Chroma madness: Am I seeing things?

[ffynnon]

Maybe I'm being too picky, but I'm curious if this is normal or not.

When capturing with an 8Mb G200 (drivers 5.55, vidtools 1.52) in win 98, in any res, with any program, I see horizontal "lines of orange discoloration". These aren't interlacing lines--they're too far apart.

I initially thought it was loose cables, or interference. Nope. Then I suspected the heads on my SVHS and tried my VHS VCR. Nope.

I then turned the chroma off and the lines dissappeared. I slowly turned the chroma back up, but they reappear quite quickly. They don't show up (at least to my eyes) on dark images, only bright, saturated colors.

I've hacked the registry to allow YUY2, but it happens in RGB and MJPEG as well. I cracked Macrovision on the off chance it was the offender and of course it wasn't. I'm out of ideas.

Is this normal? I'm banking on no, but this is my first home capture card and I'm not sure what kind of quality to expect.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

specs

PII 400
64Mb RAM
20Gb HD capable of sustained 10Mb/s writes
Matrox Marvel G200 8Mb
SB live w/liveware 3.0

[DrMordrid]

Is this a DVD source? If so it could be a Macrovision level the crack can't handle. It certainly sounds like some Macrovision artifacts I've seen even.

Dr. Mordrid

[ffynnon]

No. It's just about anything I can throw at it. SVHS, VHS...although I could dust off the 3/4 inch and give it a try...

It DOES seem to appear only on commercial tapes though, which would make me agree with your macrovision hunch. Strangely though, even tapes that didn't trigger the Macrovision warning (before I had it cracked) exhibit it. I dug out an external Macrovision buster (Video Stabalizer), but all that did was wash things out--the lines remain. That's in addition to the software crack. Could Macrovision really be surviving all these steps? On two separate VCRs?

I've made a 1 second divx example of the lines I'm seeing. Is there a way I could send it to you to look at? I don't have a webpage or the like. It's 122kb. If you double the playback size it's fairly easy to spot.

Anyway, looking forward to any input.



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[This_Idiot]

Ffynnon,

Sure, upload it to the AVI Showcase and then post the filename bak here. Instructions for the upload are on the first showcase page (don't forget to ignore the error message from your ftp package, it's the way that the anon ftp account is set up)

Let me know if you need to know more details

Chris

[DrMordrid]

Macrovision has at least 2 levels so something might be getting through. I know my cleaner worked fine up until the last few months and then I started getting horizontal lines in some of my tapes & dvd's. The worst one was Sixth Sense. What a mess..

Dr. Mordrid

[Phire]

It may or may not be macrovision but one thing I know for sure is that the Sima Color Color Corrector fixes this problem. I recently bought one and I was looking at the box cover and it exactly looks like what you were describing, The Sima Color Corrector Pro is known to remove macrovision but it's done absoulutly nothing for me :P I've found out that I have more of a tracking problem than a macrovision problem.. I recently bought a number of stabilizers and they have made a difference but i've narrowed the problem down for myself of being a simple tracking problem and unfortunatly the Matrox Video Tracker isnt very flexible and only has 4 options on its slider. But in any case, this isn't related to your problem BUT I do know for sure that the SCC Pro removes this.

[ffynnon]

OK, I've uploaded the file and it's called "Bars example mjpeg.avi".

It's just video; you don't have to put up with hearing Shania Twain.
It's big so you can step through it and see the lines. They move about and "dance".

Phire: thanks for your input. Where would I get a Sima Color Corrector, and for how much (approx Can. or US funds?)

Dr. Mordrid: Thanks for the Macrovision info. I'm curious though--the crack to disable macrovision must only be disabling the warning, not actually macrovision itself. Has anyone made a program to strip macrovision out of an incoming signal? Would that clear up this mess? I'm tempted to borrow a TBC from work and see if that clears up the lines. Then we'd have an answer one way or another...

[ffynnon]

Sorry, the Sima was incredibly easy to find on the web.

Not thinking. ;(

[This_Idiot]

ffynnons clip can be found here :

http://216.15.144.49/bars%20example%20mjpeg.avi

Please take the time to have a look, it isn't huge