Theo Verelst Local Diary Page 69
I've ditched the usual header for the
moment, I think it doesn't help much anyhow.
This page is copyrighted by me, and may be read and transferred by any
means only as a whole and including the references to me. I
guess that's normal, the writer can chose that of course, maybe
Ill make some creative commons stuff one day, of course I have
made Free and Open Source software and even hardware designs available!
This
page is under construction, so check back later, too.
11 Mar, 2009
T
What HD materials have I tested my system with
Maybe one day one or two of these films and documentaries and
animations can be a little bit played with the Sony blueray of yours,
maybe on a good TV...
Uehm, no man, sorry, all the following materials have been played with
great succes on both the 720 DLP beamer with 106 inch screen and the 28 inch 500cd 3 MS TFT
1080p monitor, so at least twice
Rented Blurays, played on the latest upgrade supplied Sony S550 player,
with 7.1 analog outputs, however with a Lexicon Omega DA converter
connected to the tos output at 96kHz/24 bit connected for the main
stereo channels, with the surround sound essentially being made quadro
from 5.1 (I´ve not 7.1 tried yet but I could play that too with
two extra speakers connected, I´ve done that with a computer at
times) where I filter my own sub (because it´s a bit bigger than
most bluray sub channels are meant for, and the seperation filters for
the in total 5 stereo surround amps are of my own analog making).
Speakers are: front in more or less equally sided triangle, and
rear/side: a little angle to the rear, but mostly side, as specified by
the player (can be used in the back like in quadro, too, which I would
a preference for). The front is tri-amped, the rear bi-amped, and the
Watts are, well, a touch too much when I need it hihi ... Lets say over
half a kilowatt true RMS sine, continuous, with the sub alone having a
500 Watts maximum allowed (which the driving amp is maybe (..) not
totally up to, but easily a few hundred sine watts).
In random order I have succesfully and mostly satisfactory and often at
some amount of cinema level played the following HD materials, meaning
at least 1080 material of actual HD quality, not upscaled progressive
standard dvds, no TV or digital TV or satellite but usually more than
20 megabits per second mpeg2/mpeg4/h264/vc-1 etc actual 1080i or 1080p
discs, with the HD-DVD logo and red box color or the Blu-ray Disc logo and blue
box color AND NOTHING LESS. Well, just to make sure. That´s not
all the HD things I´ve played, I record my own HD with the Sony
HC-3 already for years, and I download internet sources, which are
often 720p or even better (film leaders like james bond or so, and at
vimeo there are a lot of HD movies of at least actual 720 resolution,
but the following are all real HD discs, in mostly random order:
Blu-ray:
=====
1 The Enforcer
2 Bullitt
3 The Grift
4 The Usual Suspects
5 Joshua - Devils Child (not in blu ray)
6 The Merchant of Venice
7 The Aviator
8 Ghost Rider
9 Street Kings (not in blu ray)
10 The Getaway
11 Walk the Line
12 Natural Born Killers
13 Andrea Bocelli - Vivere - Live in Toscany
includes Laura Pausini appearance
14 A Clockwork Orange - Kubrick
15 Dirty Harry
16 The Dead Pool
17 The Incredible Hulk (Hulk 2)
18 Enter the Dragon - Bruce Lee
19 Legends - Eric Clapton, Steve Gadd, Marcus
Miller, Joe Sample, David Sanborn
20 The Black Crowes, The Fillmore, San Francisco
21 Rambo, The Fight Continues
22 When we left Earth, The Nasa missions
23 Jumper
24 The Legend of Zorro
25 Zoo
26 xXx - Vin Diesel
27 50 First Dates
28 Black Hawk Down
29 Gothika
30 Sudokia (a demo game only)
31 Ice Age
32 2001: a spac odyssey - Kubrick
33 Cars Pixar
34 Ratatouille Pixar
35 Wall E Pixar
36 Pixar Short Films
Collection
37 The life of Brian - Monty Python
38 Clone Wars - Lucas Film
HD-DVD
39 Arizona Dream - Depp, Lewis, Dunaway
40 An American Werewolf In London - Landis
41 Flyboys
42 The Graduate - Bancroft, Hoffman, Ross
43 Backdraft
44 Army in the shadows
45 The Getaway - Steve McQueen
46 Underworld - Beckinsale
47 Lord of War - Nicolas Cage
48 Running Scared
49 Matrix
50 The Island - Michael Bay
51 The Bourne Supremacy
52 Sawin
53 16 Blocks - Donner
54 Reservoir Dogs - Quentin Tarantino
55 Amazing Planet, het onstaan der aarde - National Geographic
56 Planet Earth, Pole to Pole, BBC (demo)
57 Poseidon
58 Santana Hymns for Peace, Live at Montreux - Carlos, Chick
Corea, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, McLaughlin, Winwood, Rodgers
59 Toto, 25th anniversary, Live in Amsterdam (2003)
60 Pat Metheny Group - The Way Up (Live, 2006)
HD-DVD in red boxes, Blu-rays in blu, and rentals (cheap mail ones, for
the same price as DVDs on can choose blurays, I think I had about 15 of
those already)
This is from another rental store where they have to be returned in a
few days and a little more expensive, but I´ve had some (for me)
hot titles from there.
Unfortunately the label isn´t readable on this snapshot, but it
sais something like guarantee that all graphics in the Ratatouille film
are free from motion scan. I saw in the behind scene extra materials
(which I saw all for the Pixar movies) that there are hand drawn
textures, which of course can be needed, though I guess generated ones
like procedural ones are more neutral and exciting. I´m pretty
sure there are no drawings in the film in general, only 3D graphics and
(camera) effects. There was quite some ado about traditional drawing in
the title roll, I guess I find it exciting it´s all 3D. Very
advanced.
Contains recepies about little ducks being prepared. Brr. Great
graphics though.
The 2 meter 30 cm wide (white area) screen with The Usual Suspects
playing and slight dimmed lights on, shielded from the screen.
High Definition on Youtube
I was able to look at that a few pieces of random nature. Cool.
I read in England, there are deals between youtube and copyright
holders for payments, I suppose from ad income, but I doubt wether that
is transparent when I would put a song of some band on. Also, people f*
euh, mess up a lot of music videos by putting stupid new age names on
them and pretending that ripping is supercool. And even worse when they
think that their drumcomputer messing and cludging about with some
production-suggesting audio plugins is actually contributing to the
world of art. Morons, that's than what I think, but probably that is
too nice.
Personally I like the record-recordings, because they sound good.
Irrespective of copyright claims, which I think should be made, and I
witnessed are made on a number of the links I made to songs, a few more
interesting songs, little blasts from the pasts, as it were:
Who ? Great song.
Not really rap, thank God, I guess I may have heard it in the disco.
Blessings all over?!
The uncomparable, the divie. Thank you Leon! I'm ready now!
These guys can play live, too. Very hard to make, live dacne music. I
mean like really dance music, not bullsh*t which has that name, let's
say like dance orchestras, rock dance, disco in the average meaning of
the word, etc.
Dancable in late 70s style. Very good music, the school band who I
managed the (small) PA system for played it and I learned to work with
live musicians that way from 12 to 18 or so. Some time after that (and
in the meanwhile I played organ and piano for acompinament with
singing) I started to play in bands myself, after als having multitrack
and Midi recording experience. I'm sure I always liked live music, and
that there is often mot so much great music around. Probably in the US
that's better.
Tonight's the night. Neil Young.
I saw on a appealing BBC donucmentary about the late sixties or early
70s music he would play his new record an evening to the audience,
promising at the end he'd play songs they'd now, and then he'd start
over again.... :)
Affordable bistable relais
A relais is a switch with control coil to drive it elecctrically,
bistable means it can be set on or of and keeps its setting without
needing continuous drive current.
A little experiment to test the functioningof the relais in practice to
switch on and off a 300 Watt halogen light in a isolated, metal held
fitting which I intend to use in the slow start circuit of my main
amplifier, where the relais can put that lamp on and off under control
of a few batteries driving the relais :
Off
On
The advantage of using a bistable realis is that it doesn't require a
hold current, and remembers it's state by itself.
10 Meter HDMI cable
I had 2x5 M DVI extension which works on a couple of sources and
endpoints, but now I found a 10 meter hdmi (1.3, with various types of
audio and dhcp) for about 15 euros, which is cheap.
So it is now fun to use the slightly noisy HD-DVD and Blu-ray players
at
some distance, and the beamer from all kinds of places, but of course
most fun is to be able to connect the HD camera up to the screen (or
beamer) over a 10 meter wire, which indeed works, with full HD signal,
too. Amazing even on the camera battery it can drive those long lines,
and not be empty straight away.
In fact the Sony bluray player has sometimes a bit of dificulty driving
the long line, but that can be helped by starting the player up again
and leaving it in menu mode a little while, strangely enough when I
change the monitor from video to PC mode (which is a different response
for motion corrections I think) the connection seems to be reset and
then I need first to power cycle the player (not the screen). The
beamer is fine with the cable, although I´ve once seen a noisy
screen after a resolution change in a bluray, so the margins are
smaller I guess.
Fun to do: take a nice enough scene:
Point the 1080 HD camera at it:
connect the long HDMI cable:
lay it somewhere to a nice monitor:
and connect it (with a 90 degree angle hdmi plug):
and watch the camera image from a comfortable viewing position in full
splendor:
(This actually shows up on the monitor, it is a photo taken by the same
camera in about the same resolution)
Also fun: monitor a RC car with HD cam with 10 meter cable live:
Bluray for Home-Cinema or HD-TV
Is there a difference...
Oh yeah! HD TV isn´t fully defined I think, and I prefer to make
it more cinema than TV like, not unlike what good color TV does. All
those people with their rather insipid ideas about which pixel and
color messing should be elected as main mess makes not much sense to me.
Of course TV isn´t viewed in the dark, there´ll be
gamma assumption differences and contrast issues.
I tried this Black Crowes Bluray (officially bought, not rented, in
blue jewel case) with the 28 inch HD monitor I use, on fairly neutral
RGB color setting versus ´Cool´ color setting, and using
various gamma correction curves, and using 1080i (the native format of
the recording) versus 1080p (which I usually set player and monitor to):
And I played with varying the players picture modes:
Big Ships
(Note the pictures in this section are
NOT MY OWN!)
Just a little older than I, and I found out by chance: retired.
Great ship!
From before WO-II, picture from 1940 I think (In color! Not color added
to in this time, and original color picture, just like nazis had
working tape recorders and even color movies):
What´s that m*f*ing tower saying????
A sense of humor before Nazism kicked in? The boat, sorry, ship was
built in before-war time, what a horrible gift to the nazi regime. One
should be careful with that, 20 to 40 cm of german steel of shielding,
and even more, 400 hits with very big granates, and it was still there.
Albeit with a jammed rudder and many jammed hatches to its many
compartiments and a lot of deck damage, also from brittish air bombs.
It sunk an important brittish war ship before Churchil decided to go
full out to sink the Bismarck, which was only done with great effort.
And I read probably it was even sunk by sabotage from german engineers
aboard...
What a horrible system, nazism. Yack. Spit. Brrr.
What´s up with these ships, Theo? Well, both are turbine driven
huge, fairly fast ships from many decades ago, of the war-kind, doing
over 50 km per hour, also the pre-war one, on boatloads of fuel to feed
the kettels.
Microphone treatment
I decided to take of most of the spit and moist cover from a AT 2020
microphone I use, and leave only a little amount around the actual
microphone element, symmetrical in back and front, with only minimal
influence on the air flow, so that hopefully the properties of the mic
are not changed negatively. The resulting sound and anti-plot behavior
for not very far distance of speaking/singing in the the mic are pretty
good. I didn't try it in the wind, and I doubt it will be sufficient to reduce wind
noises.