Dear Matrox.... YUY2 Support in NT4 or Win2k?

[RBryant]

Let me start by saying that at the moment I am more happy with my Max/RRG than I have been since July... I am so very pleased with Matrox's continued efforts to get new drivers out. I tip my hat to them.

However, I know this is being very very picky of me... but is there anyway that you guys can add YUY2 support to the NT4 or Win2k (preferably Win2k) set of Video Tools?

As a software engineer, I know how some users can ask for the whole world on a silver platter because they have no idea how difficult some things are to program. But now I have complete and total faith in Matrox's Video Tools developers and I would just like to put in a formal request that this feature be added to the Win2k Video Tools drivers for RRG and Marvels.


Thank you very much for your time,

R. Garrett Bryant

1 very satisfied Matrox customer since the original Millennium

[Haig]

Ask and you shall receive

Seriously, we have added YUY2 support for the next set of win98 PD only. We are looking into adding it into the win2k PD and maybe into the NT PD drivers but nothing is definite yet.

Haig

[Phire]

Hehe, im not too familiar with such technical terms as those. Could you explain please how it's useful to us (YUY2).

Also a discovery i've made which i'd like to share. In VirtualDub if i enable DirectDraw acceleration it will totally destroy the video, make it garbled with black and white colors etc. So for anyone that expierences this maybe you have to disable this somewhere within windows.

[RBryant]

Thanks so much for the response, Haig. I knew you guys would come through for me.

Phire, I don't know if there is a short explanation so here goes: Are you familiar with the fact that instead of capturing in Matrox MJPEG .AVI format, you can capture in Raw RGB 8,16, or 24bit? Well, Raw RGB is really huge because it is not compressed at all, but it also looks great because it is a per-pixel capture... YUY2 is antoher Raw format that takes up a little less space than raw RGB. The important factor of YUY2 is that it is the native source format for all MPEG (not MJPEG) codecs. What this means in English is that you can tell the Rainbow Runner to capture in raw YUY2, which you can pipe directly to a video compressor such as Microsoft's MPEG4V1. Since the raw video is already in YUY2, the MPEG compressor can compress the video incredibly quickly, allowing you do capture directly to MPEG1,2 or 4 in < REAL-TIME > which can save hours of rendering time later... hope this makes things a little more clear!

Take care,
Garrett

[Walrus]

Just as a note, there ARE some registry settings in the newest NT drivers for YUY2 settings... It seems that they are not yet used though as I can't seem to reghack it into working. My guess is that the feature is still under development.

[RBryant]

Yeah, I had some pretty bizarre results with the changing the registry entries.... I even poked around in the DLL with some debugging utils trying to see if there was an easy way to enable the feature, but alas no luck.

Now if Matrox would just open source their Video Tools drivers........ think of all the little things that the community could do for those drivers from the users' point of view!

Garrett

[matroxg200]

Do you need special software to pipe YUY2 input to an mpeg1/2/4 codec or is it possible to do it just with a program like VirtualDub?
If I got this right then I won't have to convert from MJPEG to MPEG1 to create my own VCDs, right? :-)
Thanks for the help!

[Michel Carleer]

VirualDub will do the piping: select YUY2 in Video Format (or apply the registry hack for YUY2), and then select a codec in Video Compression.
Michka

[stlloyd]

When is it expected that the YUY2 support in win98 PD will be available?

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-StLlloyd

[Michel Carleer]

I remember reading a post some 3 weeks ago by Haig (or Olliver, or...) saying, at the time, that the next minor release of Vid Tools was imminent (that's the 1.52 we play with now) and the next version was due sometime around mid-March.
YUY2 is already implemented in the 98 version of the capture driver, it is only a matter of the controls (buttons and dialog boxes) beeing disabled but the code is in it. With still some problems though (mainly picture dimension problems). The code is in fact also implemented in the NT version of the driver, but the controls are missing. And there are still major problems in this version so that trying to use it from the registry brings you only BSODs and the like. There are apparently still memory allocation problems. From the code which is in it, YUY2 is there, as well as YUV422 and also the possibility to do software MJPEG instead of hardware.
Now, all of this info is completely unofficial and comes only from me poking around in the drivers with some developper tools. I am just trying to indicate to the people what are the things that are *likely* to come in upcoming releases of Vid Tools.
Michka

[areia]

Well, this feature isn't new in matrox drivers. Sun brought it here, posted 04 August 1999, and it works with the new drivers, under 98 and NT. Some guys didn't find the registry key Colourformat because when they looked for it, it wasn´t still created, pc-vcr doesn't create it, all other capture aplicattions do after the first setup and capture. The interesting part is when you select a codec like Divx, which gives a very good quality and a small size; then, you can compress it even more to mpg1.

[Michel Carleer]

OK Areia, sorry for my bad english. I didn't mean to say that I found it all, I know Sun already told us a long time ago. I just wanted to summarize what I learned from my poking. Unfortunately, for me at least, the YUY2 format does not work under NT. As soon as I try to use it, the capture program crashes with a violation error. And on the other hand, I did not see anything about the YUV422 format, nor the software MJPEG capture. Of course maybe I missed one mail or two.
Michka

[RBryant]

areia, if you have actually gotten the YUY2 to work under NT with a Rainbow Runner G with a G400, then I would like to compare notes because I have tried it on several machines and not been able... were you perhaps talking about a Marvel G200 or G400? Any tips would be appreciated...

Garrett

[Michel Carleer]

Garrett,
I have a Marvel G400, and as I said in my previous post: Access violation error.
Michka