HDCP enabled on V1U?
 

On another forum, people are discussing the fact that the V1U seems to have HD content protection enabled, and sends a reduced size (numbers of pixels) image to the monitor (seems to depend on what sort of monitor you have it hooked up to).

Anyone have any facts on this one? I know that some folks were having trouble a while back getting a Z1U to provide a full res image to a Sony HDTV.

The only way they'd be having problems (I think) is if they were attempting to bypass HDCP via the V1 (which really can't be done, as the cam will not accept HD input from anything but .m2t over firewire).
On the V1,component output is always interlaced video (HD out would always be 1080i).

Over HDMI:

a) If a display device is capable of 1080i, the V1 outputs 1080i.

b) If a display device is capable of 480p, the V1 converts 1080i to 480p.

c) If a display device is capable of 1080p, the V1 sends it 1080i (not p even if the footage was recorded using a progressive mode).

Where this seems to be weird for some folks, is that their displays are not up to a true 1080, and there are issues of scaling. The cam itself is working fine, or should be. However, in today's world, we don't have just one resolution for displays, we have 3 basic resolutions and heaven only knows what kind of scaling happens in any of them.
HDCP is not enabled on the V1, unless they've got a multiport HDMI hub or switch on their television that is seeing both devices (V1 and other HDMI device) connected.
Like most difficulties folks seem to be having with HD and displays, it's likely either pilot error, or internal display issues.

For what it's worth, I bought an HDMI to DVI cable to input video from my V1u to my Dell 2407 LCD monitor. The 2407 is native 1920x1200, so it's perfectly capable of displaying 1080 material. When I plug the V1 into the 2407 using the cable, the V1 will only output 480i through the HDMI connector no matter what I do. Not sure why this is happening, but thought I'd mention it.

John

What does it do if the display device is 720p?

That's interesting, maybe I should try it on my Dell 2405 since that model does NOT have HDCP. Maybe my results will be different.

My Sony KDFE50A10 displays it as a 1080i source, and my display is 720p.
Obviously the scaler in my TV converts that 1080i into 720p, but it still reports that the source feed is 1080i.


...and the picture is gorgeous.

It displays it as 720p, but the device will see incoming as 1080i. In other words, the cam is still outputting 1080i

I have four 2407s but I do have a 2405 as well, I haven't tried it on that one. I'll see what happens...

John

I have yet to get HD working from the V1 through DVI cables on smaller sized monitors. It only seems to work on larger monitors regardless of the display's native resolution. I even had a 24" Dell LCD 1920x1200 monitor downscale COMPONENT to SD. Something is not right.

I've never gotten the V1U to display via a HDMI to DVI cable to a DVI monitor at 1080i. There is some handshaking or something missing in the HDMI to DVI connector that the V1U detects and downconverts to 480 resolution. I've tried several DVI monitors with the same results. DVI can be HDCP complient and the DVI monitors I tested were. HDMI to HDMI works perfectly. It is a shame since a lot of people do have 1080i compliant DVI monitors and they are out of luck. I have Panasonic Plasma that had a DVI interface. I had to add an HDMI interface to get the V1U to connect via HDMI. My Dish HDMI output worked perfectly with my DVI interface though, so I know that it is something unique to the V1U.

-Keith

We've been testing the Convergent Design HDMI to HD/SD SDI converter on the V1P. So far taking a live feed the camera does what it's supposed to.
But here's an interesting thing, we'd mistakenly thought this box can do a downconvert (pays to read the fine print). It doesn't!
What it does do to get a SD SDI feed from the V1P is tell the HDMI output from thhe camera to rescale to SD. The box then matches the SDI feed to the HDMI signal.

There's an interesting issue though that we've yet to resolve. Looking at the SD SDI feed on a broadcast 4:3 monitor i.e. the monitor is letterboxing, we see the first few line rather jittery and with obvious embedded data, much like CC data. This could be HDCP data, don't really know until I talk with Convergent Design. Whatever it is it'll certainly need blanking before broadcast.

We have noticed the same problem on the output from the Sony M25U deck and the Sony HC3 camcorder when playing out 576i mode (but not in 486i mode). Interestingly, the problem does not occur on the JVC HD50 deck.

We can easily blank the lines before output, but we want to investigate this problem further to see if a more elegant solution can be found (maybe some sort of HDMI issue that can be fixed in software).

Also, the latest firmware now has the VITC time-code and the embedded audio (at least in 486i) working perfect. We would apprecaite any feedback for 576i operation as we only have an NTSC DSR1500A in our lab.