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Author
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Topic: Flashing light on DMA8plus.
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 03-06-2014 11:04 AM
I was setting up a Blu-Ray player on Tuesday evening. Original player disappeared long ago, so they bought a new one. They bought one with only three connections, mains in, HDMI out and Ethernet. No audio output to connect to anything, and the usual HDCP problem. Got hold of a HDMI to analogue, either Y,Pb,Pr or RGBHV, adapter, which also de-embeds the audio and outputs it as either analogue or optical S/PDIF. Converted that to co-axial and fed it into Digital 3 on the DMA since the optical input is already in use for something else. Works fine, picture and sound are very good, but the 'valid clock' indicator on Digital 3 is flashing, at about 1 Hz. never seen this before, and can't find anything about it in the manual. everything is still working fine. Any ideas.
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 03-07-2014 10:14 AM
Not a recorded disc, it does it with a real disc, playing content from a memoory stick in a USB port on the player, or not playing anything at all, as soon as the player is turned on.
The DMA is had just been powered up, The cinema is not yet in use. First screening will be 20th March, then 27th and 28th, then two screenings each Thursday from the following week. I will be running the first few shows. I used to have to re-boot the DMA from time to time when I worked there before the cinema closed, but I upgraded the firmware and it seems to be more stable now, during quite a bit of testing which we have done.
The weak clock sounds possible. The flash seems to be quite regular, it looks like something which the DMA is intending to do with the LED. I wonder if cleaning the Toslink cable, or replacing it with a better one, would help. It's only one metre long. I don't know the history of the one that is there now; I found it with a pile of other cables. I think I might buy a better one tomorrow to try. I've used the optical to co-ax converter frequently in various places, and never had any problems with it.
The player is a cheap Panasonic, but the quality is as good as anything I have seen from more expensive ones. It can play video files from USB devices, or from Windows servers over Ethernet. It had various annoying features, but almost everything can be turned off. It even put out button clicks from the remote control on the embedded audio in the HDMI for some unimaginable reason.
Choice of player was not mine. Original one went missing after the cinema closed, almost three years ago. The cinema is not ours, it belongs to the council who will be renting it to us for a few hours each week. The rest of the time it will be used for other purposes; there was a poetry reading going on there one evening recently for example. most screenings will be digital cinema with occesional special events on film, DVD, Blu Ray etc. The first screening will be on Blu-Ray, which is why I'm keen to make sure that it's working reliably. That was the player they chose to buy. Having said that, I'm impressed by both picture and sound quality with it connected the way I have it now. I don't think there are any new players available now which have analogue outputs. It would have been nice if they'd bought one with an audio output, but they didn't.
I have configured the player to output Dolby Digital and PCM as bitstream, and DTS decoded to 2-channel PCM, with matrix encoding. The DMA is configured with matrix deconing for two channel material 'on' for PCM and 'auto' for Dolby Digital. That is the best I can do with the available equipment. It still sounds pretty good. Most of the more recent discs do seem to be using DTS DTS-HD master, so the player has to do the decoding.
I have to say that I'm impressed with Blu-Ray. Considering that it's a cheap, highly-compressed domestic format it can look very good. It's a pity that they didn't retain Dolby Digital on all discs for people with older equipment.
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