Category: Home Theater

Wiistar HDMI Audio Extractor teardown (WS-E11B)

Back in 2020 I moved to a Roku Premiere as my primary streaming device. As my audio gear is older (pre-HDMI) I required something to split out the audio from the HDMI signal and the Wiistar HDMI Audio Extractor was a good fit.

At the time I mentioned that the device was a little suspicious, but it worked and kept working just fine for some time. After a year of trouble free operation, I did have a couple of times when the box would give up and pulling the power and rebooting it seemed to fix things. Stuff happens, no problem.

More recently it’s been acting up a lot. Blanking out, then coming back or not. Tapping or banging on the case seems to help ‘fix’ things temporarily. It appears that there is something not quite right with the power connection. This meant it was time to take things apart!

There is a horizontal seam on both sides of the device, you can see it right by the mini-USB connection and the switch. By pressing with a knife blade on this seam, I was able to un-snap the sides. This took a little doing, but was pretty easy. Some gentle wiggling freed the circuit board from the snap case.

No surprises here. It’s a single chip solution, likely decode HDMI, re-encode HDMI. There is likely a small audio amplifier circuit here to feed the 3.5mm jack. It’s pretty amazing that you can get something like this for the price.

The USB-mini power jack seems to be well affixed to the circuit board (no bad joints). I inspected the cable as well, and it looks to be a power only cable – only two pins on the plug. I tried adjusting the connector fit a little which might help my power problem (and I could have done from the outside of the case).

Then I took a closer look at that one chip..

Yup, that’s a blank, unbranded chip. I’m guessing this is a chip that failed QC and was discarded or sold off as seconds. Bunnie wrote about counterfeit chips which will give you an idea of how this chip may have ended up being used. In this case, they aren’t even trying to fake the chip – they just are trying to use one that was cheaper.

Well – it was interesting to open it up which turned out to be easy. I may have improved the power connection, but first try and it’s not working. Meanwhile I’ve ordered an AmazonBasics HDMI audio extractor as a replacement. The AmazonBasics device has a lot of (mostly) positive reviews. There is a youtube video teardown which while it’s terrible, does give a peek inside. There seems to be QC stickers on the circuit board, and the underside of the case appears to have FCC logos etc.

It’s likely a very similar solution, also needing a 5V 1A power supply. The pictures show you powering it from a laptop USB port, which is only going to provide 500mA – so there is some suspicious stuff going on here too with the marketing. Also, I suspect based on the comments it accepts up to 4k input, but can only output 1080p – which is fine for my needs.

Correct Playlist – Segment Map for Bluray

Before streaming was the primary way to get new content, I collected a lot of movies on DVD / bluray. I still have a large collection, but have been slowly converting it to be hosted on my Plex server. This gives me a Netflix like viewing experience, but for my own personal movie collection.

Handbrake is great for dealing with DVDs. MakeMKV is how I rip bluray disks, then feed the resulting rip into Handbrake to compress it down. I do all of this on my Ubuntu system.

Generally this works really well. Handbrake will automatically select the longest video, and that’s almost always the actual movie itself. With MakeMKV that selection is more manual, but picking 1 title from a list of 10 isn’t all that hard.

When I got to the Hunger Games series, things got a bit more interesting. Starting with Catching Fire the bluray shows you 100’s of feature length titles – all the same duration, but with different segment maps. It seems that all but one of these titles has things shuffled in the wrong order.

Initially I naively picked the 1st and used that one, but upon watching the movie it was obvious there was 1 scene out of place, and thus two weird jump cuts to the flow of the movie. Enough to be annoying.

If you got digging around, you can find advice on which of the many to pick from the list. It turns out that there are multiple versions of the movie: rental, US release, Canadian release, etc. It’s much better to figure it out for the disk you have. The MakeMKV forum has a post about using PowerDVD and Process monitor to figure this out. I struck out here as I didn’t have a Windows machine with the right software combination, and it seems I wasn’t able to get Ubuntu to natively play back a bluray either.

Recently I came across a way to use MakeMKV to do the full process, again thanks to a MakeMKV forum post.

    1. Use MakeMKV to back up the full disk.

    2. Use MakeMKVcon to dump info to a text file

    3. Isolate the segment lists from /tmp/xx.txt. It turns out that “,26,” is unique enough to grab all of the segment lists. For Mockingjay Part 1 there are 550 segment lists on the disk, 519 of these are the length of the movie.

    4. Observations:
      a) All the movie length lists start with the same segment: 519
      b) It seems they all end with 520
      c) There are only 20 chunks in each segment list, and we already know 2 of them. Only 18 to sort into order correctly
      d) The MakeMVK backup has all of the chunks in backup/<disk>/BDMV/STREAM/
    5. Now we just need to play a copy of the movie, I have the DVD as well so VLC can play that back for me. Start at the first chunk, verify it is the start, watch the end to determine the scene break. Then figure out what the next chunk is.
      By building an incrementally specific grep, I can figure out the next chunk options. It is fewer choices than you might imagine. Each one had 2-4 possibilities.
      Hint: as you identify chunks, record the duration – this helps figure out where on the DVD playback you need to review to find the scene break.
    6. Once we identify the correct chunk order – we can go back to MakeMKV and rip the correct stream. A web search can also help verify which one is the right one, as I did for Mockingjay Part 1.

It took me about 35mins to get through step 5, much shorter than watching the whole movie. During the course of the chunk identification, I came across 3 where I had no choice, the only next chunk was the same one. After walking through 12 chunks, I hit a point where there was only 1 segment list left. I quickly verified the segment end/start matches and then double checked against the web search.

Roku Premiere Review

Last year leading up to ‘Black Friday‘ we started to think about getting a modern console gaming system – our Nintendo Wii and PS3 were starting to feel a little dated both having been initially released in late 2006.

The Ps3 has been my blu-ray player, and streaming box at the heart of my home theatre. When I bought it, it was one of the best players you could get, and it was reasonably priced for the quality. I was frustrated earlier this year when the Plex app stopped working with the PS3 and it was clear that it would no longer be supported. We’d also noticed that Netflix was starting to feel like it took a long time to start up. The Amazon Prime app would also glitch out on the rare occasion.

We decided to get a Nintendo Switch, but that got me thinking about getting a new TV for the playroom so I could reclaim the theatre as my domain and have the after school game sessions happen somewhere else. This meant finally saying goodbye to the 24″ Sony Trinitron, it was still going strong 15yrs after we bought it.

The TV I picked was the TCL 55″ 4K Roku 55S423CA from CostCo. This is the 4-Series version of the set, but at the sub $400 price point it’s hard to go wrong. This is a 4k display: 3840 x 2160 = 8294400 pixels. If my math is right, that’s 20k pixels per dollar!

While I was looking forward to a modern TV, I had not really thought much about the ‘Smart TV’ features. I just wanted all those pixels. The TCL comes with Roku built in.

 

Yup, before I can even use the new TV I have to do a firmware upgrade and log into Roku, which also requires me to create an account. I’d much rather turn on my new toy and immediately get to use it, but it was a pretty smooth experience given it happened all over WiFi. You did need a second device to complete the setup (web browser), but at this point that’s not a bad assumption.

Once we get past the initial setup, the Roku TV experience is pretty slick overall. Netflix and Prime both appear to start faster than the PS3. While I initially purchased the TV primarily to be a game console display, it’s ended up being used to watch shows quite a bit. There is a fireplace in that room, as well as the treadmill where I often run and watch a movie.

Roku has a useful Android app, and that app supports local listening. This feature lets you redirect audio from the Roku to your android device (phone). Paired with a wireless bluetooth headset and I’ve got private listening.

With the PS3 starting to show its age, and the Roku feeling like a slick media player I began to think I should pick one up for the theatre. My requirements for such a device were:

  1. IR control – to integrate into the existing single remote setup
  2. SPDIF (optical or coaxial) output to feed the sound system
  3. Ideally wired networking

This make me think the Roku Ultra was the right choice, but frustratingly the Canadian devices are a subset of what was available in the US. I did think seriously about picking up the Ultra anyways, but concerns about getting an old stock (7th generation vs 8th),  software compatibility (Canada vs. US) and generally the hassle of actually buying one resulted in my picking the Roku Premiere.

The Premiere is an 8th generation device, is officially available in Canada, and is a really nice price point too. It only has one of the 3 requirements, but the Ultra only had 2. I did have a minor concern about the WiFi support not being dual band, but it turns out that hasn’t been a problem at all. I did find the wikipedia article helpful in finally arriving at a decision on which model to get.

If I can live without wired networking, I still need to get SPDIF output. This was easy to achieve with an add on HDMI box that stripped out the audio. The box I got is pictured in the top photo on the right. What is amusing is the back of the box.

This is very clearly a single box used to packaged multiple devices, and it suffers from some inaccuracies (no power supply required?). If I had to guess, the device I got was the HDV-M612. On Amazon it was advertised as “HDMI Audio Extractor HDMI to SPDIF/Toslink Coaxial 3.5mm Stereo Audio Splitter Converter with USB Interface for DVD HDTV STB Laptop PS4” – yeah, jam in all those keywords.

Aside from the suspicious packaging, the device itself was simple to setup. HDMI input, USB power, HDMI output, Coaxial SPDIF output. It has a small red LED indicating it’s powered, and it just works.

Maybe not surprising, but I thought it was pretty amazing that it was only 25hrs between ordering it on Amazon and having the two devices in my hands – with free shipping.

All in all, it was easy to setup and just works. The Roku experience is simpler than the PS3 and just works. It’s hard to argue with the quality and performance of the Premiere.