Control and integration

OSD

On-screen display

The Diva can print what it is receiving and what it is sending onto the picture, which turns a two person diagnostic job into a one person one. Everything on the OSD page is optional.

OSD stands for on-screen display. In a source or a television it usually means a menu system; in a device sitting in the middle of an HDMI chain it means something narrower, a text readout painted onto the outgoing video by the transmitter itself. Because it is added after the signal has been received and processed, it reports what the box in the middle believes is happening, rather than what the source claims or what the display decided to do about it.

That is what makes it a diagnostic tool. You are checking a handshake, or whether a source really is sending the format you asked for, or whether HDR metadata survived the trip, and the answer appears on the screen you are already looking at. When you are finished it fades away or switches off and the picture is untouched.

The OSD section on the HDfury Diva

OSD SETUP enables the feature, and nothing else on the page has any effect until it is on; the IP command is set osd on. OSD FADE is the timer in seconds before the readout disappears, and setting it to 0 means it never fades, which is what you want while working on a problem. OSD LOCATION X and Y place it, and OSD COLOR FRONT, BACK and LEVEL set the text colour and the background colour on a 0 to 31 scale, with background transparency from 0 to 7.

OSD INFO is the set of checkboxes deciding what gets reported: Source name, Video field, Video IF, HDR info, HDR IF, Audio field, RX video info, RX HDR info and Ignore metadata change. Turning fields off is worth doing, because a full readout takes a great deal of the frame and you rarely need all of it at once. Over IP each field is switched individually, for example set osdfield videoif off.

The mask and your own text

OSD MASK SETUP enables a separate rectangle that you shade rather than fill with text, defined by MASK LOCATION x0, y0, x1, y1 for the top left and bottom right corners, with OSD MASK LEVEL from 1 to 7 for transparency and OSD GRAYSCALE from 0 to 15 for the shade of grey. OSD TEXT ENABLE prints a line of your own, which is useful for labelling a unit in a multi-room install or a demo rig, and NEVER FADE keeps that label on screen once the signal information has faded away.

All glossary terms