but I have made an elixir that guarantees lifelong immortality

Last edited by Karen O; 24th Oct 2015 at 12:18 am. Reason: Spelling error
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Old 26th Oct 2015, 7:46 pm   #18
Karen O
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Default Re: Full HD to French 819 lines - question dedicated to Aurora

A while ago I mentioned that a friend had about a dozen of the attached, which he salvaged from scrapped TVs. Perhaps this started the myth that I had cracked HDMI?

It is clearly a dual HDMI input board. I had rather hoped to find some information on this board and maybe confirm my suspicion that the inter-board connecter carries decrypted raw video.

Sadly, I've not been able to find any information to confirm that.
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Old 30th Oct 2015, 12:25 pm   #19
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Default Re: Full HD to French 819 lines - question dedicated to Aurora

Karen,

have you found a circuit diagram for the originating TV set that could be interpretted to discover the connector details?

Such a sets is the Sanyo CES32WSD7-B
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Old 30th Oct 2015, 12:47 pm   #20
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Default Re: Full HD to French 819 lines - question dedicated to Aurora

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Originally Posted by Karen O View Post
It is clearly a dual HDMI input board. I had rather hoped to find some information on this board and maybe confirm my suspicion that the inter-board connecter carries decrypted raw video.

Sadly, I've not been able to find any information to confirm that.
Karen

This board would provide an unencrypted digital video output. The Sii9023 shortform datasheet here shows that it provides a 24 bit parallel output with syncs, dot clock etc.
Unfortunately, gaining access to any of Silicon Image's HDMI / HDCP full datasheets requires a non-disclosure agreement to be in place.

John
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