XRGB-mini Framemeister

[orange808]

Image processors didn't stand still after the vp50pro came out. The OSSC 2 would need to be a very complex machine to end chaining through a proper processor. 4k will push some very cool professional 1080p gear into our price range.

[Lord of Pirates]

Y'all are assuming that there will even be an OSSC 2. It's clear that Marqs doesn't have nearly as much time these days as he did when he developed the OSSC, and he's only talked about a successor as a possibility rather than a certainty. Even if he does, it would probably be years.

Fair enough. I haven't been following the thread closely and I misunderstood.

Image processors didn't stand still after the vp50pro came out. The OSSC 2 would need to be a very complex machine to end chaining through a proper processor. 4k will push some very cool professional 1080p gear into our price range.

I know Lumagen has still been churning out units in the Radiance line. Any particular units you were thinking of?

[orange808]

Y'all are assuming that there will even be an OSSC 2. It's clear that Marqs doesn't have nearly as much time these days as he did when he developed the OSSC, and he's only talked about a successor as a possibility rather than a certainty. Even if he does, it would probably be years.

Fair enough. I haven't been following the thread closely and I misunderstood.

Image processors didn't stand still after the vp50pro came out. The OSSC 2 would need to be a very complex machine to end chaining through a proper processor. 4k will push some very cool professional 1080p gear into our price range.

I know Lumagen has still been churning out units in the Radiance line. Any particular units you were thinking of?

Definitely some equipment I can't wait to see...

I am most fascinated with live event equipment. That seems to be where latency is being taken seriously.

[Guspaz]

Live event stuff does care about latency, but they care more about genlocking everything. Live events gear can also be just as finicky about video timing as anything else. It's also more likely to output SDI than HDMI.

[Ikaruga11]

I still don't understand SDI.

Is SDI a broadcast format like NTSC and PAL, or is it a signal type like HDMI, RGB, YPbPr?

Can I play in 240p/480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i and 1080p with HDMI -> SDI on a BVM?

[orange808]

Live event stuff does care about latency, but they care more about genlocking everything. Live events gear can also be just as finicky about video timing as anything else. It's also more likely to output SDI than HDMI.

Gosh. Sounds like a lost cause.

No worries, then.

...

[orange808]

I still don't understand SDI.

Is SDI a broadcast format like NTSC and PAL, or is it a signal type like HDMI, RGB, YPbPr?

Can I play in 240p/480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i and 1080p with HDMI -> SDI on a BVM?

It's gotten convoluted. It's a set of standards for transporting digital video signals. What signals you can handle depends on the standard (or version) that your devices adhere to.

I only have one piece of gear that outputs SDI--a 480i broadcast signal transcoder--and I don't use the SDI outputs at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_digital_interface

[Guspaz]

Disclaimer: My experience with SDI and live events gear is largely from having spent 5 years running the events division of a large anime convention, so it was basically a year of planning and then only four or five days working with the actual gear. In the early days, I would have to plan/source the equipment specifics myself directly (which was very informative), but by the time I retired earlier this year, I was paying my AV supplier to figure out the low-level details for me, and my only exposure was in troubleshooting the day-of setup issues where the far end of some of those SDI runs was our responsibility and not the AV supplier's. Turns out you can solve a lot of EDID issues with pro AV gear not liking your DVI/HDMI signal by simply converting the HDMI signal to HD-SDI and feeding that in. Anyhow, what I'm saying is that my experience, while it comes from working *with* professionals and professional gear, is from my side-job as an unpaid administrator for a non-profit organization, not somebody doing this for a living.



Think of it as the broadcast equivalent to HDMI, except it just uses a single signal (hence the "serial" in "serial digital interface") instead a bunch of pairs like HDMI does. There are various variants of it that supported higher amounts of bandwidth, sort of like how HDMI has different versions. All of them are typically carried over coax using a BNC connector, although there was a dual-link version that used two wires instead of one, but was quickly replaced.

At the base level you have SD-SDI, which carries 480i typically at 270 Mbps. It was introduced in the late 1980s, so you can see how SDI has been around a LOT longer than HDMI.

While there was a 480p level (ED-SDI), 480p was never a broadcast standard, so it was practically ignored.

The next step up from there that you see is HD-SDI, introduced in the late 90s. This carries 720p and 1080i at roughly 1.5 Gbps, and this is basically equivalent to low-speed HDMI, which has the same limitation. This was a widely popular format, since 720p/1080i was (and basically still is, since all OTA and most digital cable in North America is 720p/1080i) the broadcast standard for HD. You will find wide support for HD-SDI on broadcast and live events equipment. This is the one that my experience doing live events is from.

After that, there were two standards to provide 1800p60 support at around 3 gigabit: dual-link HD-SDI using two cables, and 3G-SDI using one cable. Maybe it's different in broadcast, but dual-link doesn't seem to have been used in live events, while I did see gear with 3G-SDI support. But HD-SDI was much more common.

There are two newer standards (6G-SDI for 4K30 and 12G-SDI for 4K60), but I doubt they have seen much adoption yet. They were only standardized last year. The idea of pumping 12 gigabits down a single piece of copper is kind of nuts to me, but IIRC that's roughly what they're planning to do with DOCSIS 3.1 using only ~1GHz of spectrum, so why not?


Anyhow, SDI also defines the resolution/framerate stuff, so it's not carrying an NTSC or PAL signal, it just defines formats that are basically the same as the NTSC and PAL timings. But SDI doesn't define a single way of carrying colour information. Way way back in the day, it was used for digitally encoded NTSC/PAL composite video, and you'll still see references to that in the documentation for PVM/BVM SDI card manuals. The default for everything after that (even at 480i) is normally 10-bit 4:2:2 YCbCr, so you can assume that it uses that. Newer standards do support some other stuff, like 4:4:4 YCbCr, 4:4:4 RGB, some with 12-bit instead of 10-bit colour, etc. I don't know if support is widespread for anything but 10-bit 4:2:2 YCbCr, though, that's all that I ever saw used.

In terms of it not being RGB, I would suspect that 10-bit YCbCr looks much better than 8-bit RGB ever could (1024 levels instead of 256 levels) although there's also the subsampling to consider.

There are also specs for handling other signals alongside, like audio. We didn't do much with that: we'd get the audio from the sound guys and run it into the video mixer. Useless for the SDI outputs going to the projectors, but useful for where we'd run a few hundred feet of coax to a nearby room, and we can just hook that up to an SDI-to-HDMI converter and get both audio and 1080i60 video off that single coax line. It saved running a separate XLR cable.

[FBX]

I'm going to be spending the next month or two refining all the profiles for a new and intended to be final package. One thing I will be adding in is universal size settings, meaning for example the SNES profile will have proper zoom settings for video, S-Video, and RGB all in one profile. I'll also be making sure all the profiles use the AUTO color output since the Framemeister does a terrible job on its RGB conversion step. After that, I'm going to knuckle down and buy the PCE, Saturn, Jaguar, and Neo Geo to make profiles for those as well.

I figure now more than ever I need to get these projects done since we've only got maybe two years left before the Framemeister becomes completely sold out.

[austin532]

Now that's what I call dedication! Have you thought about making profiles for PAL games as well?

[FBX]

Now that's what I call dedication! Have you thought about making profiles for PAL games as well?

PAL is a whole other can of worms that I cannot commit to. I'm hoping someone into PAL gear will take up the quest for integer profiles for that region.

BTW, I just ordered an original model Sega Saturn for the NTSC region, which will arrive on Thursday. So that will be the first of the new profiles to come out soon!

[axlblazeadam]

I'm going to be spending the next month or two refining all the profiles for a new and intended to be final package. One thing I will be adding in is universal size settings, meaning for example the SNES profile will have proper zoom settings for video, S-Video, and RGB all in one profile. I'll also be making sure all the profiles use the AUTO color output since the Framemeister does a terrible job on its RGB conversion step. After that, I'm going to knuckle down and buy the PCE, Saturn, Jaguar, and Neo Geo to make profiles for those as well.

I figure now more than ever I need to get these projects done since we've only got maybe two years left before the Framemeister becomes completely sold out.

This is amazing, thank you so much!

[FBX]

More good news! RetroRGB is going to help out by sending me all the major consoles still needing profiles (PCE, Jaguar, Neo Geo, etc.) Woohoo! They will get the same new universal input treatment I'm now working on. I just finished the NES ones this morning after 2 hours of work. I will try to get a console done each morning and then upload them all as a single bulk package after Christmas.

[axlblazeadam]

More good news! RetroRGB is going to help out by sending me all the major consoles still needing profiles (PCE, Jaguar, Neo Geo, etc.) Woohoo! They will get the same new universal input treatment I'm now working on. I just finished the NES ones this morning after 2 hours of work. I will try to get a console done each morning and then upload them all as a single bulk package after Christmas.

Again thank you so much!!! Can't wait to try them out and ditch my own profiles!

[Zapf]

I unfortunately haven't used my framemeister in over a year, and will be selling it this week. I noticed though that in 2.0 they added "overlay / cellophane mode". Does anyone have a image of that in action? I can't find any in google results.

[wyvernshill]

I ordered a second framemeister just to have one in reserve.

The OSSC might be a great scaler, but i know the framemeister works well for most consoles i own.
I invested too much money on PS2 and SNES to risk having my scaler fail one day and not be able to replace it or having to pay an e-bay scammer 3 times the price of today.

Anyone else did the same ?

[bonzo.bits]

I ordered a second framemeister just to have one in reserve.

The OSSC might be a great scaler, but i know the framemeister works well for most consoles i own.
I invested too much money on PS2 and SNES to risk having my scaler fail one day and not be able to replace it or having to pay an e-bay scammer 3 times the price of today.

Anyone else did the same ?

I used to want a second FM, but now with the OSSC being a lag-free piece of awesomeness, I'm thinking of selling instead. At least I was until I read FBX post about profiles for every major console....

Other than that though, I'm struggling to find a reason to keep the FM. And if the OSSC breaks I can try and fix it myself or just build another one, subject to parts availability.

[wyvernshill]

Yeah, i'm not that handy. the OSSC interests me, but i'll have to see how it evolves. this is more of a "better safe than sorry" thing for me. even if it costs me an arm and a leg ...

[Fudoh]

Other than that though, I'm struggling to find a reason to keep the FM

the best 480i deinterlacing you can find. Easily reason enough to keep the FM besides the OSSC.

[copy]

I ordered a second framemeister just to have one in reserve.

The OSSC might be a great scaler, but i know the framemeister works well for most consoles i own.
I invested too much money on PS2 and SNES to risk having my scaler fail one day and not be able to replace it or having to pay an e-bay scammer 3 times the price of today.

Anyone else did the same ?

I ordered a backup one too. I couldn't imagine not having one anymore.

[leonk]

After playing on a 20" PVM for the past 5 years, I figured I should get an XRGB mini while I still can! There was a deal that I couldn't pass. I received it yesterday, and tested it on my 50" Samsung TV. Couple of observations, and a couple of questions:

1) It's a wonderful device that works very well. I wish there were more profiles available for all my consoles, but for now, FirebranX's NESRGB 5X profile seems to do the job for most of my retro consoles (I turn off the scanlines)

2) I run XRGB mini -> Marantz AVR -> TV. I noticed that with NESRGB4L or 5L profile (the cropping one) there's a tiny amount of lag. But with the 4X or 5X (no cropping) there is 0 lag. I play SMB1 A LOT on PVM (testing console mods) and very sensitive to lag - my fingers memorized level 1 of SMB.

3) As some of you know, I install the Hi Def NES kits for customers in Canada. So I've seen a lot of Hi Def NES and now side by side to NESRGB. FBX's unsaturated palette looks MUCH MUCH better than Hi Def NES color palette. BUT, the hi def NES seems a tad sharper than XRGB mini (if that's possible).

Questions:

1) What do people set their audio level out of XRGB at? The 35 setting that the FBX profiles are set at are SIGNIFICANTLY louder than other inputs into my AVR (AppleTV, Blu ray player, etc). To be at equivalent volume, I need to lower it to 10!

2) Anyone else notice a hiss at hight volume levels? This isn't native to XRGB mini. It seems to be the cause with PVM as well when turned >75% of max volume. I am using the best SCART cables and properly grounded (buy them from that eBay lady and personally open them and inspect all ground connections).

[Guspaz]

Isn't the lag on the Framemeister supposed to be fairly consistent (at roughly a frame and a half), and never zero?

[FBX]

Other than that though, I'm struggling to find a reason to keep the FM

the best 480i deinterlacing you can find. Easily reason enough to keep the FM besides the OSSC.

Not only that, but a myriad of other advantages, like 1080p with scaling well beyond the borders of the screen, ability to correct AR with minimal effect on pixel uniformity, able to make and use custom profiles, actually obtainable (at least for the next year or so anyway), etc. As it stands right now, one is for filling niche case scenarios and the other is incredibly versatile that anybody with a flat panel can use. Until the OSSC can do all of those things, it's comparing apples and oranges.

[Guspaz]

The OSSC will never be able to do some of those things without hardware updates. The Framemeister still serves a valid niche.

Randomly: scaling the GBP/GBI to fill the screen is something the Framemeister can do, and the OSSC can't. But more than that, the Framemeister essentially "fixes" the Super Gameboy by allowing the aspect ratio to be corrected. Combined with the clockspeed mod or a Super Game Boy 2 and a 1-chip SNES, that's probably the best way to play Super Gameboy games right now.

[BuckoA51]

I'm sure I've said it before plenty of times, but the OSSC was never intended to be a Framemeister replacement.

A true FM replacement that does all the FM does without being a pain in the backside to work with would be really cool though.

[paulb_nl]

Randomly: scaling the GBP/GBI to fill the screen is something the Framemeister can do, and the OSSC can't. But more than that, the Framemeister essentially "fixes" the Super Gameboy by allowing the aspect ratio to be corrected. Combined with the clockspeed mod or a Super Game Boy 2 and a 1-chip SNES, that's probably the best way to play Super Gameboy games right now.

The OSSC can actually do those things with the advanced timing tweaker but only if your display supports it. (Monitors mostly).

[bonzo.bits]

Other than that though, I'm struggling to find a reason to keep the FM

the best 480i deinterlacing you can find. Easily reason enough to keep the FM besides the OSSC.

How much worse is the OSSC at 480i? On a scale from 0 to 10, with 10 being perfect handling (either theoretical or actual, say a BVM or other elite device) where would the OSSC and FM sit?

Also, I only have a handful of games that output at 480i, but I am looking to pick up a PS1, DC and GC, in the not-too-distant future. Without slapping me about for being a massive nub, are there a lot of games on these consoles where the difference in 480i will affect playability. Say, F-ZERO GX, for example?

Other than that though, I'm struggling to find a reason to keep the FM

the best 480i deinterlacing you can find. Easily reason enough to keep the FM besides the OSSC.

Not only that, but a myriad of other advantages, like 1080p with scaling well beyond the borders of the screen, ability to correct AR with minimal effect on pixel uniformity, able to make and use custom profiles, actually obtainable (at least for the next year or so anyway), etc. As it stands right now, one is for filling niche case scenarios and the other is incredibly versatile that anybody with a flat panel can use. Until the OSSC can do all of those things, it's comparing apples and oranges.

I've spent at least 20-30 hours playing around with zoom settings and couldn't get decent scaling results for even one console (PAL SMS). So, whilst it may have incredible versatility, the usability is a huge hurdle. And unless I've completely missed it, there isn't any useful user guides when it comes to using the FM to obtain the results you mention. I mean, I could write a guide in a single sentence; download FBX profiles, install, apply and play. But that's just not very satisfying for me and my SMS still doesn't look that good cos it's PAL.

I guess I'm just at Level 2 niche usage where the OSSC is good enough for me. If either of you have some tips on how to obtain pixel perfect scaling on PAL consoles, I'm willing to have another crack at the FM scaling puzzle....

[Guspaz]

The OSSC can actually do those things with the advanced timing tweaker but only if your display supports it. (Monitors mostly).

Which isn't all that useful when the vast majority of TVs don't support it, and even displays that do support it might let you use it to correct the SGB aspect ratio (horizontal active are) but not zoom in, because support for messing with the vertical active area is much more rare than support for messing with the horizontal.

How much worse is the OSSC at 480i? On a scale from 0 to 10, with 10 being perfect handling (either theoretical or actual, say a BVM or other elite device) where would the OSSC and FM sit?

The OSSC handles 480i with bob deinterlacing. Basically it doubles each scanline like it would for 240p, but every other field gets a 1 scanline offset. This means that vertical or uniform features don't flicker or jitter, but high-contrast horizontal features appear to flicker a bit as they move up and down each frame. From a distance, this does a decent job preserving the perceptual resolution of the 480i signal: it is, in my opinion, very similar to how 480i appears on a CRT display. Which makes sense, because it's roughly similar to how a CRT draws interlaced content.

The Framemeister by default will do a per-pixel motion adaptive deinterlace, which basically means that when stuff isn't in motion it does a weave de-interlace, and when stuff is in motion it does an interpolation-based deinterlace. This preserves both the smoothness of moving objects and the sharp detail of non-moving objects. The framemeister also supports an OSSC-like bob deinterlacer in certain modes.

My personal opinion is that the OSSC deinterlacer (or rather bob deinterlacers in general) are pretty OK. Not super amazing, but like I said, it looks like a CRT would do, so it's not all that bad. A motion adaptive deinterlacer looks better, but that technique requires at least one prior frame to be buffered, so the OSSC would need a lot more RAM if it were to implement such a thing.

[leonk]

I don't have a problem with downloading the FBX profiles and just using them. If you spend as much time tweakig and learning as he has, I'm sure you can create great PAL templates as well.

As for scaling. I think its very simple. Make sure you got integer scaling!! 4X or 5X for XRGB, 2X or 3X for OSSC. Answers to your questions have been posted in many places. Google is your friend.

[Fudoh]

which basically means that when stuff isn't in motion it does a weave de-interlace, and when stuff is in motion it does an interpolation-based deinterlace.

you make it sound so easy

Most deinterlacers work this way (even your average $30 Scart to HDMI converter), but usually the whole image is blurred to a certain degree to make to differences between interpolated and weaved areas appear less obtrusive. That's why no 480i video deinterlacer ever managed to produce 480p like images before. On the Framemeister there's no additional blur and the interpolation is extremely precise. On static images you REALLY achieve 480p-like quality and even with high movement you retain a level of sharpness that no other processor can match.

I totally agree that 480i is nothing you want in the long run, but the fact remains that a lot of good titles from the late 90s to the mid 00s were 480i only and the FM is the best way to play there.