G400 Capture Query

[White Thunder]

Thanks to everyone who has replied. I never expected this many responses.

I'm glad Intomisery has added to this thread, as I believe this is similar to what he was discussing in his thread.

I have noticed that many people have mentioned the output quality. I know that this is important, but I am really interested in the input quality (picture quality on your monitor).

Dr. Mordrid,
from what I have heard, the Marvel produces a lot higher quality picture through NTSC, whether it be the signal quality of the tuner or video capture. This is either due to the hardware or the driver.

I would really like to know what everyone thinks of:

a) the picture quality of the tuner while you watch a channel on your monitor, (not the output quality from the Marvel to your TV or video) and

b) the video capture quality from a videotape (on your monitor). Also, how would you compare it to picture quality from the video directly to the TV? (HuffYUV captures would give the most accurate results here, as the limitations of the Zoran MJPEG chip would be eliminated).

Sorry for all the questions. I know it may be a bit too much. Just answer any of the questions you like and skip the rest.

Thanks again.
Ian.

[DavidHM]

As for people telling you that the ATI All In Wonder being sh*t compared to the Matrox Marvel G series cards, that's because the ATI All In Wonder cards are basically regular video cards with TV Tuners integrated into them with no hardware compression, while the Marvels have hardware MJPEG for video capture.

I'm not sure how good the quality of the tuners in the ATI All In Wonder cards are, but I can tell you that the ATI TV Wonder (just the stand-alone tuner) is vastly superior to the tuner in my Matrox Marvel G200. I would assume that the All In Wonder cards have a similar quality tuner to the TV Wonder.

And again, I think a lot of it has to do with people not actually trying the two cards and comparing them side by side. Hardware MJPEG is definitely a big plus, but nowdays you can use PICVideo and do software MJPEG.

[intomisery]

talking about PICvideo, how do I utilize it?
I'm using Virtual Dub- If I select my format as MJPEG, it won't let me choose any form of compression, unless it's the internal compression, whatever that means.

[DavidHM]

Inomisery, I just looked at the pics on your webpage. What OS are you running and what version are the drivers?

I've seen the problem you're having of the fullscreen blockiness before when playing back DVDs. It's because the video card's scaling feature is either not being used or not anti-aliasing the picture. Make sure you have your hardware acceleration set to full and that you have all the DirectDraw options selected in the Video Renderer properties.

Also, in the guy-bad.jpg picture, that could be a result of capturing at 15fps, I'm not sure. But that's also what happens when the Marvel's video hardware overlay is not being utilized. If playback is utilizing the PICVideo codec or the overlay is in use when you playback your video, that's what it looks like.

How were you able to capture these pictures? Normally when you try to capture overlayed video all you get is a blank screen, although I haven't tried recently with the latest Media Player and the new Marvel drivers. But the fact that you were able to capture these pictures as you did could be an indication that the overlay is not being utilized.

But in general, the picture of your captures have the characteristic softness and lack of color vibrancy that is characteristic of the Marvel G series cards.

[Dr Mordrid]

Have you guys gone into Control Panel\Multimedia\Devices\Video Compression Codecs and turned up the dmb1 quality to MAX and QUALITY? It's a small difference, but still worth doing.

Also have you optimised the PowerDesk TV-Out brightness, saturation & contrast settings for video editing? These are usually quite different than the defaults. This would be done in the Dualhead\DVDMax settings on the G400's. Here are the settings if you don't have 'em:

NTSC
Brightness : 180
Contrast : 234
Saturation : 137
Hue : 0

PAL
Brightness : 167
Contrast : 255
Saturation : 138
Hue : 0

Just trying to cover all the bases here....

Dr. Mordrid

[intomisery]

Running WIN98 with the latest drivers.
How I was able to capture: These are not overlays! They were captured to a file, then played back through Media Player, at which time I used Paintshop Pro 5.0 to do a screen capture.
The MJPEG image was done using VideoTools. I played back the AVI file that I recorded and used VIDtools to capture the image to a BMP.

Everything is set to max, Doc. The brightness,etc.. that's not the problem because these are not from a Dualhead out- these are still on the computer.
BTW, DOc, there are no sliders for HUE and Saturation in my DVDMAX settings. only Brightness and Contrast.

[This message has been edited by intomisery (edited 25 June 2000).]

[mikiem]

White Thunder,

Asked for as many opinions & experiences as poss, so for what it's worth...

Using NTSC, & re: the Marvel G400 tuner, the picture I get on my PC monitor is not quite as good as I've seen using an IXTV tuner card, BUT, this was very dependant on which graphics card I had installed at the time. Actually the best picture I ever saw was using an old S3 virge card.

IMHO, graphics card makers have to design a product that does everything, while dealing with a bit of pressure to handle 3D rendering as well. This sort of compromise may not compare with older chips like the 928 designed solely for video optimisation.

Capturing video etc, please bear in mind that I have a rather mediocre cable TV connection... I've noticed no difference in quality running broadcast or vhs streams through the marvel & then back out to tape, regardless what codecs etc. I happen to use.

If I use HI-8 or SVHS footage, I can get noticably better results using the huffyuv codec, but at a price: the interlacing scan lines at full size are terribly apparent on the PC monitor, so if my final destination is the PC, I *Have* to run the video through one of the editing programs to deinterlace and filter.

Like everyone else, I've had problems with the latest Matrox video tools (I use the earlier rrapi.dll), especially as relates to the color, brightness screen settings ect & display on my PC monitor.

For what it's worth, if I don't change a thing from the matrox default settings, then video out is the same as video in. Changing anything to make it appear on my PC monitor as close as possible to TV monitor display alters the captured footage, so in my opinion it's only good when the PC is my final detination.

When necessary, my workaround is to set up various profiles in Entech's Powerstrip.

While possibly a bit of overkill re: this thread, DV Magazine (dv.com) had an enlightening article about the color spaces various equipment, standards, software use. I think is some cases, and particularly playing around with the latest Matrox software, I feel this does play a part.

While not providing any answers, this is my experience any ol' way.

Thanks
mikie

[LvR]

Hi intomisery

Your post earlier regarding fuzzyness refers

I have persued this under the heading of "frame hopping" under my "LvR" user on the Matrox forum as well, and at some stage was told that this seems to be known problem and that it should be solved in the next issue of drivers for W2000 and the Marvel G400.

Have I got it right like that Haig?



------------------
Lawrence

[Joxx]

hello, I read this in the AVI_IO readme file:

"- Note, AVI_IO gives you the option to capture full screen even with TV tuner boards (remember, to do this you most likely have to switch from overlay to preview) and software compression. You will note "horizontal stripes" in scenes with fast movements in your captured video. This has nothing to do with AVI_IO or your specific capture hardware. It's due to the fact that TV is actually recorded in frames which consists of two fields. One field contains the odd lines, the other the even lines of a frame. Since the two half frames are recorded one after the other it's clear that the picture on the second half frame is not the same as on the first. You don't experiance this with lower resolutions because there the capture hardware usually simply throws away one field. If you plan to use the captured video back on TV's it's best not to change anything. In case you want to keep it digital, you may consider using a deinterlace filter with your favourite NLE software."

Maybe you all knew about this, but it was news to me.. Is this why matrox uses deinterlacing? Maybe this, together with the TV-OUT, explains the quality loss. (If it's accurate..)

[intomisery]

what's the difference between Overlay and Preview and which one is better?

[DavidHM]

intomisery, since (according to you) you're not playing back using the video overlay, that's probably the cause of most of your problems right there. How did you go about not using the overlay? i'm not sure if paint shop pro has the ability to capture overlayed images, but using the standard PtrScr or alt-PtrScn, Windows will not copy overlay video to the clipboard.

[DavidHM]

overlay transfers the picture directly from the video device to the video card over the pci bus without the CPU being very involved. preview puts the picture on screen the normal way and is much slower when viewing video.

you should not have the interlaced look of your video when playing back through the marvel's overlay because the marvel will display alternating fields. you should also probably not be able to capture the screen the way you did either if you were using overlay.

[This message has been edited by DavidHM (edited 28 June 2000).]

[intomisery]

DAVIDHM:
I never said I wasn't using overlay. You must have misread my previous msgs. it's as simple as this. I used VirtualDub to capture a few seconds of video and create a new AVI file in YUY2 format. Next, I play the AVI through media player. this is not overlay! this is simply media player playing an avi file.. it could be any avi file. paintshop pro then lets me capture whatever is going on on screen.. viola! those images you saw on the webpage.

In the case of the MJPEG file I captured, I couldn't do this. I had to play the thing through Videotools and use the snap picture option to create a BMP. YOu can see how what crappy quality the MJPEG file is in compared to the YUY2 captures. the colour is different, less clear and consice, and the image is fuzzier, if you can call it that.

[This message has been edited by intomisery (edited 28 June 2000).]

[DavidHM]

intomisery, sorry, i didn't look at the webpage carefully. i thought most of the pics i were looking at were Matrox MJPEG captures.

it might be interesting to see what happens when you convert the yuv captured avis to mpeg2 or another format with something like bbmpeg or tsunami mpeg and play fullscreen. it doesn't look like hardware video scaling is being done and maybe another codec will use it.

[kha]

Hello there,

I had the same kind of problems on both my cards (ATI and Miro) but thanksfully there are a lot of workaround.
But before a little precision all the Ati all in wonder have a hardware compression chipset on them. Even if sometimes it stinks(rage pro based for example)

Ok fist let us take care of the Bad tv flickering.
Here is the problem : AFAIK the matrox cards does not have an internal buffer for video. This means that when you connect an atenna to your input and plug a tv to the output the card will first conform the video to your monitor (ie from NTSC -> 1024x768 72hz for example) and then conform teh content of your screen for a tv output (1024x768 72hz ->ntsc)
This is done by interpolating points and desinterlieving and then doing the contrary. Of course you might(in fact will in most case) loose quite a lot of info by doing so.
The best thing you can do is to try to sync your monitor with your TV (for ntsc 60hz 90hz 120hz of vertical scan, for pal 50hz 75hz or 100hz). A lot of the flickering and post interleaving artefacts should disapear.

That was for visual defaults on tv output.
Now for the capture :
First thing to do is to download the pinacle PCTV drivers. Then you just install what is in the rep disk or disk1 choose custom and un check vidcap, teletext, tvprog etc...
Normally there should be only unremovable things left.
When asked to install indeo codecs answer yes even if you already own them.
Normally this will enable you to capture video using whatever codec you like.
If need be download and install Indeo 5.1x codecs.

Ok now in virtualdub (yes I really recomand using virtualdub for capture) set the video source to yuv9 indeo raw.
Then set your your frame rate properly according to your region (25 for pal/secam 29.97 for ntsc).
in the capture choose indeo 5.1x set compression to 96% and if you have a powerfull cpu uncheck fast compression.

Then you have 2 choices :
First you are capturing a standard vhs and/or you do not need the best quality then choose the cif resolution that fits with your standard (352x288 for pal 352x240 for ntsc)
Second you need quality and your video source is clean (Svhs, dv, hi8 ....) then choose a resolution well suported by your video card (640x480 is quite good in fact).

Launch the capture.
Normally the quality should be near perfect for a reasonable size. Of course you are free to try other codecs. (If you find one better than indeo in term of quality/cpu pelase tell me).

One last thing on some video cards if you have a big interleaved effect then take your avi in virtual dub again and apply the filter deinterleave. It is working great.

I have tested this method on both an ati AIW 128 and a Matrox Marvell G400, and it works fine.

The best I can do with my K7-500Mhz/384MO ram/U2WSCSI dirves is to capture in 640x480 but believe me the result is astounding on my ATI and on the G400 of a friend it is not bad either.

Hope this will help you
Kha

P.S : I am french so my english can be quite ackward. If something is unclear do not hesitate to ask.