Hello,

disclaimer: I'm not involved with the below mentioned company, the goal of this post is to share what I recently discovered and see if the community may have interest and possibly combine effort, so we may end with a solution to expand options for upscalers with bad comb filters, using a separate unit... really hope this will be useful somehow!

So, while looking for a dedicated comb filter and digital converter, I stumbled upon this article by Daniel Ogilvie, from SingMai https://www.singmai.com :

https://www.eetimes.com/how-fpgas-are-breathing-new-life-into-the-analog-video-format/#

I contacted him, and turns out he has a FPGA-based product he's updating these days, the SM03 video decoder, as he's focusing on analog sources like VHS, so after mentioning the LD community and upscaler/filter problem, he confirmed interest in working on the product update including testing LDs players as well.

So, my understanding is he's available having people here testing it, in case providing feedback so he can improve the product specifically for the LD case... my guts tells me given it's FPGA, the process may indeed allow few reiterations and maybe feature requests?
I provided my availability of course, as I do have a pretty decent setup with multiple players, scalers(DVO/Lumagen/Micomsoft) and projector/IPS monitors, but I believe there are people here who may have precise ideas about what a comb filter/converter for LD should do... so, what do you guys think?

Here I uploaded the data sheet http://www.netpacket.it/LDs/SM03_brochure.pdf ,.., maybe that will already show if there are important features missing? It includes contacts for those interested in reaching out to him etc
Thanks for anyone chiming in and helping, I really hope we may end with a new solution

Max

Sounds great. Anything that works with VHS works even better for LD, from my experience.

I'm interested. Thank you for sharing this.

Damn it, someone beat me to it.

thanks guys, the "usual suspects" as expected, great to see you are interested... looks like the lddb.com FPGA team is born!

I'm gonna check with Daniel if he has a player for testing... any advice on the model? I guess the point is not having the best composite to begin with to see how much it can improve the output?

What kind of tests/patterns/movies should we consider the bar? i.e., my concern is about frame rate and possible LD-specific quirks, like resolution or cadence etc..

What I gathered so far, is that the SM03 accepts NTSC/PAL or SECAM inputs, which it decodes using a 3D comb filter, it provides video noise reduction, resynchronizes the video to a stable output and provides contrast enhancement (histogram equalization). The output is SDI without upscaling or deinterlacing, but it's based on previous broadcasters projects for BBC and RAI, so the strong point are decoding and noise reduction.

LD-V2000, LD-V2200, CLD-V2400, LD-870, CLD-980, CLD-1070, CLD-1080 come to mind. Any noisy player without recombined composite.


Video Essentials (1996) [ID3487ISF] for patterns.
Goldeneye: Special Edition (1995) [ML105544] for movie.

Ideally you also want to make sure the player you are testing on has no crosstalk issues so I'd throw Pioneer LaserDisc Reference Disc (2001) [GGV1069] into the mix as well.

I agree with all of that. The LD-V2200 is my main player for testing this kind of thing. It’s very very OG LD.

thanks!

first question, about the recombined output: I get some players composite output is actually the result of digital processing and then a conversion again to analog...is such signal still improvable via an external comb filter?

I guess my point is, for those players with recombined output, in order to get the best output, would that be necessary to somehow tap the signal before the digital processing and then feed that to the external filter? I like the idea of using the "raw" signal, but is it eventually possible in practical terms? (CLD-3080/95/97 comes to mind)

Cheers!

P.s.

silly question, are the UK/European version of those models called differently?

Hi there,

I don't think I'm mistaken when I say that there is no European equivalent to the above three players (sadly). The best we ever got were the Pioneer CLD-2950 & its successor the CLD-925 both PAL/NTSC models. There were of course a couple of DVL combi players (909/919) that came later but arguably they were slightly inferior in terms of LD performance in comparison.

thanks laserfanhld-gb, I asked because SingMai is based in UK, and maybe it would have been easier to source a player close to them

anyway, as it's always a matter of luck with shipping, if those are the models right for testing, I guess having them shipped from the US it is!

Cheers,

Max

I believe current thinking is that the players with recombinant composite are the vast majority of everything that’s available, so yes it will improve the output. This kind of thing typically improves anything you put through it that isn’t already perfect.

awesome, thanks for the clarification...one thing less to worry about

It is my beater unit! Sharp drop off on build quality from the LD-V2200 to the CLD-V2400.

Yes

If you are talking about just general playback-wise, yes if you have the skillset to do so. Not necessary for testing external filtering though.


I don't think so for the V series listed. Those were models sold to US schools.

A few EU models:
CLD-1200, CLD-1450, CLD-1500, CLD-1600

Need to double check in the schematics. I think all are available here.

got it, yes my question was initially aimed to assess if the external filter testing would have been meaningful, with an un-modded recombining player...speaking in terms of general playback quality, would you consider the mod an important step up?

I could only find fragments of information, like mentioning bypassing the TBC, but did someone actually implement the solution?

Given the mod is not likely like an AC3 -RF drop-in, I wonder if part/all of the required logic could be implement in the FPGA, allowing to reduce the amount of hardware changes needed on the player side?

I think it would be a step up, but I have only experimented with this on a CLD-V2600 so far. Couldn't get it working perfectly, but it did result in better picture quality. The best thing to do if you don't want recombined composite though would be to buy a player that doesn't have it.


I think it would be more of a video buffer that would need to be on the board that feeds the FPGA, but I'm not very knowledgable when it comes to stuff like this. It might be better to just leave all of this out of the FPGA side to reduce complexity.

Either way, figuring out how and where to properly bypass digital memory, Y/C separation, etc in the player is the hard part. Once that is written up, it wouldn't be hard for others with good soldering skills to follow.

With the later players, there are ones with digital TBC and pure composite: the S104, D406, and V860+ Karaoke players at least. Note that for best performance you'll probably want to clip out the low pass filter LPF after the TBC, it causes ringing you can even notice in the OSD.

Sounds interesting... in the datasheet it's mentioning the output of of 525i/625i which would be of course in 480i for NTSC based content right?

how about a 1080p24 output with selectable 23.976 option? I don't know a scaler that does that correctly without picture judder only maybe the Denon 602ci.

You are mentioning overlays? How about selectable different aspect ratios modes and Black Border control for overlaying unwanted "out of picture subs"?

not sure how this would affect the price most important is a good 3d combfilter with 480i HDMI or COMPONENT output

Great feedback, thanks guys.

I think it's good to map all the possible use cases at the beginning, as given it is a FPGA, adding extra features may be a concrete possibility, it is just a matter of prioritizing the effort... having an external comb filter converting to digital is of course priority n.1 (and n.2!).
Good to know though, that in the future, the same device code "may" be upgraded to process the signal from modded players, in some sort of standardized mod.

So, as a recap, these could be the testing cases:

1)External filter with non-recombined player
2)External filter with recombined player

based on results, "phase II" possibly start investigating on:

3)External filter with modded "de-combined" player

I sourced a working LD-V2200, if it will arrive in one piece, I should have everything needed for test 1&2.

Now, I think Daniel from SingMai has registered an account here so he may provide way better answers, but based on what I understood, the device does not provide upscaling/deinterlacing whatsoever, so whatever is the NTSC/PAL source image resolution, it will remain the same (output is SDI btw, need an HDMI converter)... which I think it may not be 480i, but I may be wrong.
(I.e. playing with BlackMagic capture devices, I learned that they do not consider 480i/p a video standard, and (in some of their cards at least) they do not even support it?)

I'd like myself to understand first what digital signal/resolution would be provided (I'm not familiar with those standards) and if such signal would be easily processed by different upscalers (I kinda like the idea of sticking to whatever the source is of course, I hope though "common" video processors can eventually handle it)

It should. Very dense unit. It will need all the help it can get from external processing .

On the plus side I see the SM was recently uploaded in color. Many thanks to whoever took the time to do this.

If it worked before he shipped it it will probably work on arrival. These are mostly metal players, singled sided. I’m not sure if I’ve ever had the top off of mine in the 20 years I’ve owned it. I know it hasn’t had one single problem. I ran it for most of last year. Going back to the CLD-99 was *quite* the upgrade and it’s working %100 now but I still clench my teeth in anticipation of grip ring squeal, because it’s coming. Maybe not for a year, but it will squeal again just like it has squealed before. The 2200, never an issue...I can barely hear it running even. In the past I’ve left in on repeat for literally DAYS...still seems to have a million hours left on it. It’s not even that huge or heavy. The thing just rules.

On mine, no matter how the DIPs are set, it always repeats. You need to turn off Repeat with the remote every time. That’s the only actual flaw it has as a daily, that and mediocre/bad video, single side play, no digital sound, no CD functions, no AC-3, no field buffer, no display on the unit, etc. Other than those (very significant) things, in my opinion, it’s the best LD player ever. If you run it through a good DVD recorder the video gets a lot better.