Re: Open hardware AV to digital conversion

From: Ingo Korb <ml_at_akana.de>
Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 23:33:52 +0100
Message-ID: <ud26vebov.fsf@dragon.akana.de>
Marko Mäkelä <msmakela@gmail.com> writes:

> I would expect currently available analog-to-HDMI converters to be a
> hit-or-miss, it either works, does not work, or works badly.

There are indeed analog-to-HDMI converters out there that do work fine
and unlike your experience with the chinese Video-to-VGA converter I
would expect that their output will in most cases stay
"future-compatible". Although there are a lot of bad things that you can
do to to a VGA signal to cause trouble on modern displays but not a CRT,
in my experience HDMI is much more "hit-or-miss" - i.e. it either works
fine on everything or on almost nothing.

In a few cases there are still issues with unusual resolutions, but a
converter can solve that by scaling the signal to a standard resolution.

> This would be tricky, because most Commodore home computers do not
> output properly interlaced video.

Many early consoles don't do that either, even on the Playstation 2 and
Gamecube a few games still use non-interlaced 15kHz modes similar to the
C64.

> A bonus would be to make it so low-power that it would work with the
> small power supply that is available on the HDMI jack.

The 5V line in HDMI(/DVI/VGA) runs from source to sink which is the
wrong direction for this use case. It is used to power the EDID EEPROM
in the display and some devices also assume that there is no valid input
signal if the source does not power that line.

-ik

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Received on 2015-01-04 00:00:04

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