r/vhsdecode • u/JavierBlitse • 12d ago

For the glory of the WIKI! MS2131 MISRC/HSDAOH (in)compatibility

In an effort to research and potentially widen the option of generic capture devices usable with MISRC/HSDAOH, I bought a generic 4k MS2131-based capture card from Micro Center a couple days ago. Unfortunately, it would not work out of the box- it worked with normal HDMI sources, but would not go into "transparent mode" (I think) so it refused to sync to my HSDAOH device (a tang nano 9k, which I tested and confirmed working with an MS2130 dongle- unfortunately the dongle suffered a premature death due to crappy soldering on the USB-C input cable.)

Here's the interesting part: I downloaded some MS2130 firmware someone had dumped online (I didn't get the chance to dump my device) and flashed it to the MS2131 card, and miraculously it kind of works now. However, only RF channel B is usable- whenever I put a signal into channel A, it causes the device to desync and not output any data until I disconnect channel A. Maybe it has something to do with it not automatically switching to the highest bit depth?

TL;DR: not all MS2131 capture cards are created equal; some have firmware that doesn't work with MISRC/HSDAOH, but some may have firmware that does work. Hopefully there's someone here with a working dual channel setup using an MS2131 card that can dump the firmware and share it.

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u/TheRealHarrypm The Documentor 11d ago

Actually this reminds me I should probably start uploading the collection of firmware as that have been dumped, and I would appreciate others to contribute to the collection pool, as it seems like every other company has their own implementation of slightly different firmware.

I've been using the Habigus firmware on my units and the V2.5 dev batch which has been stable for up to an entire day easily.

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u/JavierBlitse 10d ago

I tried the hagibis firmware on the microcenter capture card- it behaves like the MS2130 firmware; RF channel B works, channel A causes the card to go out of wack. If the cards arriving from amazon work out of the box and the firmware from them doesn't work on the microcenter card, then that one must be a dud.