Ordered a new capture card

[Flying dutchman]

One (minor) disadvantage: The tuner is a little less sensitive than the Marvel's. Cable signal is rather lousy in my village.

[landrover]

Isn´t that just a software issue. WinDVR registers far more stations than actually available. Lots of stations appear twice or even 3 times in the list: just below it´s frequency, at it´s frequency, and just above it´s frequency. And even if the noise has some sort of chroma in it, WinDVR stores it as a station. I think the tuner is sensitive enough, the software should be more precise in what to store and what not.
Who will be the first to make it manually editable?

landrover

[Flying dutchman]

I entered the station frequencies manually in CinergyTV yet still many channels are noisy. The TV signal is simply lousy in my village (and I have 20 metres of cable from the PC to the outlet).

[areia]

I'm glad Cinergy 600 is correspondig to what has been expected from those around here who do analog capture. No more hassle with file system barriers, great! Landrover and Dutchman, what about the codecs that can be used? For me huf and divx are essential, capturing mpeg 1/2 in realtime is very usefull also, but we could still need those MS mpeg4 video codecs or compatibility with realproducer and that kind of little things that can solve small daily tasks. Thank you both for sharing your experiences, I'll check if I can get one of those things here in Portugal.

[DrP]

I've put my Flyvideo 3000 which is also a SAA7134 based card into an intel based mobo and it goes great now. I have to tell you, the Flyvideo is a good cheap card. The software that comes with it completely sucks, but I am using it with VirtualVCR (with the audio resample feature) and can capture hours and hours of full rate / size PAL TV as XVID and ADPCM audio at 354kbits without loss of audio sync. This SAA7134 seems like a nice little chippie as far as video Q goes.

[landrover]

Hi Areia

After reading your post I did a few quick tests on the Cynergy. (Shall we call this the CURC-form from now on?) Like stated earlier it will capture DivX and HuffYUV perfectly. That´s what it´s designed for, to capture AVI with genuine AVI-codecs.
Here comes the good part. I tried 3 versions of the MS Mpeg-4 codec: V1, V2 and V3. V1 and 2 worked! I was impressed by the image quality I had in 352x288 AVI encoded with MS Mpeg-4 V2.
With the V3 codec the application crashed, so with that one the Cinergy isn´t compatible.
I will install a software MJPEG codec (PICvideo or MainConcept) to see what results I can get with that.
It takes some fiddling with the settings in the Cinergy setup. The codec list show every codec installed on the system, but most of them will not work, just because they are not ment to capture AVI in realtime.
I have some less good news too. I don´t know about the Real Producer, but to my disappointment I discovered that the Cinergy is NOT compatible with Windows Media Encoder. And as it´s a Direct Show based capture card, I had expected that it would capture WMV.

landrover

[landrover]

Update:

I captured DV! The Cinergy let me capture straight to DV using the Mainconcept DV codec. Quality was excellent of course. Just didn´t reach 25fps framerate. Haven´t checked CPU utilization. It could be that my datarate to the large harddisk is too low, as it is with full frame HuffYUV. I´ll be getting a separate IDE (RAID) controller shortly. But for now, this was my surprise of the day!

landrover

[keithm]

Does the cinergy allow realtime mpeg2? I ask because some one mentioned the flyvideo 3000 uses the same chip, I went to their site and the flyvideo does mpeg1 and avi. Now: when I triid a Jetway capture card it did mpeg1 and mpeg2 but I couldn't get it to capture to Picvideo, or access the driver with a capture program that allowed segmented capture. I ask because until you buy one of these cards you don't know whether you can use other capture programs to access it's drivers.

I'm perhaps too fussy but having tried the jetway card (which may use the same chip) I found the realtime mpeg quality poor at low bitrates. I'm running an Athlon 2000xp so it isn't a lack of processor power: but, surely the quality depends on the software and the Jetway used Windvdr too

[landrover]

Intervideo's WinDVR is a realtime MPEG1 and 2 recording software, which comes bundled with the Cinergy. With your specs you should be able to capture full res Hight quality MPEG-2 with the card.
I'll be gone from this board for a few days. Right after my posting this morning I had a major system crash, causing my primary hard drive to fail. After my system's fixed, I will return.

landrover

[areia]

Well landrover, I also expected the card would capture wdm, but capturing mpeg4 is good! Also, I have some news, still don't know if they're good or not: terraTValue is a cheaper model which has a btt chip and support on linux; what's the chip found on cinergy? I'm also interested in linux 'cause I'm moving to it but don't have still a video capture solution. Good luke with your new system.

[Flying dutchman]

Areia:
The chip on the Cinergy is a Philips SAA7134 and it has a Philips FM1216/MK2 tuner. The Ct report says it works under Suse Linux 8.1 TV/Radio with the settings "saa7134" and "card=2" or "card=11" depending on the software version.

The Cinergy 600 costs 99 Euro, the -400 model (without FM radio) is only 65 Euro and has the same video properties and software. Talk about cheap...

[Flying dutchman]

I noticed some peculiarities: When using the Cinergy's sound hardware instead of the sound card, it only allows 32 kbps stereo capturing.

The CinergyTV software also installed some interesting video codecs: One is called "Ligos GoMotion Encoder" ...


Landrover:

I can capture realtime DV without frame drops using the following settings:

Mainconcept DV codec: "encoder fastest"
Audio: DV Audio - PAL (ACM)

The resulting file will probably be multiplexed as a type-2 (VFW) AVI, though, so I doubt if it is really useful.

[Indiana]

I also got the Cinergy400 some days ago and so far I'm happy with it. Picture quality is up from my previous BT878 based Hauppauge WintV, the possibility to capture audio through the card itself is great (finally no desync even in WinXP/Lego).
I don't really like the WinVCR software, but that doesn't really matter since I prefer capturing in HuffYUV / PicVideo MJPEG for later editing (cutting out the advertisements, etc.) anyways.
And with my AthlonXP2600+ finally even high quality DivX realtime grabs have become possible.

Yes, the Cinergy "on-Card" audio-capture is only 32KHz, but I guess that's beyond at least the capabilities of the normal TV antenna audio signal anyways...

[Flying dutchman]

Grüß Dich Indiana,

You're right of course about the sampling frequency, but I'd also like to capture some of my SVHS tapes and convert them to SVCD/DVD which needs a sampling rate of 44.1/48 KHz. I'd like to use the analog audio input of the card for that. Of course I have the choice of either re-sampling the audio or using the sound card for audio input but the first option degrades audio quality somewhat and the latter one doesn't guarantee lip-synchronicity. But for 99 little Euros retail price for the -600 model (I even pay less) , I'm thrilled with it!

[Indiana]

When I capture from higher quality sources like SVHS tapes, I do capture the audio through the inputs of my 6Fire 24/96. With the Hauppauge WinTV I didn't have video/audio desync problems with this approach as long as I used Win2k and Hauppauges VFW drivers. In WinXP I never managed to get real sync even for short captures, though
I still have to test this issue with the Cinergy, but I'm quite confident that it will work at least in Win2k, since it already worked before with the Hauppauge, giving perfect sync even for very long captures (>4 hours).

BTW, I shortly considered taking the 600 model, but then I remembered that in all the long time I had the Hauppauge WinTV radio I NEVER actually used the Radio part of it... So I took the Cinergy400 that is exactly the same as the Cinergy 600 only without radio tuner, even the remote control is included. Cost of this is even lower at about 65€ (this is what I paid).