Ordered a new capture card

[Flying dutchman]

Hoipipeloi Landrover,

I couldn't answer for a few days because my internet provider (wanadoo) had a total system crash.

I'll give the DV codec a try. On my slow system I could only capture with the "fastest" setting in the codec, giving a rather mediocre result. Of course I'd be best off by buying a bigger hard disk for capturing and stick to HuffYuv...

Too bad you have the same problem with MJPG as I do. I never made it as far as 90 minutes, but that might be a CPU power issue. CinergyTV comsumes up to 30% even if only displaying TV.
Have you tried other flavours of the codec? (Pegasus, Morgan, Mainconcept, LeadTools...). Come to think of it, I might try if a little overclocking improves capturing stability.

[landrover]

Overclocking rarely improves stability, as you well know...

No I haven't checked the other MJPEG codecs yet, but as you can see in this thread, I'll give 'em all an opportunity to pass (or flunk)the test. Except Morgan, because of the complicated uninstall issues.
Next on my list are MainConcept MJPEG and PICVideo lossless.

[Flying dutchman]

I was wondering, have we already broken the record for the longest thread? I hope the other MURC'ers don't mind my taking up so much storage space for a non-matrox product. Should we move this to a different forum? I just don't want to offend anybody.

[landrover]

I still think this discussion is in the right spot. Firstly, since lots of MURCers do not work (exclusively) with Matrox products anymore, but most certainly are from Matrox origin. And secondly, because what we are discussing is not strictly constrained to Terratec´s Cynergy cards, but to many WDM based tuner/capture cards on the market today.

[landrover]

I´m in a very bad mood right now. Tonight I wanted to capture a movie for my girlfriend. No experimenting, just capture with the settings that worked so perfectly earlier this week, using the Mainconcept DVcodec.
I don´t really think this is codec related anymore and I doubt if I still have to go down the path of trying out every possible codec.
I started the capture manually, no scheduling this time, and the first 45 minutes went fine. Sometime around then, capturing suddenly stopped. Restarted capturing and it stopped again, after about 4 seconds. Restarted and it ran for 20 minutes, then stopped again. Restarted again and then it went on past the end of the movie. Stopped the capture manually.
Opened up my editing app to join the files to one DV-AVI for playback sometime later this week. Found out that the last 20 minute file featured horrendous audio noise. Absolutely unusable.
So the result is no movie.
I´m beginning to think the guys at Terratec still have some work to do to get this all working the way it should.

[Flying dutchman]

I'm sorry to hear that - it confirms my own experiences so far. The only things that seem to capture rock solid (touch wood) are HuffYuv and WinDVR. Have you ever tried VirtualVCR? It's WDM based and freeware.

Note: this _might_ also be a Macrovision issue where they simply set the copy protection detection scheme too sensitive.


Update:

I did a google search for newsgroup forums with the search text "terratec cinergy problem". I found several postings reporting the same instability while recording. A user claimed that previous versions of the Philips driver (prior to 1.4) didn't have the problem.

[landrover]

Hi Dutchman,

No, I haven't tried VirtualVCR (or was it FreeVCR), but I will, although I doubt that it will improve things, because I think the problem lies somewhere in the drivers, rather than in the capture software. Correct me if you think I'm misjudging that situation...

Indiana, what's your experience on this reliability issue?

[Flying dutchman]

Just found out something interesting.

I noticed that CPU utilization during capturing shows a cyclical behaviour, reaching a peak of 60% every 10 seconds and then falling again to 30%.

The same is true while just watching TV: CPU utilization is cyclical. The peaks are as high as 33%, the valleys as deep as 0%. Now isn't that weird? What is taking up so much CPU power?

I've found out that if you uncheck the "teletext" checkbox in Cinergy TV, this behaviour is gone, and CPU utilization stays flat!

It appears that the application is cyclically storing the videotext pages even while capturing! Now isn't that interesting? I wonder if the problem is gone now? At least I save 30% CPU utilization...

[landrover]

That's very interesting. I'll definately give it a go with teletext switched off.

[areia]

Thanks Ghydda for your reply, I've been very busy lately, hope to have a few days to follow this thread before "diving" again. Did you manage to find the cause of your bsod? Sorry to hear about it, bad news for me too, later driver versions may solve all these problems, let's expect cinergy's support is paying attention to this thread, did anyone told them? It's a pity that avi_io is not being used, looks that cinergy's application is fine since you are testing with it. Remember that someone said that with avi_io the max capture size was cif, isn't it caused by wdm drivers? Vfw drivers don't do have that limitation, doesn't avi-io recognizes cinergy's vfw driver? It seems to me that you guys are suffering from driver issues, I'd suggest you to identify your driver version so we could figure out the capabilities/bugs of each version, in order to choose the best. My Cinergy 600 is waiting for me, one of these days I'll pick it, despite what has been said here it still seems to me a good piece of hardware. Good luke with your testing, hope to join you soon

[landrover]

There are only two driver versions around at the moment, the official driver that comes packed with the card and a beta driver, which is available at Terratec´s beta corner. I was the one who stated that I couldn´t capture at resolutions above CIF with AVI_IO. But at the moment I can´t capture at all with AVI-IO and Cinergy. Added to that, cinergy capture driver for 3rd party apps is very basic and absolutely not user-friendly.

[Indiana]

Originally posted by landrover

Indiana, what's your experience on this reliability issue?

I did encounter it once as stated somewhere above I got a sudden stop when trying a scheduled capture - so I don't think this is related to CPU-power.
The last few captures I did with realtime DivX compression were fine, though. Even get 25 fps in the fps counter since some time - I don't know for sure what changed this, but since the only thing I did was disabling some Mobo onboard features that I don't use, maybe it's more of an IRQ-problem. Might also explain why I have less problems since my mainboard supports APIC.

[landrover]

Indiana,

thanks for the info. I think the problem lies deeper than with IRQ´s alone. Since I provided the Cinergy with it´s own IRQ, I can capture 25fps with very few drops, but capturing will still stop at unpredictable times.

[Flying dutchman]

Update: for the first time I managed to capture 2:40 hrs of 480x576 MJPG (Morgan) after switching off videotext in CinergyTV. CPU power consumption is a smooth 40-50%. I wonder if Picvideo will be stable now?

[landrover]

I switched off teletext, but still notice a cycle in CPU utilisation, albeit a 4 or 5% lower. Haven't captured anything yet. You state your captured for 2 hours 40 minutes... did you stop the captue or did it stop by itself?