Ordered a new capture card

[Flying dutchman]

I tried to record a TV program with Avi_io on New Year's eve. It is an ancient black-and-white movie that's called "dinner for one" and it's shown exactly once a year, on new year's eve. I use a Marvel G200 under Windows 2000 and I can only record through VFW-based programs such as Avi_io. I mostly use Avi_io to record analog video through the S-video input and it does so very reliably, I rarely ever record TV programs.

Though I can select all channels in PC-VCR, the channel I wanted to record turned out to be unreachable in Avi_io! The channel sequence in the "source" dialog of the capture module is completely different from the one in Matrox PC-VCR. Many channels were there twice, others were missing completely. And the sequence was completely garbled. In short, I couldn't record the movie and was extremely p###ed off. My Matrox has let me down once too often now.

I've just ordered a Terrate Cinergy 600. It's directshow based, comes with time-shifting software and alledgedly supports all codecs including divX. They claim the software can capture mpeg-1 and 2 in realtime. It also comes with a remote control and has a built-in FM tuner, and the capture chip has 9-bit resolution instead of the Marvel's 8 bit. I'll let you know about the results as soon as I've tested it. I do hope it copes with macrovision-protected tapes; my movie collection (VHS originals) shows some signs of degradation and I'd like to convert them to VCD.

[Brian Ellis]

FD

Congratulations on ditching a dinosaur! I still use my Marvel G200, but only as a simple graphics card in one of my older computers: the BOB is collecting dust in a cupboard. It was good in its day, but its day, and the Marvel concept, was past years ago.

I hope your Cinergy does what you want. Let us know how you get on with it.

I understand what you say about VHS: I am in the same boat. I've got over 200 and half of them are worth keeping. Since the Marvel era, I've been capturing them via a Canopus ADVC-100 analogue<>DV bridge, which does the job admirably with zero hassle and with MV protection disabled. I do this in between real work, usually rendering to DVD-compliant MPEG2 overnight. I think I've done about 20 now. I usually put two short documentaries onto a single DVD. As for 3 hour + blockbusters, the quality loss is negligible, taking into account the relatively poor quality of VHS in the first place. I'm also trying to clear the backlog of capturing/editing/DVD-ing about 100 VHS-C tapes dating back into the 80s, as well as 30-odd DVD ones. Got my work cut out for a few days!

[keithm]

I'm using an ATI radeon for capture and it's a quick card but the realtime Mpeg2 is a bit dissapointing, it's not a patch on rendered output. I've gone back to using picvideo and Ulead's mediastudio pro with the latest mpeg.now patches. Interestingly, if I use a high bitrate (8000kbs) realtime mpeg is fine. But: I can get better quality at 3700kbs when rendering. So: I shall watch this thread with intrest to see how you go on!

[landrover]

I've got my Cinergy 600 for two weeks now, and I am reasonably happy so far. Only yesterday I found out that I could only install the included WinDVR (by Intervideo) when running the setup file in Win98 Compatibility mode. It does however capture realtime MPEG-2 in excellent quality with my rig. Tonight when I get home it should have recorded two scheduled TV-shows. I find it a bit annoying that you can only slightly modify the list of TV-channels that WinDVR's wizard finds. For example, it stores lots of channels which give only noise or garbled picture, but you can't delete those channels.

The Cinergy also comes with it's own capture software, which is very user friendly. Here you can capture AVI with a suitable 3rd party codec like DivX (or Huff if you want to edit it later). This app records audio with the Cinergy card itself, instead of a separate audio card, which puts video and audio in PERFECT sync.
Not completely satified here either: some DivX recordings just stopped for no apparent reason. Maybe CPU overload or something. The created AVI is perfectly useable, but what use does it have if the you can't see the end of the program you wanted to record? With a heavy load OS like WinXP I think I should invest in some 1st class additional RAM.

Terratec does not (yet?) have extensive online support for the Cinergy cards. There's no users forum and there's no FAQ yet (besides a German FAQ for the Cinergy 400).

Nonetheless I am so happy with the results of two weeks experimenting that I am considering to remove the Matrox Vidtools and just use the Marvel with it's excellent TV-out as a graphics card in conjunction with the most recent drivers.

I'll continue sharing my experiences

landrover

[Flying dutchman]

Hoi Landrover,

glad to hear you're positive about the card.

Can you find out for me if your realtime mpeg-2 files are I-frame only or if they are "true" I-B-P format?

Background info: "I-frame only" mpeg files are very similar to MJPG, every frame is compressed individually which costs little CPU power but isn't very suitable for DVD players. "i-b-p" is much more sophisticated and compresses better.

[landrover]

Hallo daar, Flying Dutchman

WinDVR has 3 presets for MPEG-2 capturing: "good" (CIF), "better" (352x576) and best (full res), plus you can choose "aangepast" (for non-Dutch MURCers: "custom"), which brings you to a new menu in which you can create and manage your own profiles. I'll check if you can select I-frame mode here.

landrover

[TnT]

I guess I'll probably end up being the last to use the ol' Marvel G200. Once I get the dough I'm going to be building a completely new mini-PC multimedia system and finally get a new card, HDTV hopefully.

Anyways, thanks for all the great support you gave other Marvel G200 users, like myself. Good luck with the new card.

Thien

[landrover]

WinDVR´s settings menue doesn´t speak about I-frames, but you can adjust GOP size in your created profile. Setting the GOP to "1" should give I-frames only. I haven´t tried it out yet, though... I guess I still prefer HuffYUV over I-frame MPEG for editing purposes.

landrover

[funky-d-munky]

Hope you like your new card. But why didn't you just tape the program and capture it later?

[Flying dutchman]

If I had known about this problem, yes I would have taped it.
But VHS has such lousy bandwidth that it isn't really worthwhile to make SVCD's from it. I wanted to record it directly off the cable and make an SVCD of it.

[Ghydda]

Hi FD

I would very much appriciate if you could keep us all posted on your findings and discoveries on the capture card. have been looking for a new capture card with DirectShow support for a long time, but so far none I have found matches my needs. Fortunately the Cinergy 600 looks promising, so if you guys could keep this thread updated it would help me a lot.

Cheers
Ghydda

[areia]

Well, it seems that the of Matrox analog capture cards are almost gone. I still have my G400/RRG combo and it works under win XP, but with the limitations most of you know. Also, the lack of driver support from matrox left us with some obsolete drivers, if we want to be able to install video tools. I'm getting a bit tired of tweaking and I've also been thinking about a new capture card. Probably will keep G400 for it's good tv-out, however, I don't know about the quality of that feature in other cards, maybe some of you could give your impressions. About the new capture card, the Cinergy 600 seems a good choice. Would like to leave a few questions:
- How good is colour quality/fidelity when capturing with Cinergy 600? Already had some bad experiences with non-matrox cards.
- Any experience with dual rigs? In that case, do the drivers perform well?
- Is there already any linux support? I'd like to think that one of these days I could move from this crap OS, just sick of it...
A good year to everybody

[Technoid]

I have a pinnacle PCTV that is actualy enough for me for the moment and now that I have got my Sony DRU-500A DVD burner I'm going to start converting some of my VHS to DVD :-)

[DrP]

I have a flyvideo card thats also based on the SAA7134 (same as the 600). The video quality is great and the board has 0 noise. Even the onboard tuner shows no noise. Thats something of an achievement these days. Odd thing is, I can't get it to give me full size (720 x 576) at 25fps. Always chokes and gives around 23fps. Seems like a PCI bus bandwidth problem, but I've had my old faithful marvel G400 working on this machine just fine, and also any number of generic BT8x8 cards too.

Wouldn't mind know what mobo / chipset you are running there, Flying dutchman.

[landrover]

I´m reaching the point to get a little p****d off about the fact that you can´t modify WinDVR´s tuner settings manually. Apart from the fact that the scan feature stores a lot of frequencies that contain nothing but noise, it also stores channels close to but not at their optimal frequencies, giving audio noise related to certain chroma levels in the video signal. Terratec´s own capture software lets you manipulate the tuner settings perfectly, so I hope future versions of WinDVR will also. The Cynergy hardware is capable of delivering perfect results. I´ll keep you informed.

landrover