Forcing HDR / Dolby Vision when not supported

 I came across VideoProcessor.org through a thread on AVSForums. From their own description, this sounded like something that might be of use for me to see how far I could push HDR on my venerable JVC X500 projector;

VideoProcessor turns a computer into a 4k HDR capable live video processor by connecting a video capture card to a renderer and taking care of details such as conversion, timing and HDR metadata.

This allows advanced renderers to do things like 3D LUT, HDR tone mapping, scaling, deinterlacing and much more which can significantly improve image quality on most displays and beamers.

It turned into quite the adventure, and when I finally got it working, I thought I'd write up the settings for posterity....

Mapping additional and network drives inside an unRaid Windows VM

On the unRaid forums recently, I was responding to a user who was asking why his VM gcow2 image did not shrink when files are removed (thread here). I advised that auto-shrink is not standard behaviour, and in the discussion, it became clear that the use case was security camera footage. The user figured out that perhaps saving video files to a network share would be better than to the VM boot / system drive, and I mentioned that I do this with my BlueIris setup. I promised a quick guide, so here it is....

Streamer, with benefits

I've spent a while refining my a/v setup and finally got around to building a decent home for all the kit. It now all rests on a DIY pull-out and swivel rack that allows for access as needed. However, one of the problems with any rack is the proliferation of devices and cables. 

In the spirit of consolidation that underpins this blog,  I thought there must be a way of tidying all that up. So I started with a svelte computer case and starting adding stuff in until I was happy. 

Serial Perl Revisited

I'd posted this item on creating a custom serial driver / interface in  PERL a few years ago, and needing to revisit it for another project, I found that there was now an issue with running the Win32::Serial module on 64-bit Windows, Windows 10 specifically.

The problem was, when I ran some Perl that previously worked for me, it now failed when querying a serial port with an error like this;

error: Second Read attempted before First is done at xantech.pl line 47.

Some Google-Fu later, I found a reference to the issue on PerlMonks, and a link by user cr8josh to the fix by Christopher Oicles which is published here.

It looks like there's a risk that the rt.cpan site will close, so I'm reproducing the fix here for my own future sanity;

The Good Schiit

Through a long and winding path that started with an offer on Readly, which allowed me access some Australian Hifi magazines I would not otherwise read, one of which contained a review of this book, I picked up 'Schiit Happened' by Jason Stoddard & Mike Moffat.

I'd been somewhat aware of the Schiit brand from reading reviews and online, but never paid all that much attention, and don't own any of their products. However, learning this book was a blend of business startup and audio engineering, it very much appealed to me.

It's very very easy to read. The writing style is informal, laid back and yet wildly informative. It gets very technical at times, and at other times is filled with riveting anecdotes and business insights. The overall impression is of a smart team who very much have their Schitt together, but we learn that they weren't always so efficient & switched on!

If you have even a passing interest in the audio industry, marketing, business, startups or how to deal with intrusive homeowner associations,  you can't really go wrong with this entertaining read.

Solving HDMI Long Run Dropout

My Sky TV box feeds three displays throughout the house; a JVC projector in the Home Theatre, a Panasonic 58DX800 in one living room and a Samsung 7 Series TV in another All are more or less 4k , (the JVC is a Faux-K unit), but all support UHD resolution, which the Sky box outputs.

I don't see much value in the additional multi-room subscription for Sky as we really don't use more than one TV at a time, and on the odd occasions we do, we can run the Sky app on a playstation or other device.

So the challenge is how to route the signal to each device. All are reasonably proximate to the Sky box with runs from 7M for the projector to 15M for the two TVs.

I have the system set up as follows;

 The SkyQ box feeds an HDMI Splitter via a single HDMI cable. This serves 2 key functions; It allows me route to the 3 devices, but also strips HDCP, without which my JVC won't display an image.

One splitter output has a run of 20M Fibre 4K cable direct to the Panasonic TV, while the other goes to the Marantz AV8805 Cab/Sat input, to connect to the JVC projector as needed (Zone 1) and permanently routed to the Samsung TV (Zone 2)

This mostly works, except that the HDMI connection to the Panasonic TV is unstable, (red arrow above).. From time to time there are merge visual artefacts (green lines), some audio drop-out and fairly frequent re-syncs where the screen blanks and resets, resulting in a 1-2 second interruption.

I'm on my second or maybe third cable and thought that this Fibre version would resolve the problem, but unfortunately not. I've also tried all sorts of configurations including testing direct cable connection between the SkyQ box and the TV, but the problem always exists. Some combination of this TV model and the cable run length is problematic.

Before considering purchase of an expensive 8K Fibre cable, I thought I'd try HDMI over ethernet as I had a spare AVAccess HDBaseT extender kit I'm not using. The configuration now looks like this;

And this works perfectly. The AVAccess devices are rated at 4K60Hz over 40M Cat5e, which is more than enough for my needs. Been watching UHD content all through the day without any hiccups so, problem solved!

I've written before about these devices for routing virtual computers, but they really are very flexible pieces of kit. If you're having trouble with lengthy HDMI runs, you could do worse than look at this solution.