English version: It's a little better and a bit faster, but not very useful for anything yet until I can decode colors better. But I'm learning a lot, so that's OK.

Just curious, why did you switch from an LD-V8000 to a CLD-V2800?

Lots of little reasons - mainly the V8000 is a bit complex for me to properly tune - lots of adjustments on the bottom, and the V2800 fits on my computer desk under my monitor.

(edit 2/1/2015: The V2800 is basically an S104 with serial, which makes it easier for others to replicate my results... and the RF test point on late players has 48ohm termination and can handle a direct tap w/o an amplifier)

It took me a little while to parse this (it doesn't help that the "NR" in "SNR" stands for something different than "NR" alone). I think what you're saying is that the SNR from your decoder is okay when you consider that we're comparing a raw ratio -vs- players' reported ratios which have been massaged with noise reduction?

Following with interest as always.

It's interesting how you put that. That's why I personally prefer a player from the 80s. Most players that started with the internal comb filter to svideo thing, just don't seem so great to me. I honestly don't trust any player with digital CLV still frame features, and increased SNR. A lot of times SNR is increased with DNR and other noise filters, which doesn't always represent what's on the LD IMO. Also can't help but notice a distracting slimness of color with capture shots from HLD-X0 and other supposedly great players; I get way better color through a line doubler than most shots I've seen from the HLD-X0 on the net.

Great work happycube! I wish I was smart enough to learn python and all that stuff you're dealing with.

Vexatious: That's part of what makes LD so interesting to me, it isn't just a "plug in via HDMI and if you're smart adjust TV settings" thing like a Blu-Ray player. There are many ways to get good results And just start playing with things, find a problem that interests you and take a spin at it, even if you don't get far at first.

I think what I've been getting recently is close to what's on the disk, but could be better. There's a resolution/noise tradeoff I'm trying to work out.

I'm also looking into probability and probabilistic programming - and I'm thinking it might be useful for comb filtering. (Anyone got suggestions for LD's and DVD's based off the exact same digital master? I'm going to take a look at Titanic, which wasn't anamorphic in it's first release.)

then you would want to look into an LD-S1, that has NO S-video, only thing it has on the front is a sharpness knob
but that's more like the knob on the older TVs to change sharpness etc.

new players give great images but a lot of these older ones give great images also


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Did a bit more since the last update:

- Added noise reduction in an analog-like style, following the description in a Pioneer patent. Signal/noise ratio varies by level - I can get 45-48dB now. It also allowed me to increase resolution at the same time.

- Put in dropout detection (they were much more visible with the newer FM decoder, which I debugged a bit more in the process) - disks with dropouts/speckles can still cause picture errors, though.

- The comb filter is more or less a proper non-adaptive 3-line 2D filter now. Not great, but pretty good with real footage.

- I wrote a simpler and slightly more effective TBC in Python, but it's dog slow even by my standards.

I finally updated my sample video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEpt5nQ ... e=youtu.be - this is an old Pioneer Japan pressing, so it gives the dropout compensation quite a workout

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Other musings:

Pioneer actually got a patent in 1986/7 for an all-digital video signal decoding path - everything from FM decoding to comb filtering (US 4,736,238). (I might be able to use the related FM decoding bits, patent #4656432) It looks like memory et al made it too expensive at the time to implement, sadly. It's quite possibly prior art for CubeTek's videotape decoding work.

edit/addon: The FM decoding scheme, probably used because doing arctan's was too much in the 80's, was definitely lacking - I got it going last night and it's much worse than the arctan method I (and it turns out, a lot of 80's VTR digitization work) use. Unless there's something I'm missing, Pioneer probably didn't use it because it wasn't very good, and commercially it was a bit late by the time it wasn't too hard to do right. *sighs*

There's also a ton of prior art about handling VTR data in a computer/digitally that I was able to pull down at the local uni library.

Wonderful news! Hope you will be able to release a final executable version!

Dang that rally car reminds me of the 78 Saab 99 sedan I had. Got stolen and crushed and I've been sad since.

This is great news!

I am following this project with great interest. Are you still using the same capture device but with new FM decoder? How much more quality do you think you would get with more expensive hardware?

Still using the same capture device. I think better equipment would give me a few more Db... ideally I'd have something like an S2 or 97 modded with video RF out, and a USB3 56mhz/10+bit capture device, but I really don't have the money right now. But there's plenty to improve even with the current capture quality. I think with an adaptive 3D comb filter I could at least get to R7G quality, probably 97 w/good comb filter.

The noise reduction is probably more important than the new FM decoder, since it allowed me to increase resolution without making things too noisy. I'm also trying to perfect the TBC - because I can't synchronize the RF capture with the disk speed, the rescaling is very important.

And of course, dealing with dropouts and speckling during the sync periods and especially in the color burst.

Such as? You might be able to crowdfund this over at AMPS.

maybe this one?
https://www.ettus.com/product/details/UB210-KIT

It'd need to be a straight ADC (and about 10% the cost!), but that's close to the idea. I can probably get where I want to be with current capture quality, but better quality raw data can't hurt.

I'm more interested in a NXP ARM microcontroller that has USB 2 high speed and a 80mhz 12-bit ADC on a reference board (lpclink 2) for $20. If the DMA can support ADC->USB streaming well enough, that and an analog board could get me a nice ~32mhz/8bit gain adjusted signal, and would be easy enough for someone else to put together as well.

(The microcontroller could probably handle digital audio decoding natively, but doesn't have nearly enough power to do video demodulation and time base correction)

Did more on the TBC code, it now works directly with audio, and seems quite accurate although it can still be fooled by rotters. Right now I'm looking at the comb filter code again, hopefully I'll get around to making it 3D one of these weeks.

A CX audio decoder would be nice too... I still want to do AC3, but without the error correction specifications it'd be very hard to do if it scrambles the data like regular digital audio. I should've asked disclord the right questions about getting in touch with the right people...

Making some headway on 3D comb filtering - here's a 10 second bit of S&W:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ_ZlEP6HKw

The code itself is still rather crude - it currently only looks at three frames, lines, or pixels if all else fails, and compares the forward and back samples to each other to decide if there's motion/gradients/etc. The end result is workable but not teriffic, and the chroma filtering is resulting in dot crawl (and the lack of it results in worse artifacts)

Now to make some headway on CX decoding... just not tonight (yawn)

Any chance of figuring out AC3-RF?

Very good results indeed!!! Bravo!

Well done!