New Video Capture card

[dsp]

Hi all,

I'm looking at getting a new capture card for my video editing system (specs at bottom). I currently have a WinTV Go card in there but I am looking for the following things:

SVHS port
Stereo sound
TV-Tuner
Works with IUVCR
Works in XP Home

I have three options:
Zoltrix Genie-TV
ATi TV Wonder
or a more expensive Hauppauge WinTV Theater

Thank you in advance for any advice. If you know where I can get the Hauppauge Model 401 card in Canada please let me know.

dsp

System Specs:
Celeron 850
Gigabyte 815EPT board
G400 Dual Head
256MB RAM
XP Home
8.4GB Quantum CR - Boot
40GB Maxtor UDMA-133 - Capture
Promise Ultra-66
SB Audigy
Win TV Go

[Dr Mordrid]

Since you have DualHead on your G400 you don't need a video output capability. DVDMAX can handle that well enough.

I'd go with the Hauppage WinTV Theater. I have one of these myself and it's pretty darned good. Captures a full 720 wide frame (using VfW drivers) and works great with a mix of AVI_IO, HuffYUV, PICVideo MJPeg etc.

VfW capture limits you to 2 gig capture files, but no problem with AVI_IO doing segmented capture duty.

Dr. Mordrid

[dsp]

Dr. Mordrid,

I would like to get the Theater card but I was wondering also what chip is on the TV Wonder and the Zoltrix beforehand and also the state of drivers. As the Theater is about double the price of the others I'm slightly hesitent to buy it.

As I'm using XP I use the Directshow drivers, in conjunction with PICVideo MJPEG. With iuVCR it allows for capture at 720*480 using my WinTV GO which every other piece of software (AVI_IO included) only allows for capture of up to x*240.

dsp

[DrP]

On the subject of WinTV cards, regulars might remember that I went along the path of Hauppage when checking out a new capture card, but didn't like it because of the blurriness it gave with PAL captures. Welllll, here's the reasons behind the poor picture quality:

PAL TV reverses the phasing of the colour burst each line to avoid hue problems with multipathing etc. On a normal TV, at normal viewing distances, it results in the 'right' colour being seen on the screen for us humans (ie there is no hue adjustment on a PAL set). Problem is, someone decided to give a PC TV abilities!. So now when you decode PAL into a PC, quite often the phase flipping will result in alternating colour line by line (within a single field). How much of this you see really depends on your signal conditions and a few other things. This could be compensated for completely in hardware, perhaps the BT/CX878a can do this, I don't know. Hauppage's answer to this is to use the filtering abilities of the BT/CX to blur up the picture to smooth over the colour alternation.

I've tried alternate drivers that let me put the filtering an an acceptable level, and once again the PAL problem pops up. Its easy to get rid of fortunately, as there is a phase correction filter available for virtualdub. Without correction, codecs such as msmpeg4, divx4, divx5 have a fit and start horrid 12.5Hz colour / luminance flickering. Other codecs try to encode the alternations and end up with visible artifacts and a higher required bitrate.

Now if only I can find a driver that will run my card properly, I'll be one step closer to happiness.

http://btwincap.sourceforge.net seems nice, but still needs work.

Hmm, infact, he's already done the work! The driver now runs my card perfectly. Now if I can just solve the RFI problems of the card .... (aint these card designers heard of analogue isolation?)