Now here's a still-born product if ever there was one..

[DrP]

Take a look at the g550.inf that is part of the 582 beta. A Matrox Marvel G550 eTV is in there!...

[AndrewDV]

As strange as it sounds, I would have given it a go...

Oh well, best to move along.

[zeb7]

It will probably come out when matrox need to sell the last batch of G550 chips.
And will have hardware MPEG4 codec limited to 176x144 at 12fps with a maximum capture time of 30mins with fully
integrated digital rights management.

well may be half of it's, possible?

[This_Idiot]

Haig did post a couple of weeks back to say that Matrox Graphics division (i.e. the folks that brought us the Rainbow Runner and Marvels) would NOT be producing any more vidcap cards of any variety. That part of the business will be left to the Video division who have a long history of producing high-end capture cards, and latterly the mid-range (but very capable) RT2000 and RT2500 capture cards.

It's amazing what's found in driver packages, the code control is (frankly) appalling (sorry, that's my profession). That's without dealing with the notorious sense of humour of the programmers. Anyone remember the "Easter Egg" episode which displayed pictures of the programming crew?

Just my own opnion of course....

Chris
(T_I)

[SatMan]

Having had fun and games with this G450 eTV for 10 months now only to find support (driver) has been stopped makes me wonder if there is hardware issues that drivers won't be able to correct.
This is based on no knowledge on the internals but just the hassle I have had to get it to work.
The new desktop cures the dvd playback problems and allows sizing of the display in clone mode. thats good.
The pause live TV feasture is still pretty useless for watching as the Low resolution and lack of interlace make for an unwatchable picture and it still stutters.

The ordinary mpeg2 works better in that now with Win2k you can at least set it to interlaced but soft coding real time mpeg even with a quick pc does leave lots of artifacts especially around text.

My savior with this card has been AVI_IO and Picvideo mjpeg codec. Pictures are much nicer with not a lot more disk space being used and It can work as the best Quality mode around 3.5-1 compression and give excellant pictiures. with my set up It will drop 1 frame in 30,000 - not perfect but good enough for me.

I only wish there was a hidden dialog in pcvcr to drop in an external codec when yuy2 is selected

The only boo boo is the still frame grab. Supported resolution is 16 bit colour but it will not grab clean 24 bit stills with this mode. (YuY capure is not affected)
however the fix is easy and that is to set the display to 32 bit colour. If the system will cope with the extra overhead then clean pictures can be grabbed. Haig at matrox did mention that there was some issue with the way the capture converts to RGB.

Having said all that generally when the card is playing back a recorded item using avi instead of mpeg the pictures are very nice.

just my thoughts.

[cpurdy]

Dear Satman,
what settings do you use with avi_io to get decent avis from MPEG2 PCVCR captures(or do you capture into AVI native from the matrox?)
One unfixable driver hardware issue was SBlive audio out which mutes whaen you start player after record.
I just fixed that by spending £12 on a multimedia keyboard
for the pc.As well as rubber volume keys it has a mute button!
(which single touch unmutes on pCVCR play)
This saves bring up mixer and un-checking mute each play invokation.
Chris

[SatMan]

Hello,
I use only AVI_IO direct instead of PCVCR for capture.
I dont bother anymore with direct mpeg capture using the Matrox remote. but I still use it to grab stills.

[cpurdy]

Thanks,Satman
Oh dear - thats what I suspected.What important settings do you
use for avi capture on the G450etv?
Do they inport to premiere ok?

I have captured a huge library of good high quality MPEG2 and need to make a powerpoint with video inserts.Only AVI
seems compatible across laptops and op systems.

Going down to MPEG1 from premier/avisynth server/TCmpeg/then VCD gives acceptable results, but its not AVI, and lipsync is out.

[SatMan]

Hello,
With AVI_IO there are no special settings that I use.
I just record to a seperate drive at 704x576 and set the Pic Video codec compression to whatever I want at the time.
The earlier post said 1 drop in 3000. That was a typo should have read 30,000 (corrected now).

No problems with importing to Premiere 6
The 2 gig file limitseems to exist though the registered version will seemless record with no problems to several files.