How can RR capture mpeg video in Ulead VideoStudio 4.0?

[Walrus]

JayZ:
I guess I had just hoped there was a 352x240 RGB option available under Win9X.
As a note... I've been experimenting with reg hacking under NT... and I SEEM to have found a way to capture DIRECTLY into NTSC VCD with Video Studio 4.. I need to do more experimentation (and more importantly, I need to figure out exactly which of my experiments did the trick), but this looks promising...
As for my (old) strategy, I always captured to 352x240 MJPEG at highest quality (yes, I know I'm losing half of the frames, but deinterlacing never seemed to improve the quality in my eyes) and then I compress using LSX 3.0
Now.. I have to experiment with this new method

[hella356]

Walrus, you said: Go to the global commands menu, choose "Change Capture Plug-In" select Ulead MPEG capture, then you have a new menu item under video options from which you can specify the MPEG capture settings. Make sure to set the output video format under the "Video Format" item to RGB. I changed the Capture Plug-In, but I don't see the video options. Am I missing something? You also said: Note, the latest Win9x drivers do have a registry hack that allows one to actually output the raw YUV data. What hacks are those? VideoStudio is a new program to me, but if it can do all this I'll be stoked. Thanks for all the info Walrus.

[jeff b]

hella356: the video options are another button that's below the 'make video' button on VideoStudio...

[Walrus]

hella356: I'm sorry I haven't replied in a while. My cable (and cable modem) have some grounding issues that's making it VERY tough to be online for more than a few minutes and I've been working on a lot lately.
Info on how to enable YUY2 support under Win9x is at http://forums.murc.ws/ubb/Forum2/HTML/001449.html
Are you still having a problem with finding the video properties menu item that controls the MPEG capture?
JayZ: As for the "new method" I described.. it involves reg-hacking the RGB capture width and height manually. Both the old beta-NT driver and the new officialy NT driver supports doing this, so I assume that Win9X will as well.
The registry location under 9x will probably be a bit different, so I recommend people do some searching until they find what looks correct.
The registry settings are (under NT with the latest video tools) in the following location:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Matrox\RainbowRunner\0 \VidCap\CurrentValues\
The important keys to set are as follows:
ColorFormat needs to be set to 24bitsRGB
DisplayHeight needs to be set to 240
DisplayWidth needs to be set to 352
One note: When you go into the video format settings dialog boxes in a vidcap program it will NOT highlight any of the capture sizes after you do this. The dialog boxes do not know about 352x240.. but the drivers seem to be fully capable of providing RGB data in 352x240 without a problem.
Also of note, on my dual Celeron 550, VCD capturing eats up over 70% of both of my processors... (I can't wait until the YUY2 support is working under NT) I also loose about 1.2 frames out of every 1000
However, it does seem to work

[LittleFoot]

Walrus,
You mention that enabling YUY2 support under Win9x is at http://forums.murc.ws/ubb/Forum2/HTML/001449.html
however, that thread is has some unanswered questions. Apparently, something might have to be changed in the system.ini to allow YUY2
>> From that thread;
>> posted 16 August 1999 14:22
>> Grigory, wich line we have to place in
>> the system.ini file for the YUY2 format?
>> I have the same problems that Phil Pugh
>> has
I am also getting codec errors. Can you explain further for the newbie (me)?

[Walrus]

I've only tried using YUY2 once under Win9x (I haven't used Win9x in months), but if memory serves the reghack is the only thing you need to do to enable YUY2. The trick is you don't actually want to capture YUY2 video raw. You want to pipe it immediatly to a compressor. The advatage of YUY2 is that it's the native color format that MJPEG and MPEG is based on (or very close) unlike RGB. That cuts down the processing needed to compress to either.

[Michel Carleer]

I can confirm that the only thing that needs to be modified is the entry in the registry. The only problem with this solution is that as soon as you launch PC-VCR, the entry is restored to 24 bit RGB, and you have to do it again.
There is another way to enable YUY2 capture in external capture programs such as VirualDub, Videocap or Ulead MS. If you look at the Video Format dialog box that pops up when changing format in one of these programs, you will see a blank space below the last entry MJPEG. This is because there is another entry which is YUY2, but it has been programmed as 'invisible' by Matrox. Find a way to make it visible, and you get the all YUY2 capability for capture. The dialog box is programmed in the file vcap16.dll, which is the capture interface to the card. I did it by using (programmers will understand the following) a program called AppStudio which is part of the old 16 bit Visual C++ compiler from Microsoft. This program is normally used to graphically build menus, dialog boxes and so on. But it has the additional capability to read, show and even edit the resources in exe or dll files. Just open vcap16.dll in AppStudio, open the video format dialog box and make the YUY2 button visible and save the modified file. And voila, you can now access YUY2 from any capture program (except Matrox's own PC-VCR which bypasses the format dialog box). There is even a new picture dimension dialog special for the YUY2 format.
Michka

[Walrus]

Michael Carleer: The solution can even be easier than that. Use the reg hack on the previously mentioned site, and then modify the "DisplayHeight" and "DisplayWidth" registry settings right next to it to set the YUY2 capture size. Ignore the dialog boxes altogether and just manually adjust the settings. Incidently, PCVCR uses it's own registry entries that are independent of the generic Vidcap settings. (and does not support YUY2 at all)

[Michel Carleer]

Walrus: I prefer not to have to touch the registry each time I want to capture. Once vcap16.dll has been patched, it stays forever and I can change format and dimensions at will and the YUY2 choice is always there, together with RGB and MJPEG in the Video Format dialog box. But thanks for your additional info.
People should perhaps know that if Matrox decided not to give this choice to the user it is because the implementation of YUY2 is not perfect. As an example, if I capture in YUY2, the picture shows a green border of some 2 to 4 scan lines at the bottom. Well, sometimes green, sometimes black. And there may well be some other problems. Anyway, it is really nice to be able to capture in YUY2 and do an MPEG4 compression on the fly, without one single frame dropped. The MPEG4 picture quality is by far superior to the real time MPEG1 compression done by the Ligos GoMotion. And it is a very good starting format to convert the stream to true MPEG1 afterwards.
Michka

[RBryant]

Michka, what do you use to do the Mpeg4 compression on the fly?

[Michel Carleer]

RBryant: I am using the Microsoft MPEG4 codec under MediaStudio 5, or under VirtualDub, or VidCap32. Simply choose MPEG4 in the Compression dialog box. I think the codec was installed on my system when I installed the Windows Media Tools pack from Microsoft. It is normally intended to generate .asf streaming files, but the codec works equally well when called from any capture program adhering to the VfW standard. Sorry, I don't remember the exact URL I downloaded WMT from, it was on the MS site however.
Michka

[LittleFoot]

The microsoft site I believe is http://www.microsoft.com/windows/win...ad/default.asp

Toward the top of the page.

[RBryant]

Ok, so I set the capture to 352x240 YUY2 and everytime I try to start the capture in MSP6, it just says that the codec has failed to initialize... Can I capture directly to MPEG4 with MSP6? I have MediaPlayer 6.4 and Windows Media Tools and OnDemand Producer installed and have converted captured files with them... but can I capture straight to MPEG4?

Thanks!

g

[Michel Carleer]

RBryant,
There is one small thing I was not aware of: Microsoft removed the possibility to use the MPEG4 codec from capture programs in the newer versions of WMT. You can only use it from their own asf encoder. I happen to have an old version of the codec installed on my PC. I don't know if it would be sufficient to overwrite the newer version of the codec with the old one I have (filename: MPG4C32.DLL).
Sorry for the false hope.
Michka