Re: Chumby NeTV?

I think a correct retail price for this would be around $50-$60 - given that full featured IPTV boxes now sell for $80 or less (see http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/14/netg … hot-at-th/ for instance). If it's closer to $100 it will start to compete with Google TV boxes such as the Revue from Logitech (that sells for $99) and that thing runs Android Honeycomb.

I'm not sure if a $50 price is doable (it would probably require large quantities, larger than what Chumby is prepared to make). I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Razvan

Re: Chumby NeTV?

Technical question:

On the wiki, I see under the features:
HD-resolution (480p, 720p & 1080p24 “True Cinema”) support

Is this just saying that it supports 24fps mode, or is it implying a frame-rate limitation on output?  What I really want to know is what output framerates are supported?

TIA for any extra info you can provide.  This is an intriguing device.

Darin

Re: Chumby NeTV?

bunnie can correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that it does not support 1080p25, 1080p30, 1080p50 or 1080p60, only 1080p24.

Re: Chumby NeTV?

drazvan wrote:

Thank you Mary, will email you privately with our details.

Just a few questions though that might be of interest to all the developers:

1. Does the developer kit include that USB breakout board that Bunnie mentioned?

2. Does the NeTV use an USB WiFi adapter? If it's USB, can the WiFi adapter be removed so that we can use the port for another USB device (if no WiFi is needed)?

Thank you,
Razvan

1)  no the kit does not include the USB breakout board.

2)  no, we aren't using a USB WiFi module.

Thanks,
Mary

Re: Chumby NeTV?

Mary, are you sure about that WiFi USB module? I've checked the picture on the Wiki and the module clearly says "IEEE 802.11 b/g/n USB module" (see red highlighted area in the attached picture).

netv insides

Re: Chumby NeTV?

drazvan wrote:

Mary, are you sure about that WiFi USB module? I've checked the picture on the Wiki and the module clearly says "IEEE 802.11 b/g/n USB module" (see red highlighted area in the attached picture).

netv insides


Sorry about that!  You are correct.  It is part number Azurewave AW-NU137.  It uses a header for the connection not a usb connector.

Re: Chumby NeTV?

What about unencrypted video streams? Will the NeTV support overlays on top of a DVI over an HDMI cable? (It's my understanding that HDMI is an encrypted super-set of DVI.)

We have a digital sign system that uses a DVI to HDMI cable to connect it to the display and I'd love to be able to add some of the NeTV's features without having to hack into the digital sign's computer.

33 (edited by drazvan 2011-09-16 15:19:09)

Re: Chumby NeTV?

Also, could someone at Chumby please clarify if the NeTV will interfere in any way with HDCP protection or any other HDMI capabilities? We plan to deploy these to end users and we wouldn't want them to call back saying that their Blu-Ray player no longer works with their TV. Can we safely assume that these units can be deployed anywhere there's an HDMI cable and will work without problems?

Later edit: After doing some reading, it appears that the NeTV only overlays its video on top of the signal that HDMI carries, without attempting to decrypt it. A good explanation is here: http://rdist.root.org/2011/09/13/the-ma … -new-netv/ . Very clever indeed! cool So I guess the answer to my question is yes, it will work with any HDMI source, regardless of HDCP. I'm impressed!

Re: Chumby NeTV?

Well....it turns out that a lot of implementations of these standards in the real world are broken - the NeTV has been tested with a number of devices and there are some hacks in it to take care of the odd quirks we've run into so far.  We would never go so far as to claim compatibility with *every* device - but we think we're compatible with devices that *strictly* implement these standards.

We'll probably publish a list of devices that we've tested against, and invite people to add to that list.

Re: Chumby NeTV?

Sounds good to me, I'll help in any way I can. I have a few HDMI sources here, including a few weirder ones (mobile phones). I'll give them a go as soon as we receive our dev kit.

Razvan

Re: Chumby NeTV?

Just to clarify a couple of questions --

USB support:
Yes, a USB breakout board exists. It's not being offered for sale yet but it probably will be made available, concurrently with the release of kits to the developer/hacker market through distribution partners (right now dev kits are in limited availability direct through chumby, and not available through our distribution partners (i.e. Adafruit, Sparkfun)). If you want to learn more about it, the full schematics and plans for the breakout are in the same directory that the hardware docs sit. You could, in fact, make it yourself, if you get impatient with us getting it to market. Yes, the wifi is USB, but it uses a non-standard pinout format.

Resolution support:
The board does not support 1080p60 or 1080p50. The software is programmed only to support 1080p24, but 1080p30 is also supportable in the hardware with a simple modification to one of the programs; but, we have yet to see a DVD player correctly interpret 1080p30 as a progressive mode. Usually they just go to 1080i when they see 1080p30 in the modeline, which is sort of crappy because they aren't the same and the result is a mixed up UI.

The hardware restriction is that the pixel clock has to be less than 95 MHz; all resolutions lower than that could be supported, but we restrict it to the most common ones to ease up on the validation matrix (there's about two dozen modes that *could* be supported).

With a high-quality transmitter, I've seen NeTV reliably support 1080p60, but that is overclocking the system substantially so we don't officially allow it. Again, it would be just a few lines of code to modify to allow the overclocking, but you would do that at your own risk and void your warranty.

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Re: Chumby NeTV?

I have my Tivo S3 fixed at 720p and it mostly worked with that output -- there were some glitches in switching video inputs on the attached Toshiba monitor/TV where I'd see the Tivo output stretched with the NeTV overlay in green for a moment, before it just going to black screen with a normal looking overlay.

I did try switching to fixed 1080i output and didn't see that working at all, but that was after the NeTV synced to the 720p.  I didn't try booting it with 1080i output.

Re: Chumby NeTV?

unwiredben -- I have a question about the Tivo S3. Is it the case that it *never* properly does an overlay (i.e., in all cases it goes to UI on black), or that on occassion it will glitch and go to UI on black.

I've tested with a TivoS3 in San Diego and it worked there, so I know it does work in some modes, but it sounds like there could be some other issue at play.

To elucidate the problem you are seeing, you are witnessing the pains of auto-resolution detection. If NeTV doesn't recognize the incoming resolution, within a few seconds it will switch to "Self-timed" mode, i.e. it's not overlaying anymore, it's just showing the UI. In this mode we're supposed to put up a helpful screen explaining the issue but we haven't put it into the firmware yet.

If you're curious, and/or willing to get really into the nitty gritty of helping us debug this, there's a couple things that would be helpful to see.

Probably the single most useful command line would be "killall matchmoded; matchmoded c". This puts our mode-matching daemon into console mode and a ton of debug info will be printed out at regular intervals telling you what our state machine is thinking about your Tivo S3. A snippet of the output log a couple seconds before, and up to ten seconds after, you try switching to the Tivo S3 would probably contain all the info I need. My guess is that one of the timing parameters is shifted slightly or is unstable in measurement.

A second, a little less useful but good to sanity check, would be the output of "snoop 0", and the contents of "/psp/cached.edid". This will output the mode that the NeTV is representing itself to the Tivo S3 as being supported by the TV (we do a man-in-the-middle modification of the EDID reporting fields). /psp/cached.edid would have the raw derived EDID structure. The EDID structure is derived on the fly at boot because different monitors may or may not support all the modes we support, so we first measure the monitor, take the intersection of the reported modes, and the synthesize a composite EDID that is safe for both NeTV and the monitor.

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Re: Chumby NeTV?

It has usually been doing proper 720p overlays with the S3.   It's only on switching HDMI inputs on my set and returning to the Tivo where I get problems.

I'll try grabbing the matchmoded debug output while switching when I try things out this evening.

Re: Chumby NeTV?

@unwiredben -- that's very helpful, thank you for the clarification.

The HDMI input switching logic probably could use some improvement. The matchmoded debug will be very helpful, but i fear we may never be able to get "perfect" on nailing the HDMI input switching, because a very complex dance happens each time you switch inputs. Depending on if your switch is a repeater, a hub, or a pass-through, we have to re-capture the encryption keys; plus we have to resynchronize the PLLs to the new resolution at the same time. This is further complicated by the fact that each user device/TV combo has timing quirks. I've seen some pretty horrific abuses as far as timing compliance goes. The Tivo S3 in particular has device-specific patches in place to fix quirks it has in negotiation with the TV. For example, Tivo S3 double-keys the cipher. While technically only the second key event is the one that counts, I've never seen another piece of equipment attempt to authenticate twice in a rapid succession.

But, I do have a couple of things left that would be good to try, and the data you can provide from matchmoded would be helpful in terms of winnowing out which one is the first to try. On the other hand, I wanted to give you the back-story so you didn't waste a ton of time trying to debug this -- it's thoroughly trodden ground and the problem is really hard, and I don't want to burden you with it.

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Re: Chumby NeTV?

Hi Bunnie (and everyone),

I've received my developer unit today and managed to run a couple of tests. I'll continue over the next few days, but here's what I noticed so far:

1. The first HDMI source I've tried is the HD set top box that came with my cable from UPC Romania. I have no idea who makes these, I'll try to find a debug menu or something. I get about 7 HD channels in 1080i and the rest of them are plain PAL, non-HD. The first thing I've noticed is that when I start the NeTV while the STB is set to one of the HD channels, the TV (set to autodetect) only sees 720p while if I connect the cable directly between the STB and the TV, it autodetects 1080i.

2. There's a lot of "flicker" (for lack of a better term) when switching between HD and non-HD channels on the STB - the ticker bar appears semi-transparent and "jumps" all over the screen in a very quick motion - it never appears to settle anywhere. It looks like the NeTV doesn't really like this HD to non-HD switch.

3. I've also tried my Optimus 3D (a.k.a. LG Thrill in the USA) as an HDMI input. 1080p doesn't work at all (black background on the TV). 720p works fine but only if I plug the HDMI cable into the phone _after_ the NeTV has booted up or if I reset the HDMI output from the phone's menu while the cable is plugged in. If I connect all the cables and then power up the NeTV it just gives me a black background.

If there's anything you need me to try, just let me know. I'll continue my tests.

Thank you,
Razvan

Re: Chumby NeTV?

@drazvan

The NeTV only supports 1080p24, which is a 24 frame per second mode typically supported only by blue ray players. Thus, the 720p mode is the correct native mode that NeTV will report to the cable box.

1080i is a mode maybe we should consider supporting, but it's not supported at the moment.

For the "flicker", I have a question -- is that flicker only transient during the channel switch? If you stay on the channel, does it eventually settle in, or is it constantly just flickering around no matter how long you stay on a channel?

Phones are really weird for HD output -- we've tested against a couple of them and I won't be shy in saying that our support of phone HD will have some quirks. But again, 1080p is not something you should expect from a phone going through NeTV because the phone won't do 1080p24. 720p is the correct resolution to expect when using NeTV.

...and yes, I'm guessing a lot of people will be confused by the 1080p24 "trucinema" support, because most people don't quite get that it's a bluray-specific mode, and only on certain bluray movies and players at that. The broad compatibility will really be with 720p.

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Re: Chumby NeTV?

Hi Bunnie,

I've just run a few more tests, it appears that 720x576 at 50Hz (what the cable box uses for the SD channels) is not supported - I've uploaded a quick YouTube video of what it looks like, the TV keeps switching between 720p and 720x576 for some reason - see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7F8TGkov2l4

If I start with an HD channel it works fine until I switch to a non-HD (720x576) channel - when it starts doing the same thing as above - see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl7jY6KJc9s (starts on HBO HD at 720p then I switch the channel on the cable box to ComedyStar which is SD).

Razvan

Re: Chumby NeTV?

Razvan -- are you in the US?

You're right, 720x576 is not currently a supported mode. It is something we could extend to support, we would have to add the mode identification to the system and more importantly we would need to scale the artwork to fit. The other trick is we'd need some video source so we could test our programming, and currently we don't have anything that generates 720x576.

That resolution sounds sort of PAL-ish, though, so I'm wondering if you're located outside the US? Can you recommend any DVD players or stand-alone equipment that would output or can be forced to output at that resolution so we have a validation target to use?

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Re: Chumby NeTV?

Bunnie, I am in Romania, in Europe. I'm not sure what equipment that you can get in the US would output this resolution. You could try the LG Optimus 3D phone (LG Thrill in the US), if you go into its HDMI settings it appears to support 720x480p (NTSC) and 720x576p (PAL), so you could try both.

Also, I don't have a 3D TV, but it would be interesting to see how the NeTV would handle the 3D HDMI signal (the Optimus 3D phone can output 3D - as well as display it on its autostereoscopic screen). But 3D support is probably very low on your priority list right now smile.

Razvan

Re: Chumby NeTV?

Thanks. I'll try to find some import movies that are in PAL format, those may be able to force some of our DVD players into PAL mode.

As for 3D, it doesn't work with it at all. It's an extension to HDMI that would be blocked by the NeTV device. sad

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Re: Chumby NeTV?

Bunnie and Duane, I know this is beating a dead horse (dang you HP for killing WEBOS, and the actually pretty decent hp WebOS phones), But will there be a supported WebOS app?

Re: Chumby NeTV?

I've got plans to write a NeTV webOS client when I get some free time.

Re: Chumby NeTV?

unwiredben wrote:

I've got plans to write a NeTV webOS client when I get some free time.

thats good to know!

now if someone would write a windows mobile app I'd be set.

Re: Chumby NeTV?

too bad that it doesn't support 1080p60 because this is the mode that people use. What danger would overclocking impose? Overheating of the fpga?

Additionally, if I understand correct it only work if an input source exists because it doesn't have own keys to encrypt the signal. Am I right?