I know this topic has been talked about before on here as I have done a lot of searching on it but a few people seened to be on the right track but never really finish anything. I would think that it would be possable to take the signal from the current display and convert it to standard video out. With the whole mobile video market booming here in the US I would think there would be a pretty good market for it with the Rio Players. Any help here would be greatly app. Also for all of you that are wanting to remote mount or intagrate the Rio with your current system I am in the same boat. Yes I have a Rio Player and yes it is one really cool unit but for a true high end audiofile the CD is still better. I compete in IASCA Sound Quality comps. and you still have to be able to play a standard CD for judging. I am hoping to use both my Eclipse cd player run though the Rio. This way I can still use the Rios EQ to get a close to flat RTA but still be able to control my Eclipse DSP and CD changer as they use a seperate DIN type cable to communicate with the main deck. Then the output of the Rio will goto the DSP unit using a pair of RCAs and be distibuted from there. If anyone has tried this please let me know. I want to know if you get any lose in sound quality running it through the Rio and then out. I have not installed the Rio in my car yet as I am in the middle of redoing the whole system. Thanks for any input on either of these topics

Yes I have a Rio Player and yes it is one really cool unit but for a true high end audiofile the CD is still better.

I could argue with you about this on many levels, but, being totally objective, you can still load uncompressed WAV files onto the empeg and not suffer any compression artifacts or the degradation that would occur in the D/A of the CD player (of course, that assumes that the D/A of the empeg is better than the D/A of the CD player plus whatever path it has to take in order to get to the empeg's EQ, which you can argue).

Of course, that doesn't help in your IASCA SQ competitions, but, then, I'm personally much more interested in impressing myself than everyone else.... I'm sure Doug might have more to add to that.

Anything is possible with enough money and a little help from very knowledgable people

Search around for pictures from the last amerfoort meet and you see what i mean.

Hmmm, forgot about loading a few good songs as WAVE file. Eats up some HD spare but it might be worth it. I will have to try that. Thanks for the tip. I am still hoping to find some way to display something, hopefully everything, to a video monitor.........

Turboegt, two things:

1) Read this and this.

2) The paragraph break is your friend.

I compete in IASCA Sound Quality comps. and you still have to be able to play a standard CD for judging.

You are correct, and this is an unwinnable battle. I spent a lot of time and effort a couple years ago trying to convince IASCA to allow me to compete using my empeg player. It is hopeless. I understand (and even agree with) their position: they are in the business of judging audio playback systems. Allowing alternative sources different from the official judging CD opens up the possibility of people remastering the CD (don't think I didn't give that idea some serious thought!) to minimize the deficiencies of their particular installation. IASCA wants to see who has the best stereo, not who has the best recording studio!

I have given up on trying to tweak my system for an absolutely flat RTA curve on the Pink Noise track. For one thing, the new rules effective this year greatly reduce the scoring impact of the RTA (used to be a maximum of 20 points; now all is just a simple 5 point pass/fail); and to be truthful, a perfectly flat curve doesn't sound very good. The human ear is attuned most strongly to the mid-range frequencies, and unless the low end and the high end are boosted disproportionately compared to the middle, it comes out sounding kind of "thin". I just tune for a nice "smile-shaped" curve that is never more than 3dB different from one 1/3 octave band to the next, take my 5 points pass/fail, and use the same setup for SQ.

Now, you may be a much more serious competitor than I. I am what would charitably be described as a big fish in a small pond -- I win, but my competition isn't all that tough to beat -- mostly Rice-Boys with hiss-boom systems. If I showed up at a regional competition in California or Florida, they would laugh me out of the parking lot.

tanstaafl.

tfabris, two things for you:

1) Yes. I have read all of the FAQ on there but I guess I missed thepart about being etched in stone, well at least to you. I have also read a ton of other posts on here and it seens to me that sometime you do not like to "bend" the rules when it comes to thinking up new things for this player and usually revert users back to the FAQ instead of actually giving input. Sure would be nice if you gave more of us credit! I have the full documents for the CPU/DSP that is used in the Rios and there are still a lot of thing you can do with it that have not been done yet. I do not know who wrote those FAQ, weather it was you or someone else is not the piont, but I think there piont was to amswer queations about the "stock form" of the player and they did a great job of that. I, on the other hand, was not asking about a "stock" feature on the player. I thought that was pretty clear. I am a pretty smart guy but just do not know to much about the software side of the player yet but I am working on it. I am not one to take NO for am answer very ofter especailly sence it would seen to me that the player has to produce the video from somewhere. I would think it is there, it would just be the task of finding it and converting it. Looks like I will have to find out on my own.

2) I did not know that perfect grammar was a must on here. I get to thinking/typing and I know I make my fair share of errors but geesh man lighting up. This stuff is suposed to be fun. Not a good first inpretion of these BBS.....

There isn't any easily convertible signal which would give you a composite video output. The display is driven directly by the CPU.

pca has designed a video output board for the empeg but it costs a huge amount to produce and it was under contract to a third party so the design isn't available. I believe he accomplished it by adding an extra board inside the player which connected via the IDE port to transfer the display data. He did design the hardware of the empeg so he has a advantage over the rest of us.

It has been done so it's possible at least. It's not a single chip solution so expect some hard work

- Trevor

I get to thinking/typing and I know I make my fair share of errors but geesh man lighting up.

I was lightening up. Hence the smiley-face icon in the post. It was meant as a joke.

Back to the original subject:

Yes, people have created display extensions and video outs for their players. In all cases, it involved significant expense and hassle. And I do mean significant. Yes, it can be done. How much money and time are you realistically willing to spend on such a project?

I'm not trying to tell you it can't be done, because it can. I'm just trying to give you a realistic expectation of what you're up against. This isn't a one-weekend project for a few hundred bucks. For a true display extension or a genuine video out, you're talking orders of magnitude more time and money. At the Amersfoort meet, they demo'd a player with a genuine video out, and it was billed as "the most expensive empeg ever" or something like that.

In fact, if someone could please give me actual numeric figures, even ballpark ones, for the display extension hack (from a long time ago) as well as Patrick's video out hack, then I could put those into the FAQ so that I don't have to keep telling people the generic "it cost a lot of money are you really sure you want to pursue this" thing.

I can't really say, but together it might have paid for quite a lot of Hugo's NSX. The clients, both of them, were pretty serious about it.

To give an idea of the complexity, the video board has a component count of 516 individual parts, on a double-sided 8-layer PCB of about 7.75 square inches (credit card is about 7.5 square inches), including an arm7500, 4MB of ram, 1MB of flash, and took about 10 months to get to a final PCB. Almost all of the passive components are 0402 size, due to the packing density being so high. To put that into perspective, the majority of passives in the empeg are 0805, which are 2mm long by 1.25mm wide. 0402 parts are 1mm x 0.5mm, and a little fiddly to solder by hand. It takes me about 20 hours work to build one of these boards by hand.

That client was REALLY serious.

pca

Okay, that's enough for the FAQ entry, I think.

I wish I had the money to be to be able to be that serious about my empeg!

And If I did, you can rest assured it would come your way Patrick.

ahh, maybe one day I can win the lottery or something.

Hmm cool.

Was it colour/color output, or was it *just* B/W??


TommyE

Check out the European Meeting 2002 pictures (I think at riocar.org). There are, I believe, 3 pictures of a big screen taking S_Video input signal from the Empeg (God's [pca] playground... a empeg with that much extra additions, including full functional front+display on a couple of meters flatcable...)

Cheers,

EiSl

Was it colour/color output, or was it *just* B/W??

Since the empeg's display only does four shades, the video output would also only have four shades.

I think the Amersfoort pictures showed a false-color system whereby the two intermediate shades of gray were translated to some other colors. It looked sort of like when you see a false-color infrared image a la "Predator".

The board is full colour, but how you choose to drive that is your call. You could, for example, drop a full colour Rio Central UI onto it. At least, we could

Rob

What about a project similar to this:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/30/200218&mode=thread&tid=126

Bypass all the hardware mods and somehow hookup through the ethernet port. It might be a lot cheaper and easier.

Tecno

BTW I saw thoughts on awards for the longest between replies on a thread. How about I nominate myself for longest time between posts. :-)

Cool, is it adressed separatly from the internal display.
eg. could one play up a movie in full color, while having standard Empeg output on the internal one??

TommyE

Yes and no. It is independent, but the data path between the empeg processor and the graphics subsystem is quite slow. You would want to run your graphics routines on the coprocessor, but it's not going to have the guts to decode MPEG or anything like that.

This is based on a lot of assumptions - I don't have one of these boards, I saw it in Amersfoort like everyone else.

Rob

I hate to beat a dead horse but here goes again..

I am not sure what is ment but "it would cost alot" type statments but if I could send be beloved empeg to someone and have it returned with a Video out (color) or a Color display panel I would gladly lighten by Wallet by 1000 bucks or so.

I am consider the new COLOR Sony just for the "Cool factor"

What can I say I am A Geek.. and Cool rules

I would gladly lighten by Wallet by 1000 bucks or so.

I thought we just got done saying that it was orders of magnitude more expensive than that.

I saw 20 hours and ten months but not price as too what it cost

I saw 20 hours and ten months but not price as too what it cost

Patrick's statement that "together it might have paid for quite a lot of Hugo's NSX." should have been enough.

Note that "NSX" refers to a rather expensive exotic sports car.

:-O

Well, I figure the cheapest you could hire an engineer of that skill would be around $50 US/hour. Just the soldering time alone would cost $1000. Add in 10 months of development time at the same rates, and you're looking at $20,000 if he's only working on it 10 hours a week. If you're lucky enough to hire him at a cheaper rate (say half that), you're still looking at a minimum of over $10,000 US.

All I know is that if I had that kind of expendable cash, I probably wouldn't be spending it on a remote Empeg display...

Well... If I had that much cash lying around to spend on having a video out for the empeg then I'd be pretty rich as it is and I wouldn't care

Any millionaires out there want to employ Patrick to design another one?

- Trevor

How about a collaborative group buy of the design rights by interested parties from the empeg bbs, and then a 'tuner style' kit of parts being made available at an additional unit cost ?

You would have to spend a huge amount each, have a very large number of people or price the kits very high. The amount you'd get by selling kits wouldn't cover the costs of the design.

Patrick mentioned that the cost of the development would have been able to pay for a large part of a NSX which isn't exactly cheap...

- Trevor

Mmmm.. doesn't sound too bad for a one-of product. No need to engineer custom PCBs or any such stuff.

I guess what it might need is

-- a memory chip for the video ram, perhaps piggy-backed onto the existing RAM on the board (epoxy is your friend).

-- a 6845 compatible video controller chip to manage the raster scans and stuff.

-- a small amount of digital glue as required for accessing the 6845 control registers.

-- some nice analog glue to provide composite video-out.

-- some kernel mods to update the display data in the new memory chip.

Trickiest bit will be managing access contention to the video ram, or are there now commonly available dual-ported ram chips for this purpose?

As a hacker, I'd do it if I wanted something like this.

-ml

I thought that most VRAM was dual-ported - in fact, according to techtarget.com, dual-port is one of the major differences between VRAM and normal RAM. It can't be too hard to find.

Simple method for Displaying Empeg on any Video Monitor.
With the Via Epia motherboards with CPU and flash disk now available for £75, a very simple Empeg display unit could be created.
As the Mobo is pretty inclusive vga, video out, spdif, Lan, usb etc One could simply add a DC regulator circuit and a ethernet crossover cable to the Empeg and by running the Empeg web interface with the HI/LO kernal mods you could output the mpeg display in 24 bit colour to any y/c or cvbs video monitor in high quality resizable output.
If one used an 6.4" earthlink vga panel or a USD LCD output http://www.massworks.com/ you could even use a touchscreen for remote control and gain the ability to run emplode, gps, etc in the car.
Further, with the simple addition of a hdd you could even run dvd's or other media (mp3 ??) ;-) in the car but this kind of defeats the point of our Empegs and therfore may not be the way you wanted to solve your problem, after all incar pc is kind of mutually exclusive with EMpeg.
However if you were keen an epia (fanless) it and the PSU would fit in a box the smaller than a poweramp, mine sits under the passenger seat and cost less than 100 bucks.
Obviously not as elegant as redesigning the entire Empeg display subsystem but with some lateral thinking, like that that created our fabulous Empegs there are often many ways to solve a particular problem.
Best Regards
Max
80gb mk2, epia-eden, honda X, alpine pxa H700 (soon).

What was it that the Amersfoort display actually did? Was it a replacement/duplicate empeg front-panel display or did it show alternate data? If the latter, what sort of alternate data was it and did it show it concurrently with normal empeg operation?

Given that there are now in-car DVD players and a pair of VCDs (about 1.2 GB) can hold a movie with reasonable quality (especially considering the fairly small displays that would be appropriate in this environment) and we can now get 120GB worth of data in our empegs, it would be cool to be able to hold and display 100 different movies on the empeg. Of course, I have no idea if the ARM in the empeg could do real-time MPEG-2 system stream decoding. But maybe an off-board controller could if it could just throw the data at it.

(Am I just reiterating what other people have said? Maybe I missed a thread somewhere. This all seems so obvious now.)

What was it that the Amersfoort display actually did? Was it a replacement/duplicate empeg front-panel display or did it show alternate data?

From what I gathered, it was an actual video-out plug on the player. The output was the same as what was on the empeg screen, just enlarged to fit an NTSC/PAL video display. It applied a false-color palette to the monochromatic empeg shades (and from what Patrick said, the palette was user-selectable).

Didn't rob say that they used the rio centrals UI to get the color? Either way, it's a neat hack that I'm sure plenty of people would enjoy.

I think a seperate tiny PC is really going to be the easiest way for people to do this... It wouldn't take much...

Matthew

A PC using ethernet and VNC would work. But at that point, why have the empeg in your car at all? Just use the PC to play MP3s and also have full screen WinAmp visuals.

Yes, I know the empeg car is superior to most PC MP3 player systems. I'm just saying that if one has already gone to the trouble of car-mounting a PC with an in-dash video display, then the dash-mounting of the empeg is not going to be an issue for them.

someone said there were pictures somewhere of the display but i coudlnt locate thme on riocar.org anyone care to post some that was at the meet?

You know what? I don't think they're at riocar.org. I think one of the empeg team posted them directly on his own site. But now I don't remember the link. The link is somewhere in a thread on this BBS. Anyone have it?

http://www.differentpla.net/~roger/photos/empeg/2002/

It's on the 15th in the Afternoon. (You'll see what I mean when you get there.)

Thanks!

Well, from my memory of the various discussions about patrick's video out, didn't he essentially mount a seccond ARM processor inside the empeg to handle the video out? Most people are more comfortable working with x86, and there are plenty of pre-built solutions available...

I don't think I need to convince anyone here the reasons to go with an empeg over any other PC based solution. The motherboard posted above could easily be configured so that you'd never even know it was a PC doing the work -- boot off flash into linux and start grabbing the display and outputting it to the video out... Man, this tranparent PC booting into linux stuff is sounding familiar. What could be more l33t than having two computers running linux in you car?

Matthew

What the heck is this thing?

Tom

The prototype DJ unit.

What does it do?

Tom

Lets you "mix" mp3s in the same way a DJ would mix records on a speed-controlled turntable. The big circular object is the "turntable"

I thing the weird bit though is he sends the video signal up the IDE bus inot what is basically another computer.

It won't actually mix though - for that you'd need 2 decks and an external mixer.
It is the functional equivalent of a DJ turntable - allows you to scratch, adjust speed, positioning, start/stop with differing abruptness etc. , just that you don't have to carry all those big round plastic bits with you...

IIRC, there was some talk of a possibly more consumer-targeted version where a single unit would decode/control 2 mp3s and mix them.

/Michael

Picture now rotated to make it slightly more obvious...

VRAM is by definition dual-ported. Most video cards today use faster single port memory but VRAM makes less demanding designs far easier.

You can't simply piggyback those on to (most) other types of memory though :-(

Cheers,

Rex.

A PC using ethernet and VNC would work. But at that point, why have the empeg in your car at all? Just use the PC to play MP3s and also have full screen WinAmp visuals.

Actually...I used to have just that...a pc mounted in my car using winamp and a remote to control it (eventually I added a 8.4" touchscreen LCD.) When you have run something like that, you realize that the hardest thing to duplicate about the empeg is not the hardware (although patrick has given us quite an elegant piece of hardware to work with), it's the software. The software that controls the empeg is by far the best music playing software I've ever used, and in my opinion is far better than winamp or anything else on the PC. Quite often, I plug in my empeg right beside my PC and use it, even though I have all the same music on my PC, because the software on the empeg is so much better. The Cambridge team has created a true masterpiece in my opinion, and I think it'll be quite a while before we see it's equal on the PC or on commercial decks from Sony, Pioneer or others. I can sum it up in my first impression of the empeg when I got it -- "Finally...someone gets it!"