The new DVDO iScan VP30 Video Processor

[JPP]

Now that the arrival of the VP30 is only a few days away, I thought it best to start a fresh thread. My thoughts are to keep all posts on users' findings/info/thoughts/ideas on the VP30 in this thread, with hopefully a sticky Q&A/FAQ at the top.

This thread had its origin in the "Group Buy on the DVDO VP30" thread, where many posters discussed various aspects of the VP30. See:

http://www.dtvforum.info/index.php?showtop...80entry313367

Phil.

Edited December 17, 2005 by JPP

[big_marcelo]

Also of interest could be the AVS Forum in the US -

The link is for the VP30 thread - very good... up to 47 pages so far (link to the last page)

AVS Forum - DVDO VP30 discussion

Regards,

Marcelo

[JPP]

Also of interest could be the AVS Forum in the US -

The link is for the VP30 thread - very good... up to 47 pages so far (link to the last page)

AVS Forum - DVDO VP30 discussion

Regards,

Marcelo

Yes, it's a very good forum, but as you point out, now very long too. They've mentioned a few times that they shoould start a new thread once people start to talk about their experiences with the VP30 - let's hope they do!!

[Austen]

I reckon you've been had.

Rule #1 - NEVER pre-order technology products.

Rule #2 - See rule 1.

Absolutely !! You're dead right !! Not an issue !!

OK, Having got that out of the way, there's one tiny detail you're missing....................

While I wasn't involved in this particular GB, I have been in on a couple of other buys through here but unfortunately the point you're missing is that not only do we know this, we actually enjoy it !!!!

We know that in five years Strathfield will be selling "Golden Dragon" upscaling DVD players that far exceed the capibilities of todays (OK, Tomorrows ) iScan VP30 for $59.00. We know that SED / OLED / Display Panel prices are coming down, quality is going up and the Texas Instruments DarkChip V43 will be far better than the DarkChip V2.

We don't care !! We want our toys now !!!

If we did care, we'd still be using our Commodore 64 computers, waiting for Quad-core processors to become mainstream, and using our Commodore C2N Datasettes while waiting for 1 Tb HDD to be affordable !!!

As one member (big_marcelo) has in his sig...............

"Addicted to technology..... / Love the toys!!! "

Or, as Norpus would say .........

"He who dies first with the most toys wins" (and I'm getting ahead at the moment for xmas)"

Some people modify their cars, others love fishing. Still others like snowboarding or trail bike riding.

We don't just see HT as a means to watch TV or DVD's, to us the pursuit of (our own) excellence is what it all about, actually watching the pictures we are able to achieve is just a bonus !!!

To continue the analogy. Imagine for a minute a new golf club was released.....Most of us wouldn't spend $500 for a golf driver, even if Tiger Woods said it was the best, but I'm sure we'd understand if you wanted to. But (if golf was your thing), why would you spend $500 on a Tiger-Woods approved driver ? With the release of this club have they stopped developement of golf clubs ? Is this one the best there ever will be ? Surely not, yet keen golfers would indeed buy it instead of waiting for the next "Best-Ever" driver.

We're the same, we want out HT stuff, and we want it NOW !!!!

That's just our thinking..............

Austen.

[Foggy]

Every time you make this point in your eloquent and "subtle" style, I think that it should be added as a forum "sticky".

Why don't these people understand our illness?!

[jokiin]

We know that in five years Strathfield will be selling "Golden Dragon" upscaling DVD players that far exceed the capibilities of todays (OK, Tomorrows ) iScan VP30 for $59.00.

It won't take anywhere near that long at the current rate of development.

[laurie]

We know that in five years Strathfield will be selling "Golden Dragon" upscaling DVD players that far exceed the capibilities of todays (OK, Tomorrows ) iScan VP30 for $59.00.

Austen.

Bullshit I was told that the actual price is $58.95!!

cheers laurie

[glenncol]

Guys

Here is a copy of a email received by our vendor giving the latest on delivery times

"Dear DVDO Retailer

After much email and phone traffic over the last few days between Synergy and DVDO we now know that our precious VP30 shipment has physically left DVDO's warehouse today 20 December (19 December USA time).

Although this is a few days later than previously advised we are pleased to report that we are the first export market to have our order shipped, such was the pressure we put on the poor Americans.

Unfortunately this means the VP30's will not be here before Christmas. We are hoping there are no freight holdups due to Christmas and that the shipment will be in our warehouse next week for immediate despatch to all our eager customers.

Sincere apologies for this further delay. We will do everything we can to get everybody's VP30's out as quickly as possible once we receive the shipment.

If you need to talk further regarding the VP30 or any other DVDO products please get in touch.

All the best

Regards

Synergy Audio Visual"

[JPP]

For those of us that like to see what makes it all tick, here are some shots of the inside of the VP30. I've yet to hook it all up.

Phil.

Added the SDI module:

What you need to know to connect all your toys up to it:

All for now

[BigBobOz]

Out of curiosity what's the SDI module?

[RodN]

Wow Phil were you a torturer in a past life, 3 whole days and not a sniff of how good it is!

Ok I'm officially impatient, thanks for the shots, looks great.

[JPP]

Out of curiosity what's the SDI module?

Bob,

Below of couple of definitions and link to SDI.

(Serial Digital Interface) - A set of standards for digital transmission of video over 75 ohm coaxial cable preferably using BNC connectors.. For video it usually uses a 270 megabyte per second data transmission rate and it supports the standard NTSC based video formats and ATSC video formats. It is suitable for transmission over 100 feet contrasted with DVI and HDMI which are limited to about 30 feet. ...

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&lr=&...en&q=define:SDI

Typically, high end DVD players use SDI. You can get your own DVD player to be modified with SDI for about $500. Now that we have digital interfaces on DVD players, much of the good oil that SDI offers has largely been obviated. The idea of having an SDI interface on your VP30 is that you let/make the VP30 do all the work of de-interlacing and scaling - you want to get the purest non-fiddled with signal from your DVD player - straight out of the read head so to speak. A good transport but very dumb player is what your want really. Broadcast stations purportedly use players with SDI.

[JPP]

Wow Phil were you a torturer in a past life, 3 whole days and not a sniff of how good it is!

Ok I'm officially impatient, thanks for the shots, looks great.

Yeah, might take a little while yet. I've just re-thought my cabling setup again and have made a few changes which requires a few new cables - will take a few days to get them in. In the meantime though, have a look at the US Forum where they have been discussing the VP30:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread....651#post6791651

Basically, as I still have the HD+ running and don't need to return it for another 3 weeks, I'd rather continue with it and have the one change over. So far, according to the Yanks, performance wise the VP30 looks to be equal or better than the HD+, plus of course having the extra features like 4 digital video inputs instead of one, and scaling/de-interlacing of component and RGBHV analog HD signals, and an analog stereo audio input in addition to the 4 digital inputs to name the most important differences.

Edited December 28, 2005 by JPP

[Groover !]

Wow its finally here !

[JPP]

Wow its finally here !

Why oh why my darling were you selling it? Just caught your post before you edited it

[Groover !]

Why oh why my darling were you selling it? Just caught your post before you edited it

Who me Nah ! You must have been seeing things.

[JPP]

Wow Phil were you a torturer in a past life, 3 whole days and not a sniff of how good it is!

Ok I'm officially impatient, thanks for the shots, looks great.

Nobby, tomorrow's the day

[Groover !]

Hey its pretty damn quite in here. Didnt anyone in Melbourne pick theirs up yet ?

[RodN]

Nobby, tomorrow's the day

heheh cool.

I'm in love with scalers but my bank balance isn't. I have three HD displays that are just aching for a scaler and am running feeds to them through the house.

Be sure to post any reviews in the review section so we don't miss out on all this widescreen churn!

[norpus]

heheh cool.

I'm in love with scalers but my bank balance isn't. I have three HD displays that are just aching for a scaler and am running feeds to them through the house.

Be sure to post any reviews in the review section so we don't miss out on all this widescreen churn!

Nobby I pick mine up tomorrow so you can have a play on Wednesday

[Foggy]

I've been tinkering with my VP30 tonight and I've already come up with what I believe to be a major flaw for the Australian market;

The only signal type that it seems to correctly recognise and display from my AUSID STB is PAL. It will not work with 1080i-50Hz, 720P-50Hz, or 576P-50Hz. The 50Hz support seems to be severely lacking, and from my knowledge of the Australian DTV standard, I don't believe any STB will output 60Hz.

This means that I can't take advantage of the HD broadcasts, and thus have to view them as upscaled 576P signals, which is significantly worse than the native 1080i broadcast.

On the positive side, the PQ from my Pioneer 969 DVD player has improved. The picture appears to be less noisy than that generated by the Pioneer's internal scaler.

I haven't yet played too much with the picture settings to calibrate colours, brightness etc. so I can't really comment on any improvement in these areas.

The plan for me is to use the VP30 on my forthcoming projector, and I will probably get Aaron to calibrate it in that environment once it is all setup.

Has anyone else had similar problems with the output from their STB, or is it just a quirk with the AUSID?

[Horseman]

I also have a problem displaying 1080 at 50 hz, only at 60 hz, thought was rather weird.

My "old" Lumagen HDP didnt give a default setting of 50 or 60 hz so dont know what it was processing.

The VP30 seems to be faster at processing the image than the Lumagen, the Lip Sync issue i have had with Foxtel is all but gone, and i havent even hooked up the audio pass through yet.

Another quirk i am having is the aspect selection seems to be changing and i cant easily save each inputs settings, thats probably LU error (Loser User).

Aaron is coming over tommorrow to calibrate the VP30 with my "Old" Nec 50 and the Lumagen with my Infocus 7205 projector so should be an interesting afternoon.

Ill report back what he thinks about the 50hz vs 60 hz issues. Hopefully he will be able to map the output directly to the Plasma and this may improve things.

Overall i think the image is very similar to the quality of the Lumagen, hard to tell if there is an improvement or not, but then again ive had a good quality scaler for a while.

[shinrai]

I've been tinkering with my VP30 tonight and I've already come up with what I believe to be a major flaw for the Australian market;

The only signal type that it seems to correctly recognise and display from my AUSID STB is PAL. It will not work with 1080i-50Hz, 720P-50Hz, or 576P-50Hz. The 50Hz support seems to be severely lacking, and from my knowledge of the Australian DTV standard, I don't believe any STB will output 60Hz.

This means that I can't take advantage of the HD broadcasts, and thus have to view them as upscaled 576P signals, which is significantly worse than the native 1080i broadcast.

On the positive side, the PQ from my Pioneer 969 DVD player has improved. The picture appears to be less noisy than that generated by the Pioneer's internal scaler.

I haven't yet played too much with the picture settings to calibrate colours, brightness etc. so I can't really comment on any improvement in these areas.

The plan for me is to use the VP30 on my forthcoming projector, and I will probably get Aaron to calibrate it in that environment once it is all setup.

Has anyone else had similar problems with the output from their STB, or is it just a quirk with the AUSID?

Foggy, would you mind putting in some dvds that you know had banding issues and report on the results there?

Also, i gather you are feeding the vp30 576i?

[Foggy]

Foggy, would you mind putting in some dvds that you know had banding issues and report on the results there?

Also, i gather you are feeding the vp30 576i?

Hi shinrai, I'm currently using the component (interlaced) out from the 969 as I haven't yet got around to picking up another HDMI cable. I believe that this is still 576i, but I might get a slight improvement with the digital output of the HDMI.

I will give Master & Commander a whirl later on today as some of the fog scenes in that movie are almost guaranteed to exhibit banding.

[JPP]

The only signal type that it seems to correctly recognise and display from my AUSID STB is PAL. It will not work with 1080i-50Hz, 720P-50Hz, or 576P-50Hz. The 50Hz support seems to be severely lacking, and from my knowledge of the Australian DTV standard, I don't believe any STB will output 60Hz.

This means that I can't take advantage of the HD broadcasts, and thus have to view them as upscaled 576P signals, which is significantly worse than the native 1080i broadcast.

G'day Foggy,

I've not been having any probs with 1080i 50Hz on DVI from my STRONG 5400 HD STB. Other sourcs such as the OPPO DVD player which I've set at 720P on DVI also not a problem.

What I do find is that when changing from a 576i source (component) to a HDMI/DVI source (i.e using the HDMI inputs), that switching across takes a long time. When switching between component sources, it's almost instantaneous like the HD+ was/is.

One interesting test I did was to compare the PQ between letting the VP30 do the scaling vs the HD STB. So, for this test I set the HD STB to 576i and let the VP30 do the upscaling/de-interlacing to my display's native res of 1280 x 768, the resolution I've set the VP30 to on its digital HDMI output. Next I set the STB to 1080i and compared the pictures. The program I was watching was on Channel 9 (1080i on HD) and was stated to be HD quality by the broadcaster.

Suprisingly, or perhaps not, I found that the VP30 did a better job of upscaling the SD picture to HD than did the station. So, for me, it's a waste of time switching to the HD channel when a program is claimed to be in HD; I get a better picture doing my own upscaling. Remember though, that my comments are restricted to viewing a picture at a max vertical resolution of 768 lines. A 1080i picture will be downscaled to 768 lines; a 576i picure will be upscaled and de-interlaced to 768 lines. People having PJ's that show a true 1080 lines may get different results.

A surprising result was that the SD picture coming out of my HUMAX PVR was ever so slightly better than that out of the STRONG 5400 (on both SD and HD)

Overall, the PQ or processing quality of the VP30 seems just slightly better than the HD+. More tests to follow.

Phil.

Edited January 2, 2006 by JPP