The black border is a bug!! (excuse me for the insistence)

[Emanuele]

I’m Emanuele, an Italian Matrox customer from more than 4 years ( excuse me for poor English). Memory from the times of the Rainbow Runner Studio that the driver of the card they had, in a way or the other, of the small defects that with passing of the time you of the Matrox are resolutions to resolve until arriving to the complete 3d/video solution that is the Marvel G400.
I have a Marvel G200 and I take advantage of it to full load for rendering 3d and for the assembly video and they are satisfied even if in order to find the just coupled one of Brightness/contrast/hue has been a problem. Still but they have not been in a position to resolving a problem: the black border that appears up to the video captured with the Motion-JPEG Matrox in video-out.

After several test they are joint to the conclusion that the captured video endures of the modifications, in fact the video is downshift of 13 pixel and rightshift of 7 pixel (measures carried out with special equipment).
More just the already present border in the images recorded on tape or transmitted in TV (hidden from the overscan of the TV) come added to the shift caused from the driver of Matrox capture.

The problem unfortunately persists with all your customers, many people finds this problem.

How can be resolved the problem? A new relase of the driver?

I repeat, I am Italian and therefore I do not know if the problem is understood, I pray you to correct the errors that are in the document because this " letter " will be inserted also in the forum of the Matrox.


Thanks to all, Emanuele.

[fluggo99]

Why must it be considered a problem? A nuisance in some cases, but not necessarily a problem.

[TommyS]

I'm Italian too, and for me is a probm too...

Everybody can see that. Look on the preview window (i used the freeware capture program http://flits102-145.flits.rug.nl/CapTV.htm , but you can see with all capture program)
if you start to record you can see the preview image shift to the bottom and to the left, when you stop the image will go back!
I'm waiting for a solution since january '99.
Ciao

[wkulecz]

The black border is most likely not a problem for 99.9% of folks doing output back to tape from edited MJPEG captures simply because the "overscan" built into TV sets throws away much more than this.

However it most definetly is a problem if your MJPEG captures are to be transcoded into anything else. Sure you can setup clipping and resize filters to work around it, but this slows down an already slow process even more. Its clearly a bug that makes the product less than the all-around solution it was supposed to me. Don't get me wrong, the Marvels & RR series can't be touched for twice the price in terms of quality of output back to tape, but for getting the best quality on video clips intended for computer playback its easier to get better results with cheaper cards simply because of this bug.

It might be interesting to see how the "floppy driv bug" lawsuit against Compaq ends up. Toshiba has already settled. As I understand it the problem was virtually imposible to trigger with "normal" software but they still figured they'd lose. Compaq appears ready to fight. The issue was selling hardware with known defects despite that hardly anyone even noticed the defect, let alone have any trouble resulting from it!

If they lose and I'm making video cards with buggy drivers -- I'd get my driver writters working overtime to have solutions ready! I'm hoping Compaq loses, and this puts the fear of God into these video card companies who sell lots of cards and then orphan them without ever fixing but a small fraction of the known bugs.

--wally.

[Brian Ellis]

I'm not at all convinced this can be classed as a bug. It is simply an interpretation of the standards and is well within the limits. I haven't worked out the percentage of time that a TV signal is actually sending out visual data, roughly 75% as a guess, but there is a wide tolerance on it. The rest of the time, it is sending out "blacker than black" synch signals, teletext, black reference levels and so on. What you are seeing here are the reference levels which are slightly wider than those of the usual commercial TV signals but probably within tolerance. On NTSC, you have 525 lines, but only 480 are used (625 and 576 resp. for PAL) for the visual data, as against ca. 490 (600) used by commercial stations. Similarly, the horizontal line also has a "dead point" to maintain the aspect ratio, broadening the black level step slightly. This is so that the TV signal will fit onto a computer screen running at 640 x 480 resolution, which is essentially a compromise. The fact that the black "border" never shows on a TV screen (not even a professional monitor) is proof that it is acceptable according to the TV standards, because it is within the period permitted for synch and its associated functions. I would say, for those wanting perfection, instead of spending a couple of hundred bucks on a Marvel, they spend 100 times more and buy a really pro set-up which has the hardware capable of all the conversions required. You don't get a Rolls-Royce when you spend money on a bicycle, do you?

Other systems with a comparable price make their compromises elsewhere, such as not having the same image quality, by dithering.

------------------
Brian (the terrible)

[wkulecz]

Brian,

If this is not a bug then I don't know what is. My Marvel claims to capture NTSC at 704x480. IF this capture resolution is not confined to the active area of the video then Matrox has lied about the capture resolution. Its really that simple. The standard is not as loose as you imagine, although great liberties are taken in its implimentation for camcorders and VCRs etc, but not for broadcast. I would agree with you if the problem was confined to captures from some VCRs or Camcorders but was not on captures from US broadcast NTSC.

In any case I don't think your explaination holds as playing the MJPEG back in Media Player I get what appears to be 704x480 active pixels without any black border on the top and left edges. When the dmb1 codec is used alone in a video pipeline it appears to return a slightly displaced 704x480 pixels resulting in a black border on the top and left edges of anything using the dmb1 codec's output as its input.

Try this:
Capture YUV2 or RGB to 352X240 (even better, if possible capture it on another system without a Marvel).

Use Ulead or Premiere to produce an AVI resized to 704x480 with dmb1 as the compression.

Play it back, should be fine. You know you now have 704x480 active pixels (even though most are fake from interpolation :-).

Load this back into Premiere or Ulead and make a new AVI choosing anything but dmb1 as the compression.

Play it back, note the black bars on top and left edges. If I recall correctly you can also make the initial dmb1 AVI in 352x240 and still get the same effect, although it not quite as obvious.

This bug seriously limits the usefulness of the Marvel for anything other than output back to tape. It should be made clear to people that if they need anything other than the best quality capture and output back to tape for the money, then they need to look at higher priced solutions for making both tapes and computer AVIs or MPEGs. If you are only buying the Marvel for computer AVIs and MPEGs then you've made a rather poor choice because of this bug and lack of official YUV2 captures!

I think a Marvel and a cheap Hauppauge WinTV card could be a good low cost compromise solution for both needs if they didn't step all over each others dicks in the registry, but it'd be better if the Marvel had this dmb1 codec bug fixed to save a PCI slot!

It'll be interesting to see what happens to this industry if Compaq loses the "defective floppy lawsuit". These "defective" video card problems are more clearly demonstratable. I know I wasn't the only one to report this problem on the G200 Marvel before the G400 was released. The G400 didn't fix it. Knowingly selling defective hardware is the root of the Compaq case. The curious thing about the floppy bug is it was apparently impossible to trigger from normal DOS/Windows! Despite this, Toshiba has settled, Compaq seems ready to fight.

I hate lawyers! but if this is what it takes to get bugs fixed in drivers or better yet, open sourced drivers, so be it!

--wally.

[Brian Ellis]

Wally

Sue Matrox, if you like. I don't think you would have a snowball-in-hell's chance of winning, even with that Cochrane guy as your lawyer. You have a smaller-than-standard picture to fit in a standard frame. Something's got to give. Either you accept the smaller picture and have a border with Marvel, or you accept the distortions or fuzziness due to the peculiar conversion algorithms (and the increased CPU times) you have with some other systems. As I said before, if you want pro quality, pay pro prices, but it's not reasonable to expect more than what you pay for, any more than it would be reasonable to expect supercomputer performance with a PC.

Personally, I think that the value for money and performance of a PC-based NLE capture/system is fantastic, when you see how much a pro system costs.

It's quite easy to be more catholic than the Pope. I've distributed quite a large number of CDs, black border and all, some for publicity purposes (15 min clip explaining how a machine works). No-one has ever remarked on the border and the pub CD has achieved the desired effect, so viewers have not been put off by these small borders. Is it not a mountain made from a molehill?

------------------
Brian (the terrible)

[fluggo99]

> Is it not a mountain made from a molehill?

Right on! Trying to fix something that isn't "broken" enough for you to complain. Sort of like getting off a murder charge scot-free because someone made a typo in the deposition.

For that matter, let's sue video distributors, because as professionals, they shouldn't be sending out tapes with snow in the first two seconds. (well, there is the fact that you didn't want to pay for the DVD player, but that's beside the point)

Or the people who make those darn rings that tarnish. (well, okay, you could have paid for the gold ones, but think of what I'm trying to say here)

YOU paid for a product that does its job very well for the price you paid. If you claim there's something wrong with it, don't use it. If you say there's better cards for cheaper (try to keep up, this is heavy logic, man) use them instead.

Just from the lifetime of this forum and the number of posts it's received, it should be easy to deduce that many have chosen to ignore the small nuisances the G-series offers so that they can receive its great benefits. People do the same with Windows. If you'd rather be entangled in lawsuits than video editing, then I'd say you're too far gone for any of MURC's advice to help now.

[RBryant]

Wally et al,

I noticed myself that the problem comes from the software implementation of the MJPEG codec that comes with the RRG/Marvel.

Case in point: I captured a 30 sec clip to 704x480 MJPEG. Then I opened up two copies of it at once with media player. The first one used the hardware overlay to play the clip and it looked fine... the second one could not take advantage of the hardware overlay while the first one was still open, so it had to use the software MJPEG codec to play it and it was shifted down exactly 8 pixels.

It was not shifted to the left or the right any, though. I also noticed that as I scrolled through the 80+ channels of garbage
on TV that different channels' signals had different displacements. For example, HBO and UPN filled up the entire window (I was using AVI_IO) while NBC, ABC, CBS had small black borders on the left and even an thinner border on the bottom.

So, I guess what I'm trying to figure out here is what role this plays in TV out? Do these borders show up in the TV out? If so, what if you capture from a station such as HBO that does not have any borders to begin with? Do the 8 pixels show up in the non-overscan area of a TV? Maybe I am not entirely clear on how the real problem manifests itself. I use my RRG for transcoding to VCD and now DivX, but I capture in RGB and YUY2 so perhaps this is not an issue for me.

But, if this is just a software codec problem, then hopefully matrox can fix this.

Garrett

[Walrus]

RBryant:
Actually, the black border is encoded in the MJPEG files. Open them up with another codec and the black borders are clearly in there. The hardware overlay MJPEG playback is making up for this by stretching the image a bit.
To put it mildly, I find this bug annoying, but I've gotten used to cropping and resizing in virtualdub along with my image correction/noise reduction filters, so it's not that big a deal for me. (esp with my target being MPEGx)

[Flying dutchman]

Wally,
I'd be interested to know about (registry)compatibility issues between a Marvel and a Hauppauge Wintv card, since I'm contemplating buying one (Windows 2000 support)!

[wkulecz]

Flying Dutchman,

I've never tried using a Hauppauge (or other BT8x8) capture card in a system with a Marvel. If you've ever had the mis-fortune of having to deal with Matrox tech support, one of the first things they insist you do is "remove all vestiges of brooktree capture settings from the registry and system.ini". Total waste of time as my initial Marvel was defective. Had they sold me a working card initially I'd have probably just installed the drivers and been on my way. Basically they blamed anything else they could think of rather than consider that there might actually be something wrong with their hardware of software. This wasted tremendous amounts of my time to absolutly no effect. OTOH I never went back and tried a Hauppauge and Marvel together, giving them (perhaps mistakingly) some credit for knowing what works together. Hence my statement.

While the cheap Hauppauge card does work quite well in Windows 2000, it only has VfW capture drivers thus it seems you are stuck with the 2G limit. More seriously, only fixed capture sizes are offered in their "vidcap setup dialog" Missing are "custom" which is the major flaw when combined with the fact that they offer 352x288 but not 352x240. Perhaps they've confused PAL and NTSC VCD standards :-)

Also if you want TV captures, you have to run the winTV application to set the channel first as there is no channel selection available in the driver setup dialog either. This flaw is in win98 drivers too!

Direct real-time MPEG captures using Ulead MSPRo6 "Video for Windows MPEG capture" via the bundled GoMotion works quite well although you can't get VCD format directly because 352x240 captures are missing. 340x240 captures to MPEG1 produced what I'd consider maybe VHS SP dubbed to VHS SLP in quality.

Doing 352x240 MPEG1 with win98SE didn't improve the quality much if at all.

I haven't played with the MPEG2 stuff yet.

I got a WinTV/Go for $50 with a $20 rebate from Microcenter. Best rebate service I've ever seen. I had a check for $20 from Hauppauge in my hand 10 working days from the time I mailed it in!

--wally.

[wkulecz]

RBryant,

Thanks for actually investigating further instead of just trying to shout me down and declare its not a bug and/or it doesn't matter.

IF we don't demand better we'll never get it.

I've praised Matrox where they are good (quality of capture and output back to tape) and panned them where they stink (drive and codec bugs, lack of "official" raw video (YUY2) capture, tech support, lack of win2000 capture support).

--wally.

[fluggo99]

Quit your whining to us if you can't figure out how to use what you paid for. It's not our fault you didn't buy the best.

Whether or not you choose to see it, the truth remains: You have no reasonable need for those extra few pixels that no one ever sees. Yes, it would be nice if Matrox fixed it. If you intend to sit around and wait for it, go right ahead. You shelled out a few hundred, and by golly, you need that thousand dollars' worth of performance.

People like you, who stand around with their noses in the air waiting for the world to be perfect just for them, are laughable. If you refuse to regard the possibility of working under restrictions, you're wasting your own time. No skin off my nose if you won't listen to reason.

[Phire]

I'm not really upset with the borders, but just to let you guys know, if you set the card to capture in RAW avi it uses all the space and you won't see a single border, it seems to only happen with MJPEG capture. The reason? Who knows..