HomeTech.fm - Episode 344 - Watching PXLVISION with Jack MacDougall and Larry Pace

Episode Date: March 26, 2021

This week on Hometech: A quick recap of the week's news and a fast pick of the week. We also sit down with Jack MacDougall, CEO of Pixelgen, and Larry Pace, President of DarbeeVision, to talk about PXLVISION and how this new product aims to improve the picture on your TV.Fan of the show? Want to support our efforts? Please consider becoming a Patron!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, March 26th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. Welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast about all aspects of home technology and home automation. This week, we're going to dive into some home tech headlines real quick, but I've got an interview with Jack McDougall, the CEO of PixelGen, and he brought along a guest, Larry Pace, president of Darby Vision. And I'm going to talk about a cool new product they have called PixelVision, PXL Vision. Interesting setup they have, so I'm going to let the product speak for itself. We definitely cover a lot of it in the interview. We'll go over everything then um first i do want

to remind everyone that we are we did we let this last week on thursday we had our first home tech talk and we talked all about video distribution we talked about uh a number of things of secret things secret things can't tell you about them what they were because if you weren't there you won't know but if you are a patron, you can go back and actually catch the replay of that in the patron feed there. So check that out. You can find out more on how to support the show and become a patron over at hometech.fm slash support. But first with that, let's jump into some home tech headlines. Sign of the times. Looks like we're getting back to normal. Regal Cinemas has announced

that it will reopen U.S. theaters on April 2nd with the release of Warner Brothers' Godzilla vs. King Kong. That will be followed on April 16th with New Line's Mortal Kombat. It's kind of like what's old is new again. The chain parent Cineworld has also struck a deal with Warner Brothers to show its 2020 2021 releases at the same time that they released on hbo max starting in 2022

cineworld will have a 45 day exclusivity window before titles that were released on streaming uh can or release first i guess can be on streaming services if that makes sense but um yeah pretty cool uh just kind of i'm kind of remembering a little bit of this from the like that amc warner brothers spat that kind of happened because um warner brothers announced that they would be streaming uh movies and that kind of thing just kind of bypassing the theaters this year. Of course, it really didn't help that like all theaters were closed down, but I guess at April 2nd, movie theaters will open back up. And if you feel comfortable doing that,

or if you've had your shot, you can head on over and watch a movie. LG, well, LG has unveiled a pricing for its new 2021 OLED TV lineup. It starts at $1,299 for the A1 series. has unveiled a pricing for its new 2021 OLED TV lineup. It starts at $1,299 for the A1 series. You can expect to pay a little bit more for the C1 and G1 series. The A1 line starts at, like I said, $1,300

for the 48-inch set, which arrives in June with a 55-inch coming in at $1,600, a 65-inch at $2,200, and a 77-inch at $3,200. Those models are coming in at $1,600, a 65-inch at $2,200, and a 77-inch at $3,200. Those models are coming in in April. You're giving up features like 120 hertz, variable refresh rate, HDMI 2.1, and the latest processors in there, but these are pretty much up-to-date OLED TVs.

And at that price point, I think you're going to start seeing, finally start seeing OLED become more accessible to more people. I mean, those, those are decent price points for kind of like an entry-level quality OLED TV. Mid-tier C1 line starts at $1,500 for a 48-inch, launching in April and there's a, uh, there's a 55 inch, $1,800, a 65 inch for $2,500 and a 77 inch for $3,800. Um, that's the step up. Those screens will be in stores sometime before March is over. And, uh, of course the centerpiece of the catalog, the 4k catalog here is the G1 gallery series. And that's where you get costly, a little bit more costly. The 55 inch G1, which ships in April, will set you back $2,200, while the 65 and 77 inch counterparts will carry respective prices of $3,000 and $4,500 coming in late March.

So no big news on 8K at the moment. LG still sells the ZX line that starts in at $20,000 for 77-inch. And you can add $10,000 more for the 88-inch. Those have specific applications for those things, so wouldn't worry too much about that. All right, so I don't know why I put dollar signs on that. It seems kind of unfair to Sonos because it's really not about the price.

Qobuz is bringing a 24-bit high-res streaming to Sonos speakers. It's the first music service to offer the level of high-fidelity audio on the devices. Sonos added support for the French platform back two years ago. But you'll need Sonos S2 app to play the 24-bit audio, which is compatible with

most of the platform, uh, that that's out there right now. So, and I, it's not very hard to actually get on the S2 platform. If you're not there already, um, you typically just have to get an S2 compatible device, bring that into the system, and then all your old stuff will kind of be brought up. I think there are a couple of devices like the Kinect, like the old Kinect that you have to unfortunately get rid of and take it away. So let's say hidden sensors. Apple's HomePod mini includes a dormant hidden sensor that can measure temperature and humidity, potentially providing the means to power upcoming features that could arrive in the future with a software update. This is all according to Bloomberg.

They found a component in there after digging around. It measures 1.5 by 1.5 millimeters. Tiny. And it's buried at the bottom edge of the HomePod. Hold on a second. Hey, recording. Wow, that's nice. Go on the mountain, okay?

Okay, go on the mountain. All right, thank you. All right. Had a little appearance there. All right. The component measures 1.5 by 1.5 millimeters and is buried in the bottom edge of the HomePod near the power cable, which they say that that's probably a pretty good place to put something where it doesn't get heated up with the internal

component. So they suspect that this can be used to monitor temperature and humidity. This could open up things for HomeKit. I don't know. This seems like something that they put in because they could. And maybe it did add a little bit of cost, but I don't know. This could, or this is one of those things that may or may not be added in the future. But kind of in the same report, it's kind of a Bloomberg Mark Gurman report. So he's always picking up on rumors, but he, he, he also, um, talked about in there, he was quoted as, uh, that Apple was, has been developing new speakers with screens and cameras, which kind of sounds like an iPad if you ask me, but, uh, this reporting suggests that Apple could be at least exploring the idea of a new HomePod models, uh, that have a display

and a camera to complete the likes, compete with the likes of Google Nest Hub Max and Amazon Echo Show. And of course, the Facebook portal, who has one of those? No one knows. And, you know, this isn't like something we're going to see tomorrow. The rumor is that there is some kind of hardware launch coming up, but we don't know what that is. Um, yeah, we'll, we'll see. We'll see what happens. Uh, very, very interesting. I think this is interesting because like Siri out of all of those was kind of designed as a screen first product.

Like Siri was designed for you to yell at the phone and for it to like give you a visual result back. Uh, you're supposed to kind of look at your phone and see what is going on there. And, you know, for, for whatever reason, um, for whatever reason, just, they've never been able to kind of get around that limitation that is kind of like pre-built into the product. Uh, it works well if you're looking at the phone and when you, when you announce commands, but Amazon and Google started just with voice, a voice first approach, and they were able to, to kind of build around that and, and, and develop products that, that people like. So I don't know, I, this will be interesting. Like I said, it sounds like an iPad.

It probably looks like an iPad might be a little bit cheaper. You know, they get down in that $200 range, $150, $200 range. Um, and slap a little like home pod mini underneath it. Um, could be a compelling product for a lot of people, especially if it, if you can run apps and stuff on it. So it could be a compelling product for a lot of people, especially if you can run apps and stuff on it. So it could be fun. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 344.

And don't forget, you can join us live in the chat room starting on Wednesday, sometime between 7 and 7.30 p.m. Eastern. You can find out more at hometech.fm live. With that, we're going to jump into the interview here that we had with Jack and Larry. And like I said at the beginning of the show, Jack is with PixelGen, Larry's with Darby Vision.

And we sat down and had a good chat about a new PixelVision product that PixelGen's launching. It looks really cool. Well, let's check it out. Let's jump right into the interview. Hey, Jack and Larry,

welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having us. Yeah. Great to be here, Seth. So Jack, you're a veteran of home tech and I,

if people can go back and listen to our episode there, where we talked about pixel gen, but I, you know, if they haven't and they don't have time to go back and listen to our episode there where we talked about PixelGen. But, you know, if they haven't and they don't have time to go back, let's just do a real quick recap of who you are and your background here in the industry and a little bit about PixelGen. Great. Well, yeah, thanks again. And actually, this whole thing is really just about a new idea that I have. I'm really excited about PixelVision, but I had this idea about Zoom calls, Skype calls. Why don't we create a button declaring pants or no pants? I think that would take away a lot of awkwardness up front.

I think it might just actually make me feel better that you're wearing pants. So that's just an idea I had. No promises, no promises. But yeah, it may or may not right um yeah i'm really happy to be here and talk to you a little bit and uh uh you know we go way back uh you saw us in our very beginnings at pixel gen and we've mostly been the interconnect guys right uh where the guys if you want to go you know 5 10 15 20 meters uh in a home theater you know how to, 10, 15, 20 meters in a home theater, you know, how to extend your cable, things like

that. So that was really our origins, right? But along the way, we said to ourselves, what can we actually do with these pixels in a really creative way? We fought so hard for so many years to create an uncompressed video link. What if we could take those same pixels and do something extraordinary? So yeah, going from interconnect to the processing was just such a beautiful fit for our company. Things are strange as ever, obviously for everybody, but we found a very creative little niche to get our work done day to day. And then all of our engineers are in their own basements and bedrooms and, you know, just kind of keep on going on, and doing the best we can. uh yeah i'm extremely excited about

this endeavor uh the amount of love coming out from you know past derby fanboys which actually i would say i'm myself uh and uh you know we were talking earlier before we came on here about this is something you need to see right this this effect of derby is something it needs to be seen uh it's polarizing in many ways but when people actually see this it is something that it needs to be seen. Uh, it's polarizing in many ways, but when people actually see this, it's something that they feel a comfort and a feeling of, uh, uh, not disturbing, you know, what, what they enjoy. So, um, yeah, that's a little bit about, you know, uh, you know, me and where I've come to, uh, and, uh, really excited about the next steps. And Larry, uh, let's hear a little bit about who you are, who you're with, and where you come from.

Yeah, thank you, Seth. I'm president of Darby Vision, and I've been president since the late 2000, about 12th period and um you know i got involved with uh paul darby who is uh both a namesake on the company and products and uh got involved with uh helping to market the technology back in the days when we really were trying to sell it to um to uh people who use software to enhance pictures. And one of our early targets was Adobe, for instance. But over time, we realized that it needed to be a real-time solution. And so, as many companies do, we introduced the technology by way of a product and then got around to eventually selling chipsets and

and just the ip but uh i've been on this ride because i told paul way back in the beginning that you know this technology is so interesting and has such a profound effect on uh creating next level um image quality that i was going to see to it in my lifetime, if I could, that it would become part of the fabric of image processing in the world. I thought it was that important and I was willing to stake a chunk of my life to work on it. So it's been very, very inspirational for me, for somebody that doesn't come from an image processing or technology background. I sure learned up a lot over the ensuing years. And I'm really looking forward to being able to share more of the story, the technology, the company and our relationship with PixelGen.

Excellent. Excellent. So, well, let's get started on that. Let's talk a little bit about, well, let's start talking about Darby Vision because it's not a common household name, I suppose. I'm not sure too many people know what it is. I don't think I've heard of it before. I have to admit, I'm not a big video fan. Not fan. I'm not a big video video file i guess is what i should say i am a video fan i love watching tv um but i wasn't too familiar like i've heard of like video processors before and i've seen them in my work in my line of work like uh the one that comes to mind is uh maybe like fair juta like way back in the day when we had to go from composite video to, to S video, then we needed to have those processors in our home theaters. I saw these expensive boxes that we were installing and, you know, I put them in, I never had one at my house.

Um, but there was, there's, there's, there was brains and everything behind them, uh, to, to make,

to, to, to, those were like scalers. They, I don't think they were very much processors maybe they did some more stuff under the hood but they there was there was a chip inside there that I knew like if you plugged in a composite

video signal to the the component or SVD or whatever coming out would look look better tell me a little bit about I guess give us a little bit a brief history on Darby vision and what that technology is in relation to video processing. And what exactly does Darby Vision do? Yeah, thank you for the question. And just to address your point there that the user then no longer thinks about. I can tell you that when you have technologies like ours, you build them into a product early on and you wave your arms around and you jump up and down and you make a big deal about it. But then like in the Sony Walkman, back in the early days of audio enhancement technology,

you get a technology in there and actually put a button on the device where you could turn it on and off. We did that with our products. But then over time, the consumer expects that the tech is just in there. It's just part of all the great goodness that's part of the brand and the product. And you take the button away and the hoopla goes away and people just assume that it's part of the driving factor of the incredible experience.

And at that point, you know you're golden. And to your point, Dartivision hasn't quite broken through as a brand where, you know, we take time, human beings have just wanted to get more and more and more out of their visual experience when it comes to TV, photographs. The experience of looking at 2D images has gotten, you know, better and better, obviously, you know, black and white went to color. Color went to high definition. I'm sorry, color went to deep color. The aspect ratio increased in width over time so that it filled more of your visual field. The dynamic range got better and better. Sensors and video cameras got better and better. Lenses, display systems keep getting better and better sensors and video cameras got better and better lenses display systems keep getting better and better all to give you an experience that is more like

what it's like to look out of your head and experience the world as compared to you know a flat not very interesting dynamic image. So technology like DariVision fits just perfectly into this ongoing quest that human beings have to make their images pop in a way that the realism really speaks to you that, hey, this has got qualities of realism that really resonate with my visual system. The images don't look flat anymore. We've tried to push 3D to some degree. We're getting into higher pixel resolution formats. And the beautiful thing about Darby Visual Presence is that it rides on top of, or it rides along with, and is perfect harmony with all of these advances in image fidelity. And so on one hand, we say it's future-proof. On the other hand, we say it's harmonious, and we really look forward to this onward march of image quality being captured better and displayed better, because the better all that is, the better that Darby on your website, the white papers, I guess, I was reading as well,

and some magazine articles that I ran across, is that I could actually see what Darby Vision was doing. And I can't... We kind of briefly touched on this earlier, but like when we talk about HDR, we talk about for one of these like new Sony 4k TVs that, uh, or 8k now it's all 8k now, 8k TVs, um, that exist. I can't see that. I can't show that off on a podcast for one thing, but I can't see that on my computer screen. I can't see that off on a podcast for one thing, but I can't see that on my computer screen. I can't see that on my phone or my iPad. I can't see that on my own TV because my resolution

on my TV is limited. I don't have an HDR TV. I might have it. No, I don't have HDR TV. I have 4K TV, but it's not HDR. Maybe you know, but you don't know it yet. Yeah. But I have no chance of experiencing what they're showing off without standing in front of it. When I look at what Darby vision is showing, I can, I can see my, my mind can see, or, well, okay, so I'm getting a little ahead of myself, but I can see what you guys are trying to do. And I read in your white paper, it kind of stood out to me is that you are just amplifying um what the mind expects to see and so what is happening there is that my my brain picks up on those cues and says oh well here is not lost information but maybe enhanced information and my brain probably just fills in the rest of it it's like it's almost making you focus do the natural focus that you were meant to do uh that single lens on on a set is not going to capture that depth. So of course, there's a 3D, I think is something that we should kind of not

talk about. We can skip that. Yeah, yeah. However, you know, it does, there's something interesting. And by the way, Seth, I think if you go to our website, due to COVID, we created a, like a virtual demo that you can try, you can actually, it's one for one pixel 4K that you can export to any panel projector. And that was a way of just saying, hey, if you want to get involved with this, have a look at this. This is exactly what you're going to see if you brought it in. Of course, it's only one still frame at this point. It's not going through your content or anything like that. But it gives you a chance to experience that and actually you know grab on to the that classic swipe image and uh you know look at key parts of that image that

make your eyes do that focus make your eyes feel like there's something i'm actually looking at if i was to be there there's nothing getting you're never going to get away from the fact you're not there but there's definitely a sense of uh i'm in this environment and that's i think why i'm so attracted to this. Yeah, in general. Now, again, you know, it's hard to pick up on a cast. But the truth is, you can't actually see the effect of it in a primitive state looking through like this. But if you were to export that to an expanded, you could actually see the effects of this. If you just notice at the bottom, you know, the rocks versus the blue sky, the blue sky, you'd be hard pressed to find any disturbance at all.

Right. And that's something that you want. You don't want to see the mosquito noise. Things that come with, you know, processing to a level that there you go. Having some fun there. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We nerded out on that one a little bit. But, you know, it's really interesting, Seth, and I think this is actually a really cool point to mention it, is that Paul Darby, I actually never had a chance to meet Paul. And I would have met him back in, oh, geez, correct me if I'm wrong, Larry, but it would have been 2013, Cedia.

Yeah. And, you know, he has an interview out there in January from CES where things were just starting to really fizzle with Darby. And he actually was doing these experiments 40 years prior. And his person really resonated with me because he admitted that this was not an invention. This was a discovery. It was something that he thought, what if you could somehow emulate the human visual model through something that's 2D? It's this weird conundrum. Like, of course you can't do that.

But what he did is he actually set up this, almost like a Johnny Five looking tripod structure with two camcorders, like human eye length apart, and started playing with video synthesis and stitching images together far before all the alphabet soup right right and then he just opened this up 30 years later and said hey you know we can actually put this in software we can we can play with it but the hardware wasn't there yet and all of a sudden the hardware just lined up 1080p hit and he said you know, this is something that we could do.

And that's right when I first saw it. So, I mean, I was at the Cedia, you might be familiar with it, it's at the unveiled event that they do the day before. Yep, yep. Yeah, so that was a really intense day for me because I was actually doing ODM work with my previous company for an

international client. And we were, you know, I love that show because it puts everybody at 11 level playing field. You know, everybody gets that little, you know, three by eight foot, you know, table with the cheap tablecloth over it. And, you know, they put their, you know, their, their, the techiest person they can out front just to kind of talk about what this is doing. And the press comes around. And I got very, very bored at the end of the day.

And everyone was selling some type of, like, extender. Or, you know, it was just at the time. Everyone was just trying to find a way to extend cables. But I kind of serpentined around the show. And halfway through, I just saw this demo of that sweep at 1080p at the time. And I remember just having a sense of like, what is that? Like that is something different. I actually come from an image processing background.

I used to do work on integrated circuits for image processing. And I hadn't seen anything like this before. It was brand new to me. And at first, I thought, OK, is this real? Like, is this just them creating this weird demo where it just squashes the before and makes the after look incredible. But I spoke to their lead engineer for a while. And I quickly realized these guys have put in a lot of work to a really cool, unique idea. And it just blew me away. That's where I eventually met Larry. And then I learned the awful news about the founder passing away just the weekend before.

And, you know, there's always been a, I've always had this, you know, seven, eight years later, I'm at a point where I can finally do this where I can bring a team together to take on his legacy, to take it where he always saw it going. That's something that I'm very, very proud of. And, you know, we're really excited to take on this army of followers that Larry has done such an incredible job bringing together over the years. We've worked together. But to get to this point, to see what you're seeing, it just gets better and better.

The effect doesn't matter what the resolution, the color sampling, it doesn't matter what factor you throw at this. It's real time. It's incredible to watch. I prefer to watch it. And it's something that is in my home theater, which is just a multipurpose room for all the kids. But it's something that is really important. And to actually work on it now is incredible, right? It's just incredible.

So I just wanted to say that this has been a long time in the making. And this is a very very very exciting next step um but i think yeah once you view it for yourself throw it up to a projector i think i think you'll see that effect that really really you know caught me in the beginning yeah and this this seems like it's fairly easy to introduce into the video chain i mean we're let's talk about pixel vision here. Is that how you say it? Pixel vision, okay. Pixel vision, yeah. Dare you say PXL vision.

Let's talk about that a little bit. It looks like it's pretty easy to introduce into the signal chain where you, HDMI in, HDMI out is what I'm seeing. That's right. You just plug it in in between and it looks like there's a couple of like a level like, you know what this reminds me of? Are you either one of you guys mess with

photography or Photoshop or anything like that? Dabbled. Yeah. So there's a there's a slider that I love to to to kind of toy with on my on my photos called Clarity on Lightroom and Photoshop. And you can crank it and it gets offensive. But just in the most minute amounts, it really makes your, like it does this, it makes your photos pop more than you think. And I think it does more than what, I mean, like I said, it can get offensive pretty quickly. This looks so much more subtle and easy on the eyes than Clarity does. But it's happening, I guess, in real time, too. Like this is happening for a 4K or 1080p signal in real time, which is really cool.

Yeah. Yeah. There's a couple of things that go into that. And you touch on a really good point, one how, or several points, actually, how comfortable it is to look at. And just to very briefly go into what we're doing, and we're doing it in real time, which was, as Jack kind of mentioned, it took a lot of hard work in software engineering and image process IP development space, that in real time, we can compute what the image would look like from two other directions besides the direction that the photo was taken from or the video was captured from. And then we look at difference information, just like your eyes and brain would analyze the difference between what your right eye and your left eye sees.

We use that difference information to modulate information of the brightness and then display all the pixels as an image in real time after this has been calculated. And it's comfortable, we feel, because it's so akin to how perhaps how your brain actually processes what you see out of two eyes. And so trying to replicate how the human visual system works to be able to put that information into a single frame rather than having to, you know, present dual frames and so elegant that it's super comfortable. It's super natural feeling. As you know, you can dial it up or dial it down. But unquestionably, when people see the before and after, it just totally resonates with how you see and what you feel inside your brain and experience as being a you know super real experience and to your point you don't need to upgrade the display technology in order to be able to see the benefit it works on legacy gear it works for printed material you can see the magazines even

in you know low resolution newspaper photograph presentation the enhancement is obvious yeah yeah and so I was I was also curious when we say real-time I mean how many how many is there any kind of delay for the processing? Like in milliseconds, like probably there probably has to be some type of small delay, but like how close are we talking? Yeah, obviously gamers and people who want a high performance out of their visuals. They don't want to tolerate all that stuff. They turn everything i don't want to those guys are crazy it would be uh very wrong for us to say there's uh zero delay but uh the

amount of delay because uh these chips are so so powerful the horsepower allows us to get a pixel across the processing in the circuit in about two to 300 microseconds. Oh, wow. So, you know, microsecond is, you know, so much smaller than a millisecond that the standard of it's got to be under 18 milliseconds or 20 or whatever gamers have called out for, developers have said that there's a threshold for latency that you can see. You've got to be below 18 or 15 or 10 or something.

We're at microseconds. So there's no way you can see it with your visual system. So this is something that you, I mean, if you weren't one of those crazy gamer people, you probably could use in your games to actually enhance the picture and make it look a little bit better. Lots of people do. They love it. Gamers love it.

Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. And Seth, to get back to the actual device, I mean, we're using apart from Intel that, you know, we're introducing something here with the processing that does take quite a bit of muscle like larry mentioned and uh back in the hd days going up to you know the six seven gig of uh sorry to get back into all my terms uh for extension but uh the kind of bandwidth that you need to run and process back then was far easier uh and what we're doing now is is really cutting edge and we're pioneering that a real-time link to make sure that you can have those uh applications still work and and for them to be optimized the way you would expect from a gaming perspective

if you're going to make the gaming market happy you're pretty much making everybody happy at that point um and our inboxes are a lot emptier right so it that's great um but and even to allude to something that larry mentioned about the fine tuning the experience. This is something that over 100 steps of of Derby that you can actually apply to this. So like you could take something, let's say, running at, say, 30 percent of its capacity. Some people might that might be the gateway to where they enjoy it. Whereas some people in certain environments might just say, Hey, I bought this economy projector. I'm actually happy with it. I got a good price,

but now I want to take this to the next level and see if I can get something out of it. And you can go to like a full pop is what they call it. Right. So that's, that's the classic term that Derby products have historically worked with to work with that. But yeah, it's, it's, it's something that it you know, I, I like mine around 45, 50. That's kind of where I like mine. Of course, we'll just fine tune the product. So I'm happy. That's all that matters.

Right. It's as long as I'm happy, no one else matters. I'm just joking, but you make something that makes you feel comfortable and it makes, it gives the, the end user that ability to say, hey, this is what works for me. So, yeah, you got a shot of it up there. It's kind of first look at it there. So, yeah, I was looking at when before we started the show, I was looking at the level, Darby level that you have on there. And it looks like there's IR and IR remote control and an iOS and Android app. That's right, yeah.

What do those do? Right, so we're trying to control this basically with every way possible, short of motion sensing. Everything we can. So every level of controlling this you could work with. So the tactile buttons, some people like to play with this on the fly. The extra step of opening up an app or just grabbing your remote, just go up and up down we figured that this was something that that is very powerful and it's uh what it applies so why not take the one independent function that's the easiest and apply

it so you know classic buttons ir right we need to have that there so just controlling your your osd uh which runs over top um of the uh the video but also, like you mentioned, the iOS Android app as well. I mean, that's going to open up a lot of things. That's something that we're very excited about launching with the product, with the hardware. There's always possibilities of some of the really exciting features being added on as we go, but it allows us to open up that. So with this Intel real-time processor, we're able to take all information out of up that. So with this Intel real-time processor, we're able to take all information out of the signal. So we can dabble in, you know,

status of registers like your resolution, the frame rate, the subchrome sampling, you know, this can be as simple as a consumer-based product where you enjoy it, or it can be all the way up to something that is very, you know, gives you the knobs for something highly professional to work with. And we feel like this app is so slick. And what we're seeing so far is that it could actually switch, you know,

what you want to use for this because it's such a simple, you know, little sliders for the effect presets that you can add. We have, if you notice, there's a little LED on the right there called auto DVP. And the idea behind that is just a dynamic way of setting Darby based on resolution. So if you like Darby at 1080p a certain way versus 4k at a different way, you can, you can apply that and it'll, it'll give you that status to say, Hey, I'm happy with that. Cause a lot of the peers out there don't want to go back and reset,

reset, reset. It just follows that dynamic resolution that you're working with and we'll apply it effectively. And this works on, I mean, this works on HDR, ultra high definition resolution, any resolution I can throw at it up to 4K, I guess right now, right? Yeah. So right now the plan is to launch this at standard dynamic range, right? So 4K SDR, and we have a HDR patch, which would come afterwards, right? But the plan is to have all HDR formats. We get a lot of feedback from a lot of the forums

that are saying, hey, why doesn't it do everything out of the gate? The issue with that is that we're trying to put out something that has the maximum effect at 4K SDR and to do the work to make HDR look right, because HDR on its own is glorious, but to apply it to Darby and make it at the same level that the SDR has looked to this day,

we need to get that right. It's not just a matter of tweaking some bits on a processor to make it work. It's actually almost an artistic thing. It's a visual thing that has to be coded and done properly. So that's not something you just rush out there to say, hey, let's just apply Darby across everything right now and it'll all look great. It needs everything kind of changes when it gets to HDR. So we're really working hard at getting that out. But certainly the 10 bit HDR formats, HLG 10, 10 plus, all those are things that we're working very hard at having ready for our customer

base. Yeah. And when people talk to when people I hear people talking about TVs, I don't think there was a very noticeable switch between 1080p and 4K. But when we got to HDR, people really saw, that's when I started hearing just the normal, everyday Joes talk about how good their TVs looked. Because they had access to, I mean, very low cost, very low cost 4K HDR TVs. This seems like it in my case where I have my SDR 4k TV, I'm pretty sure it's SDR. I don't know, maybe I

got the wrong input hooked up onto it. But I could take this plug it in and actually get a decent picture out of it. Day one. It sounds like a great opportunity just to kind of like plug these boxes in and have them behind, you know, any TV that that where you would care about having a good video picture that, you know, just popped off the screen. Yeah. And just to add to that set, the main application for this that we're seeing the feedback is that this is going people want to put this on display. There's an interesting wave of support happening here where Darby purists,

so either if they've used the OPPO 103D back in the day, or if they have had a HD Optima projector, because these were all embedded solutions at the time. Built into, yeah. Yeah, and they were willing to pay a premium for that effect, right? When they were buying their Blu-ray players. At the classic Darby products, they were, to pay a premium for that effect right when they were buying their blu-ray players um at the classic derby products they were you know five ten years ago they were building the hardware themselves but now they've turned into more of an ip uh delivery um and we're taking the hardware approach because you know i'm the hardware nerd and they're taking

the ip it was a perfect marriage um but now we're at a point where you could put this thing anywhere but we do like the idea of it being out front. We feel like it's something that certainly enthusiasts love. It's meant to sit anywhere. If you want to hide it away, you could. You could put it at the front of an AV cabinet, certainly a rack. There are solutions for racking anything these days. You could wrap a puppy to a rack.

It doesn't matter what it is. It's all good. But we do like the idea of this being out front. And so the classic application would be all your your classic HDMI inputs going to an amp and then out of the amp. A lot of, you know, a lot of the peers are coming back saying, hey, I found a way to get Derby on all my all my sources and just, you know, use the amp, switch it and use it. But that's fine. I mean, that's you're taking a function of a switcher to pixel vision and place it where you want. So we can be anywhere in that single link. It can be right out of the amp. It can be right before the display. If you really want to put it onto the input of the amp because you want to buy eight pixel visions, that's great. We're not going to stop you. No one's going to stop you. No, of course. A lot of really, really great applications. And Jack touched on the idea that, you know, people are using computer monitors, people are using projectors. And, you know, there's a lot of great emerging markets that this product is going to slot in so nicely to.

The emergence of virtual reality is a perfect, perfect market for putting a standalone tweener, we used to call it way back in the beginning, a inline plug and play device that will make even virtual reality experience more comfortable and more realistic as you get immersed in that type of presentation experience. So we're looking forward to this product making its way into flight simulation and just some of these just around the corner applications that are even enhanced by this pandemic that we've been going through

that seems like things like virtual reality are gonna take on a new life as a result of everybody having to work remotely. Yeah, even on the commercial side of things, I was thinking digital signage. I mean, if there's not a great market for you guys. Eye popping, you're in, right? Yeah, they want the image to pop off the screen. If you can tell them that, yeah.

Oh, go ahead, Seth, go ahead. ahead they say can we crank this up to 150 is what they would ask can we go past 100 can we put it to 11 to 11 exactly yeah no and and it's great i mean one application that's really exciting and i can't mention the team but you might get an idea of being in the toronto-based area that i may be a fan of a certain hockey team right so I have this dream oh yeah I saw that smirk because you're you're fresh off your uh your Stanley Cup parades down the harbor uh well you know it we'll follow up on the pants conversation later so yeah yeah yeah no maybe we will maybe we will um however uh they have some pretty impressive AV going on in that stadium and and hopefully in the next coming year or two, hopefully sooner, when we get some people back in those buildings, I do have this one little bucket list item is to get a piece like this in a stadium like that to show off what this can do.

The bigger, the better really with this processing. And to actually even to get onto that floor or ice and to look up and see that working fans or no fans game on or no game. It's not, not to me is a win. That's a pick up the phone. Hey ma, I made it right. And that's something that's definitely something we would love to get involved with is to get this into areas that could really value it to see a replay to see something that happened in a game before, you know, all these things that are happening. And even like eSports, you look at eSports is like one of the craziest things that I know, you know, five years ago, I wouldn't have thought that this is turning into like a, you know, the fifth or sixth sport, but it's turning into these stadium filling amplified by the the current events and just doing i mean there's leagues there's like this product really lends itself

well for all the pieces you need for that reaction time maybe it gives an edge to one guy hey it's like a nascar that has a certain type of tire hey do you got a pixel vision here i mean that that's what it could get to is that this could be something that actually adds a lot of benefit to that, to that experience. Right. Right. So beyond just the home theater applications, I think we're, why not? Yeah. Well, guys, I do want to thank you for your time. We're running up a little bit on the, on the time we had allotted here, but Larry let's just get this from you. If somebody wanted to reach out and learn more about Darby vision,

how can they get in touch with you? Yeah, we have a website and a Facebook page, DarbyVision.com and Facebook Darby Vision. You're welcome to reach out through those channels. the technology if you have questions about the product I may refer you to Jack because he's the master designer behind that but if you have to take questions about how the technology works what kind of experience you're gonna have we love chatting with people excellent excellent and Jack there's one question I did forget availability andailability and pricing. Yeah, right. Go ahead. Yeah, so right now we're running full throttle to get this delivered in June. It's crazy to think we're only a few months away, but we're at a point now where we feel really good about it.

And we're going to get this thing out and people are going to be excited. And we might have to get one down there for you too. Excellent. I wouldn't complain oh and on pricing i always love the pricing right at the very end it gets my pulls the car salesman out of me um well today only uh this is at 599 us right now and in canada it's 749 and if somebody wanted to get in touch with you or grab one of those uh pre-order, it looks right now, where would they head? That's right. Yeah, we've been up on pre-order for a couple of weeks, an exciting couple of weeks. So, yeah, you can visit us at pixelgendesign.com.

So that's just pixel, the word gen, design.com. Go around, try out the demo, look at what we do a little bit outside of processing as well. Have a look. But you'll see a pre-order button there. You can't really miss it. Jump in and, you know, we're willing to support you and get you this in your hands as quickly as possible. Yeah. And be sure to look at that 4k demo on, on Jeff's website. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and really any of the pictures you come across, I was, I mean, it's not doing much, like, but it is at the same time. It's one of those, it's a very, like I said,

it's not something that's in your face. And I really like that about this processing. It doesn't, I keep going back to that clarity slider. I mean, I use that to make my images pop off the page and you can crank that and it's offensive. Like it really is offensive. But this is so much more subtle, so much more smooth across the board. You have one in one of your white papers of a woman, like a model staring into the camera.

And you can see the definition on her hair. But then again, it's not like definition. It's just added depth of what i believe is there i don't know it's really hard to explain over a podcast when i don't really know the words to explain it with but it's very easy to see and and and especially on on any screen that you have you you can go and look at on your computer monitor your phone or whatever you actually get the experience so i really do like that that this is something that you could show off very easily without having to have, you know, a $10,000 Sony TV to show it off.

You don't need that. Yeah, use your own eyeballs, use your own display technology, grab the demo and satisfy yourself that it's appealing to you personally. It's appealing on your gear. And, you know, we can say all the words that we want about it. And we have lots of ways to describe what it is and what the experience is like. Comfortable? That's a good word.

Comfortable? I think that's good. It is comfortable, yeah. Yeah. Well, guys, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to join us here on the show and chat a little bit about Darby vision and, and, and pixel vision. And we'll have that, uh, Tampa discussion, maybe another year when I will wait four or five months. That'll give us time to go down young street and our parade.

We'll be okay. Okay. Not giving it back. Good for you. All right. Great talking guys. Really cool product. And I've got the little thing.

If you're on the video, you can actually see it, but it's, it's going back. I embedded the little demo that they have there at pixel gen design.com. Pretty cool product. I, I,

I have, have not seen very many things like this. Uh, uh, that, that, that, like I said in the numerous times in,

in the, in the show there that, that it was, uh, it's just like so subtle, yet so like achievable with the technologies that you have in front of you. You don't need to go out and buy that $10,000 just Sony or what are we talking about? The $20,000 OLED LG early.

So check that out, pixelgendesign.com and thanks for Jack and Larry for coming on the show. Got a pick of the week. Should be fun here. This is going to be my pick of the week this week. So I'm bringing this up to the camera. The Ruckus R650. Wasn't going to be my pick of the week, but I got this in the mail yesterday,

plugged it in, and wow. Impressive. I see what the big deal about Wi-Fi 6 is. Still not thinking that everybody needs Wi-Fi 6, but holy hell, it's really cool to see your phone go 100 up to uh from 300 well i top out at 300 so maybe around 230 to 300 megabits on a nano hd which is fine i mean more than enough but it's really cool to see your phone go all the way up to 650 down which is pretty much saturating the downlink that i have because i think i i get 700 from Comcast right now. Pretty crazy. Insane numbers. I never thought I'd see on my phone. But, you know, kind of expect that out of both a high performance router like an R650. And I mean, that's a $1,100-ish router or not router access point. So, wow. Luckily, I didn't pay for it and work sent me two of these. Um,

I really don't know what I'm going to do with two of them. Um, you know, but why not at this point I have to, so I may as well install both and see what they do. But right now I had a, uh, nano HD and one of the little HD extender things that plug into the wall, kind of reaching back for some, in the back of the house, it was really, the signal could kind of drop off. I haven't noticed that really haven't been back there too often to kind of play around with, but I had a ring camera, outdoor camera that's on the back of the house. And since that's on wifi, it was sometimes kind of tough on seeing what the signal got the house. And since that's on Wi-Fi, it was sometimes kind of tough on seeing what the signal got out there. And it's still connected with this guy that the R650

hooked up. So neat product. I don't think it's for everyone. They do offer some more affordable enterprise grade, like 320s. Those are still good, real good access points. But I'm fairly happy with the stack that I've got set up now. I've got a NetGate 3100 router that's running PFSense for the firewall. And they also sent along some Ruckus ICX switches, which are good, I guess. I don't know. I've got a 24 port and let's see, that's a 12 port for basically working here at the desk and kind of like plugging in things to it as I need to go along.

Those are a little more enterprisey and enterprisey to set up. But really you have to start off in the CLI. So the command line to get that up and going. So not really a pick of the week there. They are cool. They have some really good stats on them. It's good looking as a Cisco switch,

you know, probably comparable in price. So, but the access point, pretty good. Gets a thumbs up. If it was a few hundred dollars cheaper, I would say it's a no brainer. And I can see how people are getting excited about the Wi-Fi 6 stuff. But as I said, I've only got like three phones in the house that I can actually connect to on Wi-Fi 6.

None of my laptops, anything else is connecting on it. It's everything's working off the, what is it, 802.11n. So Wi-Fi 5 or whatever. But it's really cool. It's cool to see the phone tap, the phone not tap out the, uh, the downlink on my internet here that, that was, uh, that was pretty fun to watch. So if you, uh, if you have any feedback comments, pics of the week or ideas for the show or interview ideas too, we're going to try and start doing those a little bit more often. Um, head on over to hometech.fm slash

feedback and fill out the online form or send me an email at feedback at hometech.fm. I'd be more than happy to take a look at those. And with that, I want to thank everybody who supports the show and thank everybody who's tuned in tonight and watching and watches on the replay. But I especially want to thank those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you don't know about the Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support, where you can find out more how to support Hometech for as little as $1 a month. That's all it takes to get you invited to the private Slack chat,

the hub, that's an automatic process. So as soon as the processes in Patreon tells us, then it kind of, there's robots set up and take care of that and they get you invited. And then it also gets you into these uh home tech talks so uh if you if you missed the one last week and you probably if you're listening to this on the podcast you probably missed the one for tomorrow because it'll be on thursday and the podcast comes out on friday um check that out it was a lot of fun like i said we're gonna be talking about home theaters uh we were gonna be uh greg greg was there let me let me see he had a little comment in here about batman yeah batman was there

so that was a lot of fun uh but evidently greg came in as batman uh for a little bit and he was at a red house yeah at a red house so if you want to find out what all the shenanigans there were about uh head on over to hometech.fm support and you can learn how to join the patreon and join those home tech talks and i guess with that that wraps up another week in home tech headlines and home tech news and uh we'll just talk to you next week have a good one