Ordered a new capture card

[Flying dutchman]

I paid Eu 76,- for the 600-model ("Händlerpreis" - our company is bassed in Hannover). Getting the -400 model would have taken a week longer and I was impatient... So far I'm very happy with it.

Unfortunately the Cinergy WDM capture drivers don't work with AVI_IO 3.19 under Windows 2000 (It shows up as WDM capture device but doesn't actually capture) so it's going to be rather important that CinergyTV keeps lip-synchronicity. I haven't thoroughly tested CTV yet but so far it makes a good impression. Still I'll write to Markus Zingg just to ask if there's an update of Avi_io - it doesn't hurt to have two working options.

[Indiana]

There's always that WDM->VFW wrapper thing...

P.S.: 76€ sure is a nice price for the card.

[Flying dutchman]

The WDM<->VFW wrapper doesn't work on Windows 2000 with Avi_IO. When I press the record button simply nothing happens. Markus just sent me version 3.24, I'll see if that makes a difference. Thanks Markus - great service!

[areia]

Just one curiousity: any of you guys, with this new capture card have a dual cpu setup? One of the things that drive me mad about matrox is being unable to capture using the power of both my cpus, with the driver combo that works under xp the capture only takes power from one! If I remember well, only under nt the drivers were smp capable.

[Indiana]

No dual CPU here, so I can't comment on that. It's not listed on the specs page, so that seems to hint that it's not supported...

But then you can freely choose your codec for capturing - that takes the burden on the codec manufacturers - just find a compression codec that supports dual CPU and you should be fine.
Does DivX5 support dual CPUs, btw? (And by "support" of course I mean " takes full advantage of" and not a mere "doesnt crash")

[Marshmallowman]

just having a second CPU to do all the other stuff while the first is doing the capturing/compression should help a lot in itself.

I am no expert ..but could you do something like frame serveing it to a second compression process work?

[Flying dutchman]

No idea, but even with my limited CPU power (celeron 900) I don't run into CPU performance problems. Full-frame Huffyuv, Picvideo, even realtime Mpeg-2 recording (WinDVR) works.

I believe my fantastic motherboard (ASUS CUSL2-C) more than makes up for the lack of CPU power. It has endless PCI bandwidth. I've got a second PC with VIA chipset and similar CPU and I have nothing but trouble with it (clicking audio, frame drops, green flashes etc).

[DrP]

A question on WinDVR, can you get it to capture and keep the content interlaced? From what I can tell all I can get is a blurr / merge of the two fields - ie its progressive on playback with all the resulting ghosty time images that result from this type of de-interlacing.

I am using powerdvd to play the files back and can confirm that its playing in weave mode *ie interlaced mode* as it shows mpeg2 files I generate via tmpgenc as real interlaced video.

[Flying dutchman]

AFAIK, WinDVR records the contents interlaced if you choose a X * 576 resolution but deinterlaces them on the fly during playback. I'll check that out, though.

[Ghydda]

Dual CPU captures

Since nobody answered areia's question on the dual CPU captures I will give it a shot. I can confirm that the DivX v5.02 codec in fact does utilize both CPU's when capturing. And no, so far it's not just no-crash compatible. It works. Although I might add I haven't had time to test this intensively yet but I hope I'll get to it soon. Maybe even in this weekend. AFAIK it's also the only codec able to do SMP and since it's the most resource demanding codec out there it seems appropriate that this would be the one to feature SMP support.
So far I'm pleased with the card and I hope my first impression is a lasting one. Only time will tell.

Cheers
Ghydda

[landrover]

I found out that WinDVR records it´s MPEGs in 4GB chunks. Haven´t seen if it´s possible to turn that off, though...

landrover

[funky-d-munky]

What about this card.

http://www.overclockersonline.com/?page=articles&num=169

It's made by Hercules. This model has only mono and no remote but is $55. There is a model with stereo and remote for a little more.
Reviewer uses virtual dub with divx5 no prob. Card also sports native mpeg 1,2 capture, and time-shift recording.
funky

[landrover]

I'm back in the saddle again. Seen my specs? I wonder why I still can't capture full size Huff or uncompressed. I can reach just over 22 fps in full res or just below 25 fps in 480x576. Until my recent crash I thought the single 80GB Maxtor drive at 5400RPM
wasn't quite up to the job, but with this RAID O rig it should be a piece of cake, shouldn't it? Any clues?

landrover

b.t.w. I haven't done a write test yet, but a quick read test on the RAID O array returned 62MB per second.

[Indiana]

Windows XP Home Edition (Dutch)

I think your problem might lie here. I didn't have that much luck with full-res capturing in WinXP, either - although that was mostly true for the Hauppauge, and I don't have major problems with the Cinergy in XP, it still performs better in Win2k.
Win2k is less critical than XP when high bandwidth applications are the main use.

[landrover]

Thanx

What a shame. Since the rebuild of the rig I have ditched the Matrox vidtools and therefore had no need for Win98 anymore.
It could have been a challenge what the Cinergy could achieve on a less resource-intensive OS.

landrover