How to Adjust Focus on Sony PVM Monitor

I just scored a Sony PVM 20m2u monitor the other day and found that the picture was extremely sharp at the edges but slightly soft toward the center, which indicates that it was a bit out of focus. There is no focus setting in the service menu (accessible by pressing the degauss and enter buttons on the front, btw), as it is a physical characteristic that must be adjusted by turning a pot inside the monitor guts, just like on an arcade monitor.

With most(?) arcade monitors, the focus pot is located on the flyback transformer, along with the screen pot that controls the voltage to the electron guns. If you remove the outside case of your PVM and look in from the left (there's a big circuit board thing blocking view from the right), you should see the flyback, which is the big black piece of plastic with wires coming out of it that lead to the neckboard:

There are no easily accessible pots to turn on this flyback, but it is connected to a small white board above and behind it, right against the back panel with all of the inputs (which I did not remove), and that board has our focus pot:

The focus pot, viewed from the back of the monitor

You'll want to turn this pot very slightly while the monitor is running until you have a more uniform sharpness all over. It's nice that they moved it off of the flyback, actually, even though it made it a little harder to track down because it can be scary messing with such a high-voltage component while the monitor is running.

UPDATE (03/20/2015): Someone in the comments asked for shots of it running, so here you go (click thumbnails to embiggen):

These are all extreme closeups, since I figured that's what people are mostly interested in. These were taken with my HTC One m7 with a Playstation 2 hooked up over component cables. The first 2 are Dodonpachi Daioujou in TATE (notice the vertical scanlines), followed by a menu shot, Mega Man X Collection and Street Fighter Anniversary Edition.

As you can see, the scanlines are very crisp and "sterile," though not as much as on a 31 kHz CRT monitor (see the pics at the bottom of this post for comparison). For "240p" non-interlaced content, the PVM sits somewhere between that extreme and a regular SD/CGA TV or monitor, where the gaps between scanlines are almost nonexistent in bright areas.

Neotec 2515c Flyback Transformer Problem

I got my new JAMMA-compatible arcade cabinet up and running with MAME via RetroArch, but I noticed that the screen is blurry and has these weird, diagonal-ish horizontal lines going across the top half of the screen:

After digging around online, it seems these are known as retrace lines, and they occur when the flyback transformer is applying too much voltage to the screen. This behavior is typically accompanied by excessive brightness, as well. Normally, the solution to this would be to find the 'screen' knob on the flyback itself and turn it down just a bit until the lines go away.

However, I also learned that my specific monitor, a Neotec 2515c, is notorious for failing flyback transformers, and the issue becomes more pronounced as the monitor warms up. It also causes the image to get excessively blurry over time, to the point that small text becomes unreadable and bright colors turn into a smeary mess.

On the bright side of this being a super-common issue is that replacements can be found pretty cheaply, like this one from Twisted Quarter ($25 for one at the time of this writing), and they're pretty easy to replace, since they're expected to fail over time. In fact, next to leaky/fried capacitors, a dicky flyback is one of the most common problems a CRT display can face.

Nevertheless, fixing it means performing surgery on a CRT, which is home to many capacitors and high-voltage loads, so it's not for the faint of heart. I intend on tapping some local expertise to prepare for the task and will post some pics as I move forward.

In the meantime, I'm just going to keep my cabinet turned off unless I'm actually playing something to minimize the issue when I'm using it.

Update (9/15/2015): I ended up not doing the repair myself. After some local (mis)adventures, I shipped my board off to Sharp Image Repair in Las Vegas at the recommendation of Jason Wilson, who owns/runs Game Galaxy Arcades in the mid-TN area. Sharp's level of communication via email wasn't stellar, but the quality of their work certainly was. I would recommend them to anyone residing in the U.S., as they were quick, thorough and very reasonably priced.

For anyone that decides to take the job on themselves, make sure you check and compare the actual thickness of the wires on the new and old flybacks rather than going by the colors of the wires, as the replacements frequently use the same colors only reversed, and getting them swapped will definitely fry some stuff... -_-

If you want to see some shots of the repaired monitor, you can check some out at the bottom of this post.

Asus VG248QE Calibrated Color Profiles

Out of the box, the Asus VG248QE 144 Hz monitor has absolutely terrible color reproduction, but it doesn't have to be that way forever. I borrowed an X-Rite i1 Display Pro color calibration device from my job and used it to make some calibrated color profiles, which I'm happy to share with others who have this otherwise awesome monitor.

I had been using this color profile, which I found somewhere online (I don't remember where), but I made my own profiles for using 120 Hz refresh rate instead of 144 Hz, one for using a strobed backlight for anti-blur 60 Hz. and another calibrated at half brightness (not sure if this matters) for black-frame-insertion. For both of these profiles, my monitor had a built-in brightness setting of 24 and contrast of 53, just FYI. EDIT: I just set the monitor to the factory default 'standard' profile to keep things simple.

Also of potential interest, the dispcalGUI software suite includes a measurement of display latency, which was 15 ms for 120 Hz and 23 ms for 120 Hz with strobed backlight. I assume the increased latency was caused by the duration of the backlight blanking.

Monitoring a Directory to Automatically Invoke HandBrake

I've seen this question pop up a lot on HandBrake's forums and IRC channel, so I thought I'd make an entry about it here (Mac users skip down to the bottom for your directions):

Many folks have expressed interest in being able to specify a directory for HandBrake to 'watch' for new files that it would then automatically attempt to convert with predefined settings. I think most people are wanting this for use with devices, such as iPods, PS3s and AppleTVs, which require specific settings for videos to work. While HB doesn't support this functionality on its own (and the devs don't sound too interested in adding it), you can accomplish much the same thing in Ubuntu Linux using HandBrakeCLI and a little shell scripting.
WARNING: I'm a novice at scripting and there is definitely a more effective and elegant way of doing this. If you have a suggestion, please leave a comment! Similar steps will also work on other platforms/distros, so feel free to leave a comment about your successes or failures.

First, we'll need to install a utility to enable monitoring of directories:

sudo aptitude install inotify-tools

Next, we'll make some new directories in our home folder to hold our scripts and conversions. In a terminal, type:

cd $HOME ; mkdir HandBrake ; mkdir HandBrake/convert

Navigate to the newly created HandBrake directory:

cd HandBrake

and type:

gedit monitor.sh

This is where we'll write our script to monitor the 'convert' directory and invoke another script to do the actual conversion:

#!/bin/bash

inotifywait --monitor -e moved_to -e create ~/HandBrake/convert | while read dir;
do
(~/HandBrake/convert.sh)

done

Save, exit and--again--type:

gedit convert.sh

Here we will create our conversion script (be sure to put your desired file extension and preset in place instead of the bracketed reminders):

#!/bin/bash
for file in ~/HandBrake/convert/*
do HandBrakeCLI -v -i "$file" -o "$file".converted.[FILE-EXTENSION-GOES-HERE] --preset [PRESET-NAME-GOES-HERE] ;

#uncomment next line to delete original
#rm $file

done

Save and exit, then type:

chmod +x *.sh

to make both scripts executable.

Now, you can start monitoring by typing:

sh ~/HandBrake/monitor.sh

or you can set the script to run as a startup item where it will run continuously in the background starting the next time you log on.

Henceforth, any file you move or copy into the 'convert' directory will automatically convert to the desired format. This script will only work on one file at a time (i.e., you have to wait for the encoding to finish before dropping in the next file to convert). Also of note: HB will choke if the file is weird in any way--e.g. no audio track--and you'll have no way of knowing it if the script is running in the background, since it won't print any output.

Good luck and let me know if you run into any problems.

Bulk Encoding on Macs

Update (06/01/09): There's been a lot of clamoring on the Mac board of the HandBrake forums asking for bulk input of files to be converted using a preset. The devs have no interest in adding such a feature at this time because of the tremendous support headache it could cause, but you Mac users can do scripting to accomplish the same thing.

Just like the Linux users, open a Terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal) and type:

cd Desktop ; nano convert.sh

then paste in this (shift+ctrl+v; be sure to put your desired file extension and preset in place instead of the bracketed reminders):

#!/bin/bash
for file in ./*
do ./HandBrakeCLI -v -i "$file" -o "$file".converted.[FILE-EXTENSION-GOES-HERE] --preset [PRESET-NAME-GOES-HERE] ;

#uncomment next line to delete original
#rm $file

done

Save and exit (ctrl+x), then type:

chmod +x *.sh

to make the script executable. Now, just put the script into a folder with your HandBrakeCLI binary and you should be able to invoke the script (navigate to its directory in the Terminal by typing cd [space after cd] and then dragging your conversion folder onto the Terminal window and hit 'Enter,' then type ./convert.sh) and automatically convert any files within the directory using the chosen preset. I would recommend just keeping a folder around that you use for conversions and keep the script and HandBrakeCLI binary in there at all times, then you can just drop in the files you want to convert, start the script and go along your merry way.

UPDATE (12/20/2013): An anonymous reader shared his script, which sounds much more robust than mine:

inotifywait -r --monitor --quiet -e moved_to -e close_write --format '%w%f' /mnt/public/convert/video/android-hq/ | while read -r FILE; do echo "File copy detected" echo "Starting HandBrake..." (sleep 15 && /usr/bin/HandBrakeCLI -v -i "$FILE" -o /mnt/public/convert/output/video/"$(echo "$FILE" | cut -c38- | rev | cut -c4-| rev)android-hq.mkv" -e x264 -x weightp=0:cabac=0 -b 650 --audio 1 --aencoder faac --ab 96 --mixdown stereo --gain 3 --width 720 --loose-crop --decomb --markers --turbo --two-pass --vfr --subtitle 1 --native-language eng && sleep 15 && rm -rf "$FILE")& done

UPDATE (9/27/2014): The same user (name is teeedubb, apparently) is back with an update. This was posted in the comments but got mangled, so I tried to piece it back together:

I'm back - I have revisited the above script because it had some glaring faults - it would start a handbrakecli process for each file, which when encoding a seasons worth of tv shows it would bring my pc to its knees, it didnt handle files in sub directories, didnt handle multiple profiles and probably would have given undesirable results if a file extension had more than 3 character, plus it was kinda messy. New version below solves these issues: It queues encodes using task-spooler (tsp package in ubuntu), works with sub-directories in the watch folder (and deletes any empty subdirectories within watch folders) and supports multiple profiles. Options are 'watch directory', 'output directory' and 'task-spooler slots' (concurrent jobs) which are set through the variables. You can set multiple handbrake profiles which the script uses based on which directory the files are copied into, if files are copied into the root watch directory the first profile is used. Options for profiles are: 'name', profile name which will be appended to the transcoded file (this needs to match the profile directory and be fairly unique - script searches the input file location for profile name, so a profile called 'android' could confuse the script when transcoding the movie 'android cop'), 'handbrake settings', settings for handbrake to use (I'm pretty sure you could use --preset XXXX here as well), 'file extension', file extension for handbrake to use on output file and 'delete source file', whether or not to delete the source video file. You can create extra profiles by adding variables beginning with PRESET2 etc and adding elif entries to the if/then statement in the script. By default the script attempts to delete any empty subdirectories *and its ancestors* when completing a transcode, so you need to ensure you profile directories are not empty - I have done this by creating a hidden file in each profile dir and making the file un-deletable (eg: profile1 dir is /mnt/public/convert/video/android-hq, run the command touch /mnt/public/convert/video/android-hq/.android-hq && sudo chattr +i /mnt/public/convert/video/android-hq/.android-hq).

and here's the script:

#!/bin/bash
#script to watch a directory for incoming files and pass them onto HandBrakeCLI

WATCH_DIR="/mnt/public/convert/video/"
OUTPUT_DIR="/mnt/public/convert/output/video/"
TASK_SPOOLER_SLOTS=2

##HANDBRAKE PROFILE 1
PRESET1_NAME="android-hq"
PRESET1_HANDBRAKE_SETTINGS=" -e x264 -x weightp=0:cabac=0 -b 650 --audio 1 --aencoder faac --ab 96 --mixdown stereo --gain 3 --width 720 --loose-crop --decomb --markers --turbo --two-pass --vfr --subtitle 1 --native-language eng"
PRESET1_FILE_TYPE="mkv"
PRESET1_DELETE_SOURCE="yes"

###########################

ts -S $TASK_SPOOLER_SLOTS
inotifywait --recursive --monitor --quiet -e moved_to -e close_write --format '%w%f' "$WATCH_DIR" | while read -r INPUT_FILE; do

PRESET_NAME="$PRESET1_NAME"
HANDBRAKE_SETTINGS="$PRESET1_HANDBRAKE_SETTINGS"
FILE_TYPE="$PRESET1_FILE_TYPE"
DELETE_SOURCE="$PRESET1_DELETE_SOURCE"

if [[ $(echo "$WATCH_DIR" | grep -i "$PRESET1_NAME") ]] ; then
PRESET_NAME="$PRESET1_NAME"
HANDBRAKE_SETTINGS="$PRESET1_HANDBRAKE_SETTINGS"
FILE_TYPE="$PRESET1_FILE_TYPE"
DELETE_SOURCE="$PRESET1_DELETE_SOURCE"
fi
FULL_FILE_NAME=$(echo ${INPUT_FILE##*/})
OUTPUT_FILE=$(echo ${FULL_FILE_NAME%.*})
tsp bash -c 'nice -n 19 /usr/bin/HandBrakeCLI -v -i "$0" -o "$1""$2"-"$3"."$4" "$5" && if [[ "$6" = yes ]] ; then sleep 15 ; rm -f "$0" ; fi ; rmdir -p "$(dirname "$0")"' "$INPUT_FILE" "$OUTPUT_DIR" "$OUTPUT_FILE" "$PRESET_NAME" "$FILE_TYPE" "$HANDBRAKE_SETTINGS" "$DELETE_SOURCE"
done