Sound crackles when capturing at double height resolutions

[Baerchen]

I experience a lot of crackles when capturing at 'double height' resolutions such as 352 x 576. With 352 x 288, everything is fine. Those crackles sound very much like an old vinyl record - at a frequency of about 20-30 occurences a minutes and varying volume.

Solutions I've already tried from proposals of people of the Matrox Support Board:

- Changing PCI-Slot
- Installing SB live! WDM drivers
- Got rid of SB16 DOS emulation
- Updating to latest Matrox drivers (and therefore DirectX 8.1)
- Checked IRQs - all fine

Nothing helped so far. Are there any other solutions anyone can come up with? Highly appreciated & TIA,

Baerchen

[Dr Mordrid]

Here's another for your list: get rid of that @#%$#^@ SBLive and get a real audio card.

Start looking at the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz/Videologic Sonic Fury. I have several in my editing systems now and they work great in Win9x, 2K and XP. Very low system resource usage, unlike the SBL which hogs the bus even when it's not being used.

Dr. Mordrid

[Sciascia]

Sciascia

Yes i too was victimized by the Creative Labs Audigy resource hogging junk. supposedly it was to be less CPU intensive than the SBLive!, but I couldn't even capture to HW MJPEG with a 1.4G machine, 512M Ram and a Fasttrak Ultra 100 at RAID0 without dropping frames. I threw in my old nasty Diamond MX300 and it worked like a charm even though Diamond is gone and the drivers are prehistoric/nonexistent in most cases.

Creative is not a good chice for audio unless you like having something hijack the PCI bus and fill it with null data, "just in case it needs the bus" and can seem more responsive. Of course it will get good benchmarks, but it really bottlenecks the bandwidth for the rest of the system and in my opinion, an MP3 file does not ned to be my highest priority on my system. Video capture takes a whole ot more bandwidth and I want it to be used for that.

[Baerchen]

Thanks for your answers.
Although not explicitely stated, I assume almost any reasonable soundcard is better than the SBL when it comes to capturing. What I didn't understand is the fact, that although the SBL bogs down the bus, the captures with 'normal' heights are fine, while those with double heights are not. I understand that 480 * 576 is more data than 352 * 576, so for the former, there should be crackles as well. How could that be explained ?

Phew ;-)

Baerchen

[Baerchen]

I've replaced the soundcard by a cheap Terratec card given by a friend and the crackles are gone, so it is really the SBL causing the crackles. Now, the sync is really bad, so I guess i'll go and buy the Videologic.

Thanks for the help,

Baerchen

[Sciascia]

I feel kind of bad since I don't really have an answer to your last question about the half and doubel res captures. All that I know is that it has been proven time and again that CL's last good soundcard was the SB AWE 64. That thing took no resources, but of course the spes on it are much worse than anythng modern. If CL could just make drivers that were scalable maybe that would help, you know like a PCI bus utilization setting and then let you just instal the bare drivers or whatever you want, not all of their really lousy sound applications. They are all ugly and not very useful. I'll take good old WinMP6.4 anyday over that crap. And then all of the garbage that tries to load up at startup. God, they ust try to take over your computer. And forget about uninstalling it....you usually have to reformat just to get rid of all of the crap it leaves in the registry and it will hose other cards that you install.

[Baerchen]

Well, to be honest, as far as the SBL goes, I haven't installed anything of their software. I started the SBLive series driver CD and it told me that it needs about 200 MB HD space. I gulped, removed the CD and let windows install its own drivers which worked very nice until .. see above.

And yes, the AWE64 was a really good card, but since I only own the ISA version and my A7A266 doesn't have any ISA slots, I had to wave goodbye to it and replaced it by the SBL. Seems that was not a good decision.

I'll now try and install the inofficial WDM drivers one more time to see if that changes anything and if not, restore my Ghost backup and try the card Dr recommended (including an exchange guarantee ;-)

I wonder why I don't see very many other people complaining about this phenomenon since I assume that the combination 450eTV/SBL is not very rare.

Thanks,

Baerchen

[Dr Mordrid]

It's not just that combination that is poison, it's the SBL and about any other card or activity that uses appreciable resources....and video editing often does both.

Also: if you really research it you'll find that there has been a LOT on the net about the SBL and its poor resource management. It's a very hot topic in the VIA sites becuause of that chipsets sensitivity to bus hogging hardware.

One reason the Audigy still bus hogs: while its ACPI hardware has been fixed vs. the SBL its drivers still do most of the same-old same-old the SBL drivers did.

The reason I use the Santa Cruz is that it's the diametric oppostie of Creatives products: it uses VERY few resources due to it's on-the-fly programmable DSP. By that I mean that the card optimizes itself for the task at hand on the fly.

Ex: while playing MP3's its CPU utilization is in single digits.

Dr. Mordrid

[Baerchen]

Big thanks to all for help, especially to DrMordrid for his recommendation of the SonicFury. I bought it and I'm very satisfied. No crackles anymore, no other issues. I just thought I let anyone interested know.

Baerchen

[Dr Mordrid]

Now all you need to do is connect it to a 5 speaker setup and crank up the volume....just hold onto your chair

Dr. Mordrid