The limits of Redcode/Redray

[Wayne Morellini]

Yeah Blair, there are multiple reasons. Apart from competency issues, and just throwing rubbish solutions out to collect money (look at how the ambarella h264 solution blitz the industry by putting good competent work in, even the Japanese were caught with their pants down). Next time I pass by one of the Ambarella guys in the street, again, I'll have to ask them what is happening. If you really wanted to do RR low powdered, Ambarella is probably a great American company to contract to design it.

The thng about h264, it was that the amount of smart work you put in to making the compressed stream significantly affected the performance. Remember how around ten years ago we were getting rubbish compression, and in response I published a smart way to sacrifice image quality to sustain more quality per gigabit. That was the simple method, and image quality took off. There is more that can be done, but most don't have the competence, as is life. However, all this complexity requires more circuitry and power consumption, but if you use a GPU or other programmable solution you shift some of the circuitry to software and don't have to spend money designing it that way. I've actually come up with a solution before that should beat custom circuitry for power consumption. I've been in a scene where they developed cutting edge FPGA beating processing solutions. I am actually looking forwards to working with them on these solutions. One test project I want to do is my own codec that should beat RR in quality per unit of data.

Anyway, their is timing of roll out of the h265 standard phases, low end slow burn devcelopement cycle investments to bring out solutions in the future in a more timely manner (like when existing h264 platforms run out of steam) and the power consumption and cost of a h265 circuit is likely a big point holding it back, but I don't know yet. When the die process shrinks enough to be cheap and lower power, and the other factors arer rght they will probably come. At this stage, only cameras and other present uses, might be suitable for h265 circuites, and as usual for this this stage, solutions based on programmable solutions might be the norm for now.

I would not be too surprised if RR where based on h264\h265 with a lot of smart extras. This would make it a lot weaker, because h264's base line efficiency is less than something better, requiring a lot more smart layers to get its performance to this level.

 

[Ces Peynetti]

REDRAY does not play nice with the Denon 4K receivers, including the new X3100W and X2100W units that only shipped in the past few weeks.

It's a shame it doesn't work with the new Denon receivers. I'm considering getting the X3100w soon. Do you know of a receiver it plays nice with?

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

It's a shame it doesn't work with the new Denon receivers. I'm considering getting the X3100w soon. Do you know of a receiver it plays nice with?

I will be trying the Yamaha Aventage RX-A2040 or 3040 sometime this week. Will report back. As for the Denon X3100W it's nice, but also still very buggy. There is supposedly another firmware release that should happen soon. Should be available just in the nick of time for the CEDIA expo. It supposedly will help with some stability issues and help beef up some things with 4K support. Here's to hoping!

FWIW, Denon doesn't advertise this, but I've been told by one of their engineers that this year's models of 4K receivers all are capable of HDCP 2.2 over HDMI 2.0. As to whether or not this feature will be enabled and when that may happen is unknown at this time. I'm hoping it's true as that could extend the lifespan of the X3100W I just purchased. I'm hoping REDRAY can be made to work with it, but I'm not going to hold my breath. Denon is working to improve on their end and I have faith in them. This is the first Denon receiver I've ever purchased where I felt it wasn't up to their standards. I think the hardware is, it's just the software that needs to be finished. OTOH, while I know the HDMI implementation from the REDRAY isn't complete and could use some work, we do know it works with Samsung, Sony, LG and Panasonic 4K TV's. So we know it's possible for these receivers to also accept the signal just fine if they flesh out their HDMI abilities and allow for a broad range of timings and intervals. REDRAY seems to be difficult to get along with in that regard, but as far as I know and can tell, it's still within HDMI v1.4a spec.

 

[Ces Peynetti]

I will be trying the Yamaha Aventage RX-A2040 or 3040 sometime this week. Will report back. As for the Denon X3100W it's nice, but also still very buggy. There is supposedly another firmware release that should happen soon. Should be available just in the nick of time for the CEDIA expo. It supposedly will help with some stability issues and help beef up some things with 4K support. Here's to hoping!

FWIW, Denon doesn't advertise this, but I've been told by one of their engineers that this year's models of 4K receivers all are capable of HDCP 2.2 over HDMI 2.0. As to whether or not this feature will be enabled and when that may happen is unknown at this time. I'm hoping it's true as that could extend the lifespan of the X3100W I just purchased. I'm hoping REDRAY can be made to work with it, but I'm not going to hold my breath. Denon is working to improve on their end and I have faith in them. This is the first Denon receiver I've ever purchased where I felt it wasn't up to their standards. I think the hardware is, it's just the software that needs to be finished. OTOH, while I know the HDMI implementation from the REDRAY isn't complete and could use some work, we do know it works with Samsung, Sony, LG and Panasonic 4K TV's. So we know it's possible for these receivers to also accept the signal just fine if they flesh out their HDMI abilities and allow for a broad range of timings and intervals. REDRAY seems to be difficult to get along with in that regard, but as far as I know and can tell, it's still within HDMI v1.4a spec.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the Yamaha. I'm a big fan of Denon and the only thing that has stopped me from purchasing the X3100W is the lack of HDCP 2.2, but sadly Onkyo seems to be the only one implementing this so far, so I really hope the feature is enabled as I would love for the receiver to have a longer life than I'm expecting.

I also heard that the Sony FMP-X10 sometimes doesn't play nice with non-Sony devices. Do you happen to know if this is true?

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Looks like new Denon firmware next week. But I guess it happens when it happens. Having a Yamaha RX-A2040 being delivered tomorrow, will report back. It's being set up for a client installation, but I'll try it with the REDRAY and anything else I can throw at it. No HDCP 2.2 on the Yamaha. And in typical Yamaha fashion, there's no good way to talk to any of the product engineers or technical people. Denon is at least talking and trying to determine why the REDRAY won't work. I've referred them to talk to RED and have offered to let them borrow a REDRAY, but it's kinda low on their priority list as they know there are a lot of bugs to squash right now. I think they're also hoping that compatibility will solve itself as they flesh out their 4K support, which they admit is incomplete.

The Onkyo receiver with HDCP 2.2 is pretty much a piece of crap. I've played with one, but have no idea if REDRAY is compatible, or if the Sony FMP-X10 can pass through it. I just wasn't impressed with the thing at all...

So far the FMP-X10 only works through my Sony projector when directly connected and running audio separately to the receiver. Of course I wouldn't expect it to work with the receiver or other switching hardware because of the HDCP 2.2 not being there. However, the X10 media player is not compatible with my Samsung 4K TV either and according to pretty much everyone else out there who has an X1 or X10, they only play nice with Sony displays. Sony has their own AV receiver coming in the next couple months with 4K support. Something tells me that the X10 will pass through it just fine. But I can't stand Sony receivers or other audio hardware, speakers, etc.. Bleh...

I'm so picky on AV receivers, Yamaha is pushing it for me, although I'm really happy with my RX-A830. Usually I'm a fan of Denon and Integra and for larger systems I will use them only as pre-amps. I'm trying to get my hands on an Integra DTR-50.6, but I don't even know the MSRP just yet. It was announced after I had already ordered the Denon and passed up the Yamaha for my own needs as it was $500 more than Denon with no differentiating features. The new Integra models have Dolby Atmos, HDCP 2.2, etc.. They look like the real deal.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Update that is a couple days overdue.

Yamaha RX-A2040 AV Receiver and REDRAY *do not* play nice together. As with the Denon, the video/ audio pops in and out. Yamaha is unreachable in terms of talking to appropriate people about any of this.

As of today, still no firmware update for the Denon. Could really use it though, this thing is seriously buggy! The Yamaha works flawless and I actually like it's surround staging better although its sound can be a little sharper or brighter than I like and what the Denon produces. I would definitely recommend the Yamaha over the Denon at this point. I realize it's $500 more, but it performs solid. It of course won't play with the Sony X10 media player and it seems nothing wants to play with the REDRAY, either. Totally sucks because with only 2 inputs on my projector, I need a switcher in between the Receiver and my projector just so I can use the REDRAY. The X10 has to have a direct pipe into input #2.

4K market and interfaces right now are a complete joke... Way worse than HD ever was.

 

[Michel Hafner]

Final verdict from Red is in about the problem with my "footage". The playback artifacts are a limitation of Redray and can't be fixed with firmware upgrades. The box is useless for the kind of footage I mainly wanted to play back. Since this is special computer generated stuff it's not very relevant to others, but for me it's a big disappointment.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

Michel, can you describe the artifacts and footage please? It might give me some insight into Redray

 

[Michel Hafner]

The footage is fractal zooms into the Mandelbrot set in 4K. The artifacts are mainly stuttering (image and sound) or image distortions in part of the image. Red says it's buffering restraints that cause the problem.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

Hmmn, thanks Michel, so they are not using fractal compression techniques maybe

Interesting it can't compress that image well enough. What do all thedistirtikbs look like Michel?

 

[egon touste]

so this is where all the tumbleweeds were going ..

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

If you stop typing for a moment, you can hear crickets...

 

[egon touste]

did odemax get dropped?

i think im out of the redray loop..

well my bet says 4k codecs are going to get common pretty soon, and they will all benefit from the extra compressibility of larger images.. and hardware playback boxes will seem old fashioned and inconvenient .. and video will stream over the internet..

 

[L. Langer]

did odemax get dropped?

i think im out of the redray loop..

well my bet says 4k codecs are going to get common pretty soon, and they will all benefit from the extra compressibility of larger images.. and hardware playback boxes will seem old fashioned and inconvenient .. and video will stream over the internet..

Odemax was devoured by another - far better funded - tech start-up, who wanted their assets and any proprietary tech/software, whatever those were. The company that absorbed it has done nothing so far in any areas where Odemax was doing work, so I guess it was ultimately a bad buy or the assets were/are being put to use in other areas of development.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

Well somebody could have told us, so we could stop waiting a year or more ago. Hold it, we did stop waiting a year or more ago. Ever since they got this lame idea of not releasing a PC plugin version and concentrating on licensing for authoring tools (and places like YouTube) things have gotten tied up.