CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

[gnnash]

Alright, I'll admit I was wrong. I played with the stripper again a little more last night. When plugging it in between my receiver and HDQ, I got all sorts of noise and dropouts.

I hit OK on the remote for the HDQ, to see what resolution it was getting. To my surprise, it was running with an input of 1080p / 60! The poor HDQ was trying its best to display something wayyy outside of its specifications, and must have really been working those DVI input chips hard.

After a bit of fiddling with the EDID, and a sequenced power up (turn everything off but the HDQ, then turn on the stripper to read the HDQ's EDID, turn on the receiver to read the EDID from the stripper, and then the blu-ray player to read the EDID from there), the stripper worked flawlessly, as my Blu-Ray player outputted 1080i on the menus, and 1080p/24 during movie playback.

So, the metal-cased version of the stripper does indeed work well for me, allowing me to output HDCP-protected material through the analog outs of my Lumagen HDQ.

[stridsvognen]

Thats good to hear..

[CIR Engineering]

[gnnash]

Unfortunately no, I've played with the settings, and 24 Hz is only ever active when a 24Hz source is playing. The main GUI, setup screens, and online content apps seem to run at 30/60Hz. 24Hz is only an option that I can enable or disable on the player.

Fortunately the lumagen is the only thing that has to re-sync, and it's so fast to do so, I never even notice the change.

I intend to get a harmony remote eventually for this all, right now it's all in a state of constant change. I'll play some more after work tonight, hopefully the cheap splitter/stripper captures the EDID on its powerup, and maintains it, given the nature of how it seems to work. Since the stripper is always plugged in, maybe this will no longer be an issue. Until the power goes out, that is!

[Nashou66]

On the hDQ set the EDID to only accept 1080p24 for that input. the BD player will alway now default to that. So Shut off all other resolutions with a NO and 1080p@24 with a YES.

Athanasios

[gnnash]

I believe I tried this before and it then outputted 480p when in the menus and such instead of 1080i, but I could have been turning things on in the wrong order. I'll try again tonight.

[fragzero]

Afraid this does not work for all bluray players

[stridsvognen]

Yeah many players dont accept the Edit, like the Denon machines cant output 422 no matter how i put the radiance edit.

O cant wait to get my HDQ and test it with the splitter..

[Nashou66]

I like the LG BH 100 dual format player I use with my HDQ for some reason when I do as I said it tricks the LG to allow 480i out as well which is almost like having an SD SDI out. It works for both LG BH xxx units i have and the Oppo BP83.

Athanasios

[fragzero]

[stridsvognen]

[CIR Engineering]

[stridsvognen]

[CIR Engineering]

[stridsvognen]

i played with mine on the HDQ, and it worked fine, but i prefer not to use the HDQ RGBHV out-.. looks like it wont handle the 1080P 60 hz bandwidth to well.

[CIR Engineering]

So I haven't used or measured it yet, but I just took it apart. They are using the Explore EP9132 HDMI splitter, ST 8S003F3P6 microcontroller for "HDCP," and the Atmel 2C08N for storing EDID data. The only thing really of interest here is the Atmel because they are easy chips to write with a basic EEPROM programmer and thus can be customized. If you are having trouble with EDID and this splitter it would not be difficult to modify. I used the same chips when I was developing the 3D for CRT to force sources to recognize my CRT as 3D capable.

The solder flow is low quality, but better than I might have guessed for $15.

I'll do some testing in a bit if I have time today. Here are some photos.





craigr

[CIR Engineering]

All right, this thing is flipping awesome, I love it. Everything works nearly perfectly with this little splitter.

1:1 Pixel Mapping
Black Level
White Level
Passes RGB, YCbCr 444, YCbCr 422
Passes 3D
Passes Custom Resolutions

I can't find anything to complain about. The only minor issue is that the color decoder is not perfect. It is the closest with YCbCr 422, but it is very close with all types.

The device does report as HDCP compliant to the source and then strips HDCP from the output

I ran this splitter with 1080i on the input, 1080p 60Hz on the input, 1080p 24Hz on the input, 1080p 24Hz 3DFP on the input. I ran 1080p 60Hz on the output, 1080p 72Hz on the output, and 720p 96Hz on the output and it worked perfectly with all. My 720p 96Hz is using 195MHz digital bandwidth so it's really pushing the limits of HDMI and the thing passed it!

There is no default EDID on the splitter so you can forget what I said about reprogramming the EDID. The splitter seems to capture the EDID data from the display device (output) and then emulates (copies) it to the input of the splitter. This is actually typical behavior from a splitter and most likely it will favor output 1 or 2 for EDID capture depending on how the builder programmed it.

Something kind of cool... With a minor modification to the board, the splitter could actually be used to capture and then emulate EDID from any display device or a Lumagen. This would be done by enabling write protect to the Atmel 24C08 on pin six by connecting to VCC. A simple jumper could be installed to switch pin 7 between VCC and ground.

This splitter will probably also make an excellent HDMI extender since it can handle such high frequencies as well. So this splitter is a splitter, EDID emulator, and extender all for $15.

Here are the technical readouts from the splitter to my QD780.

Running Oppo BDP-103 to Splitter to QD780:

QD780 screen shown.

Running Oppo BDP-103 to Splitter to QD780:

QD780 screen shown.

Running Oppo BDP-103 to Splitter to QD780:

QD780 screen shown.

Running Oppo BDP-103 to Splitter to QD780:

QD780 screen shown.

Running Oppo BDP-103 to Splitter to QD780:

QD780 screen shown.

Running QD780 to Splitter to Lumagen:

QD780 screen shown.

Running Lumagen @ 195MHz to Splitter to Display:

G90 screen shown.

craigr

[stridsvognen]

Looks nice Craig..

Maybe you understand why some think its a quite nice toy to have around.. Specialy with the price in mind.

I consider it the chepest way to conect a blu ray player to a VP and output RGBHV analog, for sure a nice start to anyone with a cheep CRT projector and a old VP with RGBHV out.

[CIR Engineering]

[stridsvognen]