Quintessential Inessentiality: February 2022

Monday, February 14, 2022

Guspaz's pearls of wisdom

Just documenting them here before I lose them forever. More added as they come!

I've been quite happy with my Sabrent SSD, a field in which they've rapidly built themselves a good reputation, but when it comes to power adapters, I normally first look for Anker. If you need a 10-port charger, Anker has a 10-port charger that does 2.4A per port, shared for 12A total: https://us.anker.com/collections/chargers/products/a2133
It has PowerIQ so it should support full speed charging/power on anything you plug into it.

On high-speed HDMI cables and certification:

(NOTE: I'm going to use "HDMI 2.1" in this post, treat it as me saying "Ultra High Speed", meaning specifically 48 Gbps rated cables)
You can't use cat5e anything with HDMI 2.1, and there are no cheap yet effective solutions. The only way to do longer HDMI 2.1 runs is fiber optic, and those cables all cost a fortune.
I've been quite happy with Cable Matters' 15 meter (49.2 feet) HDMI 2.1 cable, which currently sells for $150 CAD.
HDMI 2.1 devices are very picky about cables, there are so many stories out there about people buying HDMI 2.1 cables and then not being able to do 4K120 over them because the cables aren't good enough. It's a major problem, especially for these fiber optic cables, and with HDMI 2.1, pretty much any cable longer than maybe 10-15 feet must be fiber optic to deliver the full 48 Gbps.
There are three things you should do when buying an HDMI 2.1 cable:
1) Only buy a cable that uses the specific wording "Ultra High Speed HDMI". Don't buy a cable that is labeled only as 4K or 8K or HDMI 2.1 or anything like that. If it doesn't specifically advertise "Ultra High Speed HDMI", ignore it.
2) Only buy certified Ultra High Speed cables. Make sure the cable is advertised as being certified. In the case of the Cable Matters ones, they both list "Certified" in the product entry, and advertise their certified status in the the marketing artwork on Amazon, and in the product description.
3) Once you get the cable, there will be an "Ultra High Speed" certification hologram and QR code on the box. Download the official "HDMI Cable Certification" app for your iPhone or Android phone and use it to validate the hologram. If the hologram is absent or does not pass verification, return the cable for a refund due to false advertising.
I think that if you follow these three steps, you can avoid the vast majority of issues with bad cables that fail to deliver actual 48 Gbps performance.

Monday, February 7, 2022

Bringing my Gefen Home Theater Scale out of retirement

So my DVDO Edge went up in smoke. Or rather, my first DVDO Edge went in smoke... and really, it was just the power supply, which I'm reading is a "common" occurrence (link 1, 2). Since I have a TESmart 16:1 HDMI switcher, the Edge was really downgraded to just deinterlacing and making the OSSC play nice with its more exotic modes: the PSP-specific sampling mode, Line 5x, and 480p/576p proc Line2x.

After waiting so long for the zooming/cropping modes of the RetroTINK-5X Pro, I found the OSSC's PSP-specific mode the superior one all along, and that meant an external scaler again. My long boxed-up Gefen Home Theater Scaler was perfect for this, and it did display the PSP-specific sampling mode just fine (will try 5x and 480p 2x later).

The box-shaped remote was as crappy as I remembered, with buttons barely registering and making me question if I really needed a new battery. I tried programming a secondhand Chunghop remote and I had some success, although my programmed buttons for Up and Right didn't work. I did get a brand new controller for about $10 so I'll try again with programming.

Then for whatever reason I became interested getting a second Gefen HTS, and it was cheap enough, so I did:

Gefen Home Theater Scaler HDMI Untested: $41.36 shipped
Gefen ITE Power Supply, GT-4201D-05, DC 5V 4.0A, Genuine: $20.46 shipped
GEFEN RMT-SR-IR REMOTE: $21.90 shipped

Okay, so I should've stopped with just the second Gefen HTS itself. And wouldn't you know it: this second scaler came with its own set of problems:

The remote didn't work, and without the remote, the second scaler was just a brick. So maybe "untested" really meant broken this time? Well, no. I remembered seeing dip switches under the battery cover, and I also remembered the "Remote" option in the scaler menu. Some searching led me to a PDF of another Gefen Remote, and while the dip switch settings weren't quite the same, I was able to figure it out for my scaler:

IR Channel 1: 1: down (off), 2: down (off)
IR Channel 2: 1: up (on), 2: down (off)
IR Channel 3: 1: down (off), 2: up (on)
IR Channel 4: 1: up (on), 2: up (on)

Turns out this second scaler was stuck looking for Remote 2 and my square remote was set to Remote 1. That meant going through the different combinations of dip switches on the remote until it responded.

Good news: The firmware of this new scaler was 4.8! Higher than my original one which was 2.2. The menu looked exactly the same (so no new features) except the cursor was highlighted in red.
Bad news: I saw screen tearing! It went away after I hit Reset on the remote to return to the default settings. I hope that fixed it for good.
I ordered the 2nd remote (now oval-shaped) before figuring out the whole IR Channel thing, but some good things came out of it:

The battery was included!
The buttons are much better; more tactile and responsive.
The scaler, power supply, and remote complete the set. Or maybe I'll give the old Gefen HTS to my brother so he could enjoy 5x with the SNES or whatever.
Update: the oval-shaped remote doesn't seem to actually work with the Gefen HTS, and I'm having even worse luck with the brand-new Chunghop remote. What am I doing wrong?

More IR links for fun and profit: