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02 Mar 2015

The terrible HDMI circuit

By Rudy

(Had this drafted months ago, but thought it would be pointless. Recently though, my sound bar / AVR somehow reset all its settings and I had to figure out how the wiring goes again. After sorting everything out, I thought I should make a record just in case I forget again :P)

#Start of First Draft

Recently acquired a new TV to replace the 9 year old Sammie. Full HD and 3D goodness, finally!

With every new purchase however, there would be some work involved. All those cables on the existing devices will need to be rerouted or removed. And you need to figure out the limitations with the various equipment to try to get the most out of them without having to spend even more money upgrading them.

So TV arrived the same day of purchase (thanks Sony!), and first thing to do was to move the HDMI inputs from the switch onto the TV. We wouldn’t want to lose any resolution or colour along the way. Also had to buy a digital optical cable to route audio from the TV to the AVR (just a sound bar).

Tested the gaming consoles, and Astro, and so far so good. But wait, we’re not getting complete audio from the HTPC. One whole night of troubleshooting revealed that I couldn’t passthrough DTS audio to the TV, because the TV can only send out Dolby Digital through its optical output. The workaround for this was to get another digital optical cable so that I can connect my HDMI switch (which supports ARC) directly to the AVR. The HTPC then connects to the switch as an input, and the output goes to the TV. The TV will then send back the audio signal to the switch via ARC, and this gets routed over to the AVR via optical cable. Sounds convoluted doesn’t it? Surprisingly, the TV supports DTS via ARC, but not via optical. On the other hand, it might just be the audio feed directly from the HTPC to the AVR. I had spent another night trying to figure this part out, cuz it wouldn’t work for some reason.

#End of First Draft

So here we are in 2015 to continue this post. ARC is the feature that’s working here because the only input connections that the AVR are getting are digital optical ones.

Another use for the switcher is to route the legacy devices to the TV via HDMI. This part gets kind of interesting. The DVD player and PS2 do not have HDMI outputs, so they were originally connected to the AVR via RCA or Coaxial inputs. Now that the AVR no longer outputs HDMI to the TV, I connected it to the HDMI Switch instead. So whenever I need to use the DVD player or the PS2, which I rarely do, I just had to switch inputs on the Switch.

Then, somewhere along the way, we decided to try making the HTPC into a karaoke player. For karaoke, we need to use a separate karaoke amp and speakers instead of the AVR. We originally used this karaoke audio system separately using a laptop connected via a stereo jack, and ran Karafun on the laptop for song queuing and Windows Search for the library. Now that we wanted to connect to it via the NUC, which only supports HDMI or DisplayPort, we needed to somehow convert the HDMI audio to RCA. So we had to buy a HDMI splitter that had RCA output for this.

The problem with this HDMI-to-RCA splitter is that its HDMI output would sometimes turn off for some reason. Maybe it’s a limitation of the device itself, so I went out and bought another HDMI splitter so that the original HDMI output can be split off cleanly before heading to the HDMI-to-RCA splitter. In the end, we have 2 HDMI devices between the HTPC and the AVR/karaoke amp.

Home Theater Diagram 2014

 

Everything’s all dandy now, except that XBMC can’t seem to handle the karaoke queueing very well. But that’s a different post for a different day.

28 May 2009

the karaoke trail

By Rudy

Initial plan was to stream karaoke files as video to the PS3. Hardware needed: PS3 (got it), mics with echo chamber (got a pair lying around in the old house), AV receiver & surround speakers (not really needed for this particular use, but you know.. we must have them!).

Forgetting about hardware for the time being, we need to do a POC.

PS3 Media Server does not show CDG files on the XMB, so that’s off the table. TVersity shows them, but requires a DirectX filter to play them. A free DirectX filter available on the net can’t work, because it’s too old and missing some tech. There’s a paid one available from Power Karaoke, but I can’t get the trial version to work (no audio in WMP, slow load in PS3 and hangs after about 5 seconds of play).

Another issue: English CDG files are usually paired with an MP3 file for the audio, so they’re usually zipped together for distribution. We assumed that they should be unzipped to be played, but apparently most karaoke players can play them zipped (in fact the free karaoke filter I mentioned earlier can do that using a bundled unzip filter). The IRC channel that we hang out in to get new English karaoke songs also requires our files to be zipped for sharing. Seems like a waste to keep 2 sets of the same files for different purposes (1 set is currently 7GB).

Both PS3MS and TVersity don’t show ZIP files on the XMB. PS3MS has an option called Browse ZIP/RAR files, but that doesn’t help in this matter.

The next idea that we had was to instead stream the karaoke playlist from the media server as a webcast. We can then configure PS3MS to grab it as Internet TV. It’s better than the original idea whereby we can browse for songs and add them to the playlist while people are singing.

Problem is, we can’t find any webcasting programs that simply supports DirectX. None of the karaoke players have a webcast function either. Windows Media Player has a media sharing function, but you can’t drag zip files into its playlist.

I’m currently attending a C# .NET class. Kinda tempted to just code one someday. 😛

But anyway, that particular alternative is a dead end. The last choice that we have: use a dual-screen notebook. A notebook would be better than a desktop because 1) we already have two, and 2) we’re trying to keep the number of running machines in the house to a minimum. Besides, having a full tower that generates enough heat to power the Matrix in a living room without A/C isn’t generally a good idea. 😛

So we have Faizah’s Powerbook G4: it’s nice and small, but it needs a proprietary AV out. It also has an overheating battery that was recalled in 2006 but we’re still using it. Contacting Apple now to see if we can still get it exchanged. 😛 Available karaoke players are also not free.

And then we have my HP Compaq 6910p: new and tons of RAM, but it’s the office notebook. 😛 Only needs an S-Video out, so we’re set! For software, we’d use Karafun, which is free and simple enough to use. We’d just mount the karaoke folder from the media server and use Windows Search to search for music and drag them to the Karafun playlist.

So that’s settled mainly. Just need an S-Video cable to complete the POC.

Then we moved on to looking for Japanese karaoke files. Scoured IRC for a few days but couldn’t find any. Searched the web but nothing in English. Enabled Japanese IME to start doing Japanese language searches, which finally shed a little light.

There was one major source for Japanese karaoke: Club DAM, a website for the makers of a line of Japanese karaoke machines. At 1035円 a month, you can download all the DRM10-encrypted karaoke videos you’d want. But my Japanese is rusty, so I’m not sure if the files expire after you terminate a subscription.

Today, I managed to find some videos on YouTube (search カラオケ) but it’s definitely not comprehensive. It’s a start. Most are high quality and downloadable using DownloadHelper. Playing them back, however, was another problem: the FLV splitter that comes with K-Lite does not play the HQ35 Youtube format (which is essentially AVC/H264 and AAC in an FLV package), but I fixed that easy by downloading a newer version of FLVSplitter (1.0.0.5) to replace the K-Lite one (1.0.0.4).

But now I’m stuck with the fact that Karafun can’t play FLV files. O.o I’m pretty sure there’s another player that does, but I can’t remember which one. Or I could just convert it to AVI or whatever.

I’m still tempted to sign up for a karaoke@DAM subscription. Might acquire Tunebite Platinum for DRM removal.