Hollywood+ in rgb interlaced mode

 
 

 

Abstract / Disclaimer

Ok people, here's a page to explain how to obtain interlaced rgb output from your Hollywood Plus™ from Sigma Designs ©. All brands and devices presented here are copyright of their respective owners. If anything presented here seems to be misplaced or shouldn't be displayed here, drop me an email.

What is the fuss all about ?

On a vga monitor or a projector, a home theater computer outputs a progressive scan image. This can be done with any dvd player and vga card.

We're talking here about outputting an interlaced image to a more commonplace device like a tv, or some low end projectors. To do that, you can use the tv-out feature of some vga cards but ;

  • image quality obtained is not so good because of mostly poor video encoders
  • composite and svideo connections

The HW+ uses a high quality video encoder which brings you one of the highest quality dvd image on an interlaced only device. And also, that's what this page is all about, some versions of it can be used to output rgb or yuv which can be, on some devices, a way of going even higher in video quality.

The final aim is to obtain this ;

Pre-requisites

Up to now, ADV7175 equipped HW+ cards are the only ones known to be able to output such signal. Before doing anything else, check on your card that you've got such a chipset on your card

 

See a high resolution scan of the 7175 version of the HW+ card

If you've got the chip on the left, you win. If you've got an ADV7170 like the one on the right, forget it :-(

See a high resolution scan of the 7170 version of the HW+ card

What the special cable will look like

A not so standard mini din plug on one side (you need 5 pins .. standard mini din comes with 4 pins only. Look for a more standard 8 pin plug) and a scart connector (for European users like me) on the other side.

You'll have to plug this into the mini din connector of the HW+. Here's how mine looks like.

What to solder on the scart connector

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A couple more infos in the following AVSforum thread entitled Hollywood+ capable of rgb output on tv

Also, the original page from "Bofr" (checked july'02) with other pictures and details.

To use your RGB cable, I strongly suggest you to use the "Eugene player" as an atlernative to the original Sigma software. No need of tricks nor app hacks, Eugene's player has an option for RGB/YUV output that is very to use out of the box. His latest site can be found here http://eugene777.da.ru

Current version at the time of this writing is 0.99.4. I've mirrored it here