Andreas Holzhammer - Privat a écrit :

I'm in the course of converting my home cinema equipment from S-Video (Y/C) to YUV connection.

Currently I use vdr with a full-featured card and s-video output through the j2 connector. What is the "recommended" way to move vdr to YUV output, as the FF cards are not capable of doing so? I don't want to shell out to much money, so RGB->YUV converters are probably out of the range.

Would a cheap (PCI) ATI (Radeon 8500/9x00) card with an YUV adapter be suitable, and what picture quality is achievable through this setup? Are there any other options? The PC is a 1.3GHz celeron MediaPortal, so I can't spare to many CPU cycles on either X or software mpeg decoding.

Your Celeron have enough power for softdevice (if you don't plan on HDTV before softdevice make use of hardware accelerated decoding). Well supported card are Matrox, with DirectFB. Maybe they are capable of YUV output. If you plan to convert your equipment, why don't you go the RGB way ? Do you already have a special output device with YUV input ? In fact, a VGA card with an overlay is actually an YUV to RGB converter, and a typical display device is in fact RGB by design (CRT, LCD, DLT, Plasma). So why convert from YUV (MPEG2 stream) to RGB, then output in YUV and convert back to RGB inside the display device ?

Andreas Holzhammer - Privat a écrit :

Nicolas Huillard schrieb:

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Andreas Holzhammer - Privat a écrit :

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I'm in the course of converting my home cinema equipment from S-Video (Y/C) to YUV connection.

Currently I use vdr with a full-featured card and s-video output through the j2 connector. What is the "recommended" way to move vdr to YUV output, as the FF cards are not capable of doing so? I don't want to shell out to much money, so RGB->YUV converters are probably out of the range.

Would a cheap (PCI) ATI (Radeon 8500/9x00) card with an YUV adapter be suitable, and what picture quality is achievable through this setup? Are there any other options? The PC is a 1.3GHz celeron MediaPortal, so I can't spare to many CPU cycles on either X or software mpeg decoding.

Your Celeron have enough power for softdevice (if you don't plan on HDTV before softdevice make use of hardware accelerated decoding). Well supported card are Matrox, with DirectFB. Maybe they are capable of YUV output. If you plan to convert your equipment, why don't you go the RGB way ? Do you already have a special output device with YUV input ? In fact, a VGA card with an overlay is actually an YUV to RGB converter, and a typical display device is in fact RGB by design (CRT, LCD, DLT, Plasma). So why convert from YUV (MPEG2 stream) to RGB, then output in YUV and convert back to RGB inside the display device ?

Nicolas,

thanks for your recommendations, I will have a look into the Matrox route as well. I'm somewhat concerned on CPU power especially when playing back mpeg4, but I could offload this to a pinnacle showcenter type box.

There are three reasons to use YUV:

• progressive scan is possible through YUV

VGA/RGB output can also be progressive... It all depends on your display device.

• DVD media is natively YUV

Though YUV is converted to RGB at the display stage...

• most important, my amp (Yamaha AX1) is capable of switching YUV input

signals (and add his OSD to it), but can't do RGB

That's *the* real reason... if you have more than one YUV device (VDR + something else) *or* you really need the OSD from the amp. My amp only switch S-Video, and does not add OSD, and it would not be a problem for me to directly connect the VGA output from the VDR to the display device, since the VDR is in fact the only valuable video device (VCR does not count as "valuable" : composite only, mono audio, etc.).

So the highest achievable quality for me is YUV

I googled for YUV + Matrox + DirectFB, but can't find anything else than overlay specifications : nothing about output signal type.

Andreas Holzhammer - Privat wrote:

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Andreas Holzhammer - Privat a écrit :

Nicolas,

thanks for your recommendations, I will have a look into the Matrox route as well. I'm somewhat concerned on CPU power especially when playing back mpeg4, but I could offload this to a pinnacle showcenter type box.

There are three reasons to use YUV:

• progressive scan is possible through YUV
• DVD media is natively YUV
• most important, my amp (Yamaha AX1) is capable of switching YUV input

signals (and add his OSD to it), but can't do RGB

So the highest achievable quality for me is YUV

I have the VDR box and a DVD player both with RGB output which I would like to switch with an A/V amp. However there seem to be only amps on the market that switch YUV signals. Anyone knows why ? Are there (cheap) ways around that ?

Ondrej ...

Ondrej Wisniewski schrieb:

Andreas Holzhammer - Privat wrote:

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Andreas Holzhammer - Privat a écrit :

Nicolas,

thanks for your recommendations, I will have a look into the Matrox route as well. I'm somewhat concerned on CPU power especially when playing back mpeg4, but I could offload this to a pinnacle showcenter type box.

There are three reasons to use YUV:

• progressive scan is possible through YUV
• DVD media is natively YUV
• most important, my amp (Yamaha AX1) is capable of switching YUV

input signals (and add his OSD to it), but can't do RGB

So the highest achievable quality for me is YUV

I have the VDR box and a DVD player both with RGB output which I would like to switch with an A/V amp. However there seem to be only amps on the market that switch YUV signals. Anyone knows why ? Are there (cheap) ways around that ?

Ondrej ...

Ondrej,

there is a "workaround" for this, where you would split the RGB connector into three cinch connectors and switch these through your YUV inputs on the AMP. You would also have to switch the Sync through Composite to get a working setup.

There are some explanations and schematics for this out there on the web, but I don't remember where :-(

Andreas