Source-Specific display settings lost when routing HDMI thru AV reciever?

[PartTimeGeek]

Hey all,

I have finally retired my much loved but phosphor burnt Pioneer Elite HD530 Rear Projection CRT HDTV, and stepped into the compromise world of Samsung LED LCD "Precision Dimming" TV (UNC558000)

I have hit the books and research pretty heavily to know to turn off Auto Motion Plus, (hate the soap opera effect) Turn off edge enhancement, turn off black enhance, turn ON LED Motion Plus, etc, to approximate the smoothness I used to take for granted in my Pioneer, and I am pretty happy with it. Plus the 3D capability is really quite impressive.

All that said, I have made such settings for each of my AV sources based on the material I am likely to be viewing:

XBOX360: Gaming only. Standard picture mode, cool color temp, all motion smoothing off, contrast at 95, black level at about 45, LED Motion Plus On, sharpness at about 20, etc etc, geared for a hyped picture that still has no motion artifacts.

Blu-Ray: Film Mode, EVERYTHING off, sharpness at 0, color temp warm, etc etc

TV: Similar to XBOX360, Judder reduction at 0 blur reduction at 2, LED Motion Plus on, etc etc.

I have an Onkyo TX-NR808 reciever

My question is this:

In order to get true Dolby and DTS discrete 7.1 soundtracks from a blu-ray player, you MUST run the HDMI cable through the receiver, since optical and coaxial feeds to the receiver cannot handle anything more than the compressed dolby and DTS formats like Dolby Digital and standard DTS.

I am used to my older setup where each source was connected to the TV directly (analog and HDMI to DVI cables) and I used my harmony 550 universal remote to handle all the audio and video source switching.

That was the only way to have the televisoon settings be specific to the source, since there are no specific commands in the harmony database for selecting display settings directly.

I usually RTFM, but in this case I am finding a lot of generic sounding information in the manuals that does not directly address this concern.

Does HDMI-CEC address this?
I see that, at least when the sources are directly connected to the TV, that CEC (Anynet) sources come up in the source list in their own section above the list of hard inputs below (where they are duplicated, but not identified)

Will today's HDMI recievers pass the source's identity through to the TV, and as such, can the TV remember settings for the sources separately even though they are coming down the same HDMI cable from the monitor output on my Onkyo?

Any recounting of others experience in this regard would be greatly appreiciated.

Thanks!

[MrBoylan]

Good observation and no, HDMI-CEC does not address this. Samsung's "BD-Wise" option does allow the player and TV to communicate RE: picture settings (Assuming they are both from Samsung), but I have not found its assumptions about picture settings to be ideal. Plus I just dislike machines doing the thinking for me (look what happened in The Terminator!).

You have a couple of options that I can think of:

1. Save your settings for each device under a different picture mode (e.g., "Game," "Cinema," "Standard," etc.). This way you can switch to the specific mode for each source. If Harmony has discrete codes in its DB to access the picture modes directly for that TV, then all the better, because you could add that mode switch to the Activity. You can find this when logged into Harmony to program custom buttons or add custom functions to an activity. You'll see something like "ModeGAME" on the list of functions available for the device if they're in there.
2. Get a Blu-ray player with dual HDMI outputs: e.g., the Samsung BD-C7900 or Panasonic DMP-BDT350. This way you can send one output to the receiver for audio and the other to the TV directly for video. Since the other sources do not do net gen codecs (right?), you could use fiberoptic audio cables for these devices to get sound to the receiver without losing any quality.
   

BTW, I would not set Sharpness to 0 on any recently manufactured TV. This may actually soften out the image and lose detail. For a time, sharpness of 0 meant no "enhancement" was added to the image but from what we've seen on TVs made in the last few years, this is no longer the case. The ideal sharpness setting (passthrough, no enhancement or softening) varies from model to model but is usually around 1/3 of the way up the scale (e.g., 33% of max).

To set sharpness, use a good test pattern with hard white solid edges or lines on a black background. Adjust the sharpness up until you see the first faint echo of ghosting around the edges and turn it down one or two ticks below that point.

Good luck!

-Chris

[PartTimeGeek]

Hey, thanks for the quick reply!

You know, i had an inkling that the sharpness setting to which you are referring was indeed the case, but I set it on the blu-ray input upon reading something posted on hometheatermag.com

20 or 30 is what I set sharpness to on my xbox 360 input, and that seemed to have the most well defined picture with the least artifacts.

Good idea on customizing the game / normal presets, although each one disables some of the options that are available in advanced picture settings, etc.

The other issue is that in the harmony custom codes pulldown field, there are only toggles, rather than direct mode sets, if I remember correctly.

Sometimes toggles are ok if there is a way that you can get to a known starting point, for example, on my previous Sony DS receiver, I wanted to ensure that no matter what anyone in my house did, switching to the set top box would have the surround mode as normal (uses Dolby pro logic for stereo sources, Dolby Digital automatically comes on for shows broadcast in DD) and I could do that by switching to stereo only mode first, then toggling normal surround twice. That ensured the starting point. But this took a little time and digging to see how the receiver behaved. The Onkyo is new territory for me, so we shall see what little tricks I can figure out with more experience.

I also have some experience in the professional / industrial AV arena (crestron programming and interface design) and the CAIP I work through has been able to dig up full programming specs for devices, so maybe I will hit him up and see what he says, perhaps I can create my own custom codes somehow for the harmony.

For now, the only HDMI source that I MUST run through the receiver is my Blu-Ray player, so I will most likely be using optical from the 360, coaxial from the Cable STB, and ARC to get the sound back from my Dell precision laptop (DisplayPort to HDMI to TV, ARC back to the receiver since I won't care about multichannel sound for it)

For now, this should work, but it really would have been a great idea to implement something on the TV end that recognizes the CEC for the source, regardless of what physical wire it comes down, and associate presets to THAT instead of purely mapping to the TV's HDMI inputs.

Again, thanks for the advice, I will poke around and see what is the best compromise and let ya know.


Chris.