May Status Update

Hi everybody!

This is going to be a mostly non-technical blog post for you... just some ramblings on what is going on over at HD Retrovision HQ, why we're teasing you with all these products you can't even buy yet, and whatever other random things I think of. Hopefully I'm diligent enough to do one of these every once in awhile.

So first of all, what is the mission of HD Retrovision? Simply put, we want to make a suite of products targeted towards retro gamers who want to be able to take advantage of the improved quality that high definition televisions can afford them.  Because of the cabling and video display technology of the time, a whole lot of detail was lost and noise added to some really nice artwork that was programmed into those amazing plastic cartridges. Our cables and other products aim to get you back to that true quality created by the designers of all your favorite retro video games.

On to where we are at and what we are thinking. A lot of the design work is done for the component cables. There are some minor technical issues to deal with still related to the fact that these systems actually went through several revisions of the hardware sitting inside of them, so we actually need to make sure the cables work regardless of when you bought your machine. We've also got some test software in the works so that we can actually quality check the products coming off the assembly line. We certainly don't want to be shipping out duds. The goal from that point is to run a Kickstarter campaign, fund ourselves to spin up a production line, and start shipping out products to you. If we're successful enough at the Kickstarter campaign, we also have some other products in the queue that we would like to get to ASAP. But more on that later.

What else? We just had a reasonably productive little Saturday all working in the same space. We're damn close to having some nice business cards to hand out, cool splash screens, and a lot of other stuff you just gotta have to be a business. A good business, anyway.

That's all from here. Comment and share, please. Help us get the word out so we can have a successful Kickstarter campaign very soon!

Getting 60fps Retro-Gaming Videos onto YouTube

We recently posted comparison videos highlighting the differences between composite video cables and our component video cables.  We chose YouTube as the video host due to popularity and accessibility.  However, YouTube does not support frame rates greater than 30fps (frames per second).  This is a hurdle we had to overcome when preparing our videos for upload.

In this blog post, we discuss a simple method for downsampling a video from 60fps to 30fps that retains the flicker and jitter present in the original 60fps video. Televisions in the United States and Japan display video at a 60fps rate, which is the frame rate provided to them by consoles like the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Genesis. YouTube, on the other hand, displays video at a maximum rate of 30fps. Therefore, when video recorded at 60fps is uploaded for sharing, it is downsampled (and possibly pre-filtered) by a factor of two. When this happens, any flicker that is produced by pixels turning on and off from frame to frame is lost.

A typical example of this might be when a character is blinking during temporary invincibility after taking damage. (See here for a real life example.) In such an example, the resulting downsampled 30fps video would either show a solid character or no character at all.  In addition, during our work we discovered a similar issue when trying to display certain types of jitter in the original video that was a result of using the composite video output used by the SNES. Because of the downsampling to 30fps required by YouTube, this jitter was no longer present in the 30fps video and we had no way of providing a representative comparison to the HD Retrovision component cables which alleviate this problem.

To solve this issue, a simple model of jitter was considered. In the following jitter model, we imagine a single row of pixels consisting of only 0's (black) and 1's (white) shifting between frames at 60fps.

Frame 0:       1   |   0   |   1   |   0   |   1

Frame 1:        0   |   1   |   0   |   1   |   0

Frame 2:       1   |   0   |   1   |   0   |   1

Frame 3:       0   |   1   |   0   |   1   |   0

Frame 4:       1   |   0   |   1   |   0   |   1

Assuming a simple scheme of dropping frames (although this will work similarly with an averaging pre-filter), it is easy to see why the flicker disappears in the 30fps video:

Frame 0:       1   |   0   |   1   |   0   |   1

Frame 2:       1   |   0   |   1   |   0   |   1

Frame 4:       1   |   0   |   1   |   0   |   1

If we imagine that frames are paired up like so [0 1], [2 3], [4 5], [6 7], ... , then the standard downsampling method is simply choosing the first frame in each pair. As above, we'd get [0], [2], [4], [6] ... for our frames. Instead, what we'd like to accomplish is to alternate which frame we choose to drop from each pair of frames. To do this, we can simply flip frames in every other pair before running the standard downsampling method. We rearrange frames as [0 1], [3 2], [4 5], [7 6], ..., so that the resulting output frames in the 30fps video are [0], [3], [4], [7], ... and so on. The result retains the jitter in our simple model:

Frame 0:       1   |   0   |   1   |   0   |   1

Frame 3:       0   |   1   |   0   |   1   |   0

Frame 4:       1   |   0   |   1   |   0   |   1

So how does this hold up in practice? Is our incredibly simplistic model at all representative of reality, or is the output an unwatchable mess of video that looks nothing like the original 60fps video? It turns out that despite the simplicity of this model, this downsampling schema works quite well. In the example video below, you can see both the flickering and jitter inherent in the higher frame rate video even though it is being displayed at a downsampled  rate of 30fps. 

Note: All 3 segments below are from video captured using the standard composite input cables and do not represent the improvements gained by using HD Retrovision cables. The right pane is the HD Retrovision downsampling schema on composite video.

Uploaded by HD Retrovision on 2014-04-25.