Ordered a new capture card

[Flying dutchman]

I stopped it manually. But I rejoiced too early: My next attempt, using Picvideo, stopped again spontaneously after 8 gigabytes. The subsequent attempt with Morgan MJPG also aborted spontaneously, after 1:30 hours. Maybe I should have rebooted after the Picvideo failure, I dunno.

I'm testing VirtualVCR now. Unfortunately it suffers from the same problem as WinDVR: it is unable to tune the channels exactly.

By the way: The "beta" drivers from Terratec's FTP site contain exactly the same version of Philips' CAP7134.SYS as the official drivers (1.4.0.0).


Update:

I've found another interesting WDM capturing program (iuVCR) that even allows to set the frequencies for the individual channels. So no tuning problems at all! It's 25 Euro which is a bargain. Such a lot of testing to do...

VirtualVCR seems to work well. I'm currently capturing 704x576 Picvideo MJPG because that's the most critical and it's already near the 20 GB mark. I am going to let it capture till it smokes!
Its behaviour is impressive: I can even open the Explorer and browse the hard drives without additional frame drops. No way I could ever do that in CinergyTV.

Update 2:

I stopped the capturing manually at 35 GB. I am now convinced that the Philips drivers are basically OK but that CinergyTV sucks. VirtualVCR makes a good impression as does iuVCR but I'm not going to use CinergyTV for critical TV recordings.

[landrover]

I sincerely hope that Terratec will release a good working edition of CinergyTV soon. As only CinergyTV can use the onboard sound device of the card, to me experimenting with 3rd party capture apps feels a bit like abandoning one of the main features. Like using the Marvel card and bypassing the Zoran chip.

Does any of you guys have any experience with Showshifter?

[Flying dutchman]

I had thought that using the on-board Cinergy audio would automatically mean "no dropped frames" but unfortunately I was wrong there. CinergyTV consistently drops one frame every 200 seconds if I use the on-board audio. So that's not much of an advantage.

VirtualVCR captures reliably as far as I can tell; but it is a bit short in features. you could consider this to be the WDM equivalent of Avi_IO ....

I think I'm going to buy iuVCR. It has a neat user interface and supports firewire capturing; I particularly like its ability to set the tuner in MHz instead of channel numbers and the ability to compose your own program list. Also it has a builtin timer for automated captures. I think this proggie would be useful to Marvel G450 owners as well.

[prophet]

Marvel G450etv users are out of luck.. because of lack of WDM drivers, iuVCR works with WDM only..

iuVCR is very nice software, I'm using it with Pinnacle Rave card (878a chipset), I tried long captures at full PAL resolution, no dropped frames and perfect synch with audio!

[Flying dutchman]

Is the G450 still VFW based then? Oh boy.

[landrover]

I´ve tried iuVCR for a couple of days but I don´t plan on buying it (yet). I think it´s a nice tool but it won´t remember it´s settings very well. Most persistent flaw is that it will switch to mono audio too often. I also found that it changed the manually specified capture file path back to it´s default, just like CinergyTV and, in ancient times, PC-VCR for the Marvel. And I don´t like like that it uses the Windows Scheduler, because Scheduler will only work with user passwords defined.
I did manage to let it capture PicVideo for as long as I wanted, which in this case was almost 3 hours. So there is light at the end of the tunnel...

[henrikhovring]

Hi there
I orded the 400 today and I will make my pc ready for nle.
I have been very pleased by my earlier capture card RRS under win 98,but time has run from it.What system is best :XP or 2000??
Do you have an advise for mee,I will start with a new formatted hd.
Hope you can help mee

Henrik

[landrover]

It´s entirely up to you which OS you want to use, but unless you have a specific need for running apps that were designed for W2K, I´d go for XP, since it´s newer and more intensively supported by Microsoft, now and in the near future.
Try to put the card in a PCI slot where it doesn´t have to share an IRQ, it will perform better.

[henrikhovring]

Ill come back when it´srunning
Thank´s
Henrik

[Flying dutchman]

I do hope Terratec get their act together with CinergyTV. It's definitely unstable.

IUVCR does have a few shortcomings, but at least it lets me control the tuner accurately and doesn't crash. With VirtualVCR and WinDVR I couldn't accurately tune-in to the "Yorin" channel, it's on an awkward 754.25 MHz in my town.

[landrover]

I´m running a 15 day trial of Showshifter currently and apart from the fact that it doesn´t do real time deinterlacing, this seems very stable and appears to be a true multimedia solution. Until Terratec get their sh#t together, I think I´ll put some money in a Showshifter license.

[Flying dutchman]

Interesting! But can it tune in MHz instead of channel nrs?

[landrover]

Yep!

[Flying dutchman]

@Landrover:

Sorry to give this ole thread a bump to the top again but I've just noticed that Terratec released a new (non-beta) WDM software version on their ftp site. I wonder if it fixes the stability issues.

IUVcr was not the miracle cure I hoped for - it drops audio frames as well as video frames which is intolerable. Fly2000TV looks promising but I haven't had time to really test it and my 30-day trial license has now expired. Maybe I'll download it again, it looked really promising.

I've given Showshifter a short test this week but I find the user interface awkward to say the least. Talking about hate at first sight. Also I find I'm unable to produce AVI files right away - maybe I just don't find the right button, I dunno, but I find it hard to find my way through this moronic clickety-colory-kindergarden user interface. It produces files in a proprietary format which forces me to convert them (re-compression? Bah!) to AVI prior to being of any use to me. So far the program fails to convince me.

[keithm]

Just for info: I've started to use the old Pinnacle DC30 and it's stunning. Not only does it capture audio and video, it's very forgiving of poor quality vhs. In fact, I had a betamax tape of my band playing a gig in 1985: the sync was so bad I couldn't even copy it to vhs but the DC30 captured it and now it's burned to a DVD. Definately the best capture card mI have tried (and I've tried a lot!)