Ordered a new capture card

[Eddy]

On my PII 450, I can capture full res PAL in PICvideo MJPEG (Q18) or HuffYUV in full res with a Bt878 tuner card under XP. That is to a 3 year old 5400 RPM Maxtor disk. The OS is on a different disk. So your machine should be able to handle it. Try to stop unnecessary software and check DMA on the harddisk. And don't select any AVI/MPG files using explorer, because XP seems to start reading them completely.

Eddy.

[landrover]

Thanks, Eddy, but with this Promise RAID-O array it isn´t even possible to turn DMA off. So the problem lies somewhere else. And of course, the OS is on another drive outside the RAID array, which is one of the basic laws in setting up an NLE system.

landrover

[Flying dutchman]

A Philips engineer (Volker Baumann, Philips semiconductors Hamburg) mentioned a registry hack in the current C't issue for getting the Cinergy to work better with VFW bsed programs such as Virtualdub, Avi_io etcetera. It is posted at www.virtualdub.org.

The VFW<->directshow wrapper erroneously enables preview and overlay simultaneously on the Philips chip. This registry patch disables preview but leaves overlay untouched. It is said to have some side effects for the directshow-based programs though. I haven't tried it out yet.


HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Cl ass\{4D36E96C-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\nnnn\Parameters\CapPreviewEnabled = DWORD:00000000

Note: the "nnnn" is a 4-digit number and depends on your system.

[Marshmallowman]

cool, I will try the registry fix Flying D, It would be great if it works, I have only been ably to capture using the virtaulvcr or the software that came with my capture card. (flyvideo 3000)

The 3000 can use the same WDM cap driver that comes with cynergy 400/600 but you lose the remote control if you use them.

Would be great of I can AVI_IO or virtual dub to work

[landrover]

I can use AVI_IO with the Cinergy, with the restriction that I can´t capture larger than 352x288. Above that AVI-IO just doesn´t respond. Maybe the reg-hack would fix this but I´m a bit reluctant about the side effects for Direct Show apps on my once again healthy system.
FD, what framerate can you reach in Cinergy´s TV-software?
And you have cracking noise in some of WinDVR´s channels?

landrover

[Flying dutchman]

I can easily capture 720x576 full-frame HuffYuv and Picvideo in Cinergy TV without any frame drops. My video hard disk is a Maxtor 40 gb, 7200 rpm running @ UDMA-33, the board is a Asus CUSL2-C with a Celeron 900, 100 MHz bus clock, 512 mb ram.

Yes I have poor sound in some WinDVR channels but that's because of the inaccurate tuning in WinDVR. I hope WinDVR 3 will fix that.

I have one problem (?) in CinergyTV: Yesterday I was capturing a film, I did it manually by pressing "rec" in Cinergy TV, not with the scheduler. It captured fine for 30 minutes then stopped spontaneously so the recording was incomplete! I hadn't set a time limit in CinergyTV so that can't have been the cause. The resulting file was 5 gb in size. Any ideas? I'd like to record "Babylon 5, the beginning" from TV tonight which lasts 2 hours.

[landrover]

Yes, like I stated in an earlier post in this thread I´ve had several occasions where the capture stopped for no apparent reason. Are timer controlled captures safer than manually controlled captures in your experience?

...gotta find out what´s causing the frame drops....

landrover

[Flying dutchman]

Bad luck again. I tried to tape "Babylon 5- the beginning" yesterday. I set the scheduler to record from 20:55-22:55 and to shutdown the computer afterwards. CinergyTV was set to 480x576 resolution using Picvideo codec at quality 19. The video hard disk was empty (thus: absolutely unfragmented) and had 38 gb free NTFS capacity.

Next morning I found the PC still on to my surprise. It must have either re-booted or logged-off the current user, because the screen showed the login dialog and I had to type in my password. Next thing that happens is I see a Terratec dialog with a progress bar telling me the PC will be shutdown in 10 seconds and I must press "cancel" if I want to keep working with the PC. I did so. It appears CinergyTV is still running but not recording. The produced AVI file is 8,3 GB but won't play. It turns out the first 128 kb of the file consists of zeroes so the file is unusable. What the heck has happened here?

[landrover]

Hey Dutchy,

Did you have a VCR as back up? I'm hoping Cinergy will record "Love at first bite" this afternoon (for my Vampire Movie collection), but after reading your post I'm not so sure that I'll be happy tonight....
Looks like we're gonna have to push the guys at Terratec a little...

[Flying dutchman]

I already sent them a bug report.
My next attempt will be to NOT let the scheduler switch off the PC. Maybe it did so while the CinergyTV software was still busy.

[landrover]

Do you use the official or the beta drivers?

[Flying dutchman]

The official. Their FTP server seems to be down (ftp.terratec.net) or do you have a different address for it?

[landrover]

If it stays down, I could send it by e-mail, though I don't know if it solves these strange problems.

[Indiana]

this adress did work when I tested it about 5 minutes ago.

[landrover]

I don´t know if it´s the beta drivers, but my capture was succesfull, and I ended up with a perfect 17GB 352x288 HuffYUV encoded AVI. So it´s certainly worth the try.