More tests done with Marvel G200, W2K & FD Patch... strange things happen!

[JoeDaring]

Hello' everybody...

Just did some more testing with Marvel G200, W2K and the Flying Dutchman's patch...

Here are some strange things I've found:

P.se note that I installed, together with the Official VT/PD set, also the following codecs:

- HUFFYUV (Latest)
- Morgan (Latest)
- PicVideo (Latest)
- AVI_IO (Latest, Trial)

Also, I used the utility "AVI Patcher" which peeks into the AVI and tells you what's its "FourCC" ID string (and allows also to change it...), this utility, if I remember correctly, is available somewhere in the Morgan codec's page or, at least, a link should be over there! :-)

- Selecting "RGB" (8/16/24) in the Matrox vidcap panel,and no recompression, produces an AVI which has a blank FourCC string... the played file doesn't use the HW codec, and they're not supposed to, obviously...

- Selecting "YUY2" (Enabled with FD's tool) and recompression=HuffYUV, at full frame PAL, produces (BIG!) AVI files which bear "HFYU" in the FourCC ID string, which is fine... I had no drops in a 5 minutes capture, the buffers in AVI_IO peaked around 7. Played files are jerky (I expected that on my PIII @800, and I am also a bit scarce with ram at this very moment... only 128 Megs :-( ) and again, obviously, they don't make use of the HW Codec...

Also, when using YUY2 with Morgan, I get files that have the correct "MJPG" FourCC string, but examining their properties in WinMedia Player shows ALWAYS the use of PicVideo Codec, instead of Morgan's one (Remember, I have both of them installed!)...

Now for the tricky part...

- Selecting "MJPEG" (Enabled with FD's tool),and no recompression,at full frame PAL, produces an AVI file which has the "YUY2" FourCC string!!! I expected to find a "dmb1" string there... am I wrong? Don't think so!

This is a strange behavior indeed and, SergioValentino, for your info, the displayed frame rate in the VidCap panel was correctly stated @2.9 Mb/sec.

When playing back the files, they don't use the HW Codec at all, and I'm almost sure they aren't, because they play back jerky (they NEVER did, with HW Codec!), and they show the "Top Lines With Coloured Dots Artifact" usual with software codecs playback and our Marvels in W2K! What's strange to me is that, even when changing the FourCC from "YUY2" to "dmb1" manually (with AVI Patcher), playing back the files is still done with some software codec (...But WHICH???), and NOT with HW! (Note also that regEdit shows correctly "vidc.dmb1=rricm.dll")...

Having found this, I went a bit further and played a bit with T-Rex tricks, and discovered that ONLY WHEN USING THE "LEAKED" RRvcap32.dll, I can get AVI files that have the correct "dmb1" FourCC ID string. Those files DO play with the Matrox HW codec! They are NOT jerky at all, and they don't show any artifact at the top lines of captured video! I can make them play jerky and with the artifact: if I try and play simultaneously TWO files in WMP, one file is played correctly, the second has the defects... I think that the second instance of WMP cannot use the HW codec, because the first WMP is using it...

Of course, you still need FD's patch (Hey Flying dutchman... any newer version ready???) to activate YUY2, and it also makes very handy to switch from one codec to the others you have installed...

Another problem I have is:

Both when capturing in YUY2 and MJPEG (Leaked AND Official versions), if I select "Custom Frame Size" in AVI_IO's Capture Panel, (But the same hapens if I select frame sizes smaller than "Full" in the Matrox's VidCap panel), the captured file gets CROPPED, instead of being resized to the desired resolution! This cuts away the whole right-end portion of the input video (Tried only with TV Tuner as a source), making the option of capturing reduced frame sizes useless.

Now, I'm not a software Guru but, does anyone have some hints on why all this happens?

I mean,

- Why MJPEG captures vith Official RRVCAP32.DLL have "YUY2" FourCC ID string, and why they don't play using HW codec even when the FourCC is manually set to "dmb1"?

- Why Those damned colored-dotted-lines appear in captures when playing the files with software codecs? Has anyone got rid of them? (I know, I can mask them with a bit of post processing, but NOT having them would be better! ;-) )

and, finally,

- Why the Custom Framesize option in AVI_IO yelds CROPPED captures instead of resized ones?

Wheeewwww! This has been a lot of typing... I hope someone will take the pain to reply me :-), or I just wasted some bandwidth!

Thank you everybody! And happy experimenting!

Joe Daring, Italy

ASUS CUSL2-C
PIII 800Mhz
256M ram
Quantum Fireball 10 Gigs System Disk
IBM DTLA 20 Gigs Video Disk
Marvel G200 TV (PAL, tuner added after the purchase)
SBLive! 5.1 (Forgive our sins, Dr.Mordrid )
Sym810 SCSI Controller
Pioneer 104 DVD Player IDE
Yamaha 6416 CD-R/RW SCSI
Plextor PX40 SCSI
W2K SP2

[Flying dutchman]

I am abroad right now, but if I recall correctly, the hardware mjpeg DEcoder (rrmjpeg.dll or something) isn't installed at all if you use the "release" version of the videotools.

On my PC the release version correctly captures hardware MJPG at 3 mb/s, and I use picvideo for playback.

Maybe we'd better use the "leaked" version? Do you have any experiences as to the stability, with busmastering disabled?

[fberger]

Joe,

Very good work! I read your message with a lot of interest, the only thing I can add is that I experience the same issue in regards to frames being cropped in VirtualDub 1.4, instead of being resized. I was afraid it was a bug in VirualDub, but since you have the problem in AVI_IO as well we can conclude that it is a driver issue. It is interesting because when I submitted my problem to Matrox weeks ago, they said this was a capture software issue and they did not support third party capture apps (obviously...). If we can conclude that their driver is faulty, then... nothing of course, they won't fix it because:

1. they released final drivers and won't touch them anymore
2. they don't support YUY2 under Win2k on a G200!!!

So are we stuck with full frame captures only?

Fred

[JoeDaring]

Hi all...

@Flying Dutchman...
I hope you are abroad for vacation or pleasure... in this case, ENJOY! ;-)...

Back to main topic...
As I said, I'm not a software guru, and I actually don't know what each .dll does...

If you are referring to the file "RRMjpeg.ax", then this file actually doesn't get installed with Official drivers...

The last part of T-Rex's tricks does just that: adding this file from the Leaked set and registering it with "Regsvr32" but... what's this file? I frankly don't know! :-(

Is it the HW Mjpeg activation control? Who knows that?

Anyway, doing just this part of the trick did NOT make my captured files have the correct "dmb1" FourCC... I had to replace also the Official RRvidCap32.dll with the LEAKED one... replacing "RRIcm.dll" didn't make (apparently!) any difference!

Again, FD, are you sure your files are captured with HW? OK, I know you told me before that MJPEG capture, once activated, is done ALWAYS with the HW codec, but without the rrmjpeg trick, I got files which have the Colored Dotted Line Artifact at the top, and that are a bit jerky, apart from having the MJPEG FourCC ID. All this makes me think that they are using some sort of SW codec, even if I tried this also WITHOUT PicVideo or Morgan installed in my system... does Matrox install its own (poor) SW MJPEG codec and this gets used instead of HW???

Does anybody have more info on this?

@fberger

I can confirm: It shouldn't be Cature App-related, but Matrox related instead! But you are right: results doesn't change!

Yes, I know, I've read your thread over at the Matrox Forum... too bad it didn't brought out anything useful for us... Actually, it seems we are stuck to Full Frame captures only...

Everybody, don't get me wrong! It's a GREAT thing to be still able to use our cards for home video editing in W2K, and thanks to everybody that elaborated on this and came out with Tools & Tricks to get the job done but...

isn't seeking perfection (and not being able to achieve it, for that matter....) in the human nature? ;-)

Let's hope someone else has observed better behaviors in their systems...

Of course, PLEASE SHARE! ;-)

Ciao everybody!!!

Joe Daring

[JoeDaring]

@Flying Dutchman,

Sorry, I overlooked your question about leaked release...

I did some testing, not a lot indeed, but I feel that the whole PC-VCR application is not very stable, at least on my system...

Got a nice series of crashes when moving windows around or when accessing the configuration panels...

Vidcap seemed stable to me though! But affected by the same problems as the official release!

Cheers!

Joe Daring

[Flying dutchman]

Hi Joe,

luckily, I went through the trouble of making a LOT of backups during the installation of Windows 2000 and all my (50+) applications. I used Norton Ghost, and I can recover any intermediate stage of my installation.

When I'm back next week, I'll do a clean restore of Win2kSP-2 on an empty hard disk and a fresh install of the official vidtools and drivers just to see what happens. Then I'll do the same using the "leaked" drivers.

I'm pretty sure that my Marvel does hardware MJPG, because the rrmjpg.* files are simply not there on my PC... But just to be sure, I'll investigate next week...

[JoeDaring]

*Bump*

...hello'!

Is there anybody else doing tests with Marvel G200 & W2K?

Flying Dutchman, is there anything new on your side?

Does anybody have found a way to capture at smaller-than-full-frame-size with Marvel G200 & W2K?

Ciao all!

Joe daring

[antimix]

Hello,

there is anyone (up Today) who has found a combinations of Driver+Patches+Tricks+Copy+Register+???....

that enable under WIN2K the correct recording in YUY2 at 352x288 resolution with correct resize and no cropping, using a Marvel G200 ?

All this because:

Due to VIA conflict with SB PCI 128 on my K6 board I am no able to record usefull YUY2 clip in WIN98 (crapped audio).
I tried in WIN2K and it works well no audio clicks, but I have the video clipped and not resize !

Cheers.


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AMDK6 on SOYO 5EMA+ 1.1 board
256MB RAM
SB 128PCI
2 HDs: FUJITSU MPC3064AT , WDCAC310100B
ADAPTEC SCSII 7850
DXR3 Creative (no drivers installed for test purpose in WIN2K)
Creative DVD 12X