New capture card!

[Peter B]

Someone e-mailed me this question and there maybe others that want to know.

The following capture resolutions are possible

88x72
128x96
160x120
176x144
240x176
240x180
320x240
352x240
352x288
640x240
640x288
640x480
704x576
720x240
720x288
720x480
720x576
Plus 768x576 and 80x60 (via 3rd party software)

Noteably missing are SVCD resolutions, 480x480 aND 480X576 whihc would have been useful. The FlyDS has a custom option, whihc I haven't tried yet.

TV system (see previous post for list of TV systems) and frame rates are selectable independent of resolution. In fact frame rates are a box where you fill in the rate you want, not a drop down box.

[DrP]

I considered one of these cards when they first were released as a replacement for my trusty Marvel G400. The initial release driver was woeful, the current download is just as bad. When I saw this thread pop up again, I tihought, hmm, I should dig that out and try the latest drivers......

Installing the latest driver completely and uttterly disables all audio out from the card! No TV audio, no FM radio audio. The pre-mapped TV channels for Australia are totally wrong or at best broken. For instance, VHF 6 is on 175.25MHz. Due to some oddities with the Australian frequency allocations, channel 6 maps to channel 8 in the Windows WDM tuner panel. This is normal. Dialing up 6 shows the frequency of 175.25MHz. Only problem is that the station is not there! I have to tune manually down to 168.475MHz. Something is fubar.

The video quality from composite is quite nice. If only the tuner part would work too.

Why oh why can't the hardware makers get their act together. Either the hardware is complete crap or the drivers are. Not yet have I seen good clean, quiet video and _working_ stereo audio hardware, with fully functional drivers that are capable of actually operating the harware.

Ever tried to contact these guys for tech support? Prolink doesn't even have tech support, Hauppauge have support email, but never ever answer it (piped to /dev/nul no doubt), Pinnacle, well, may as well go find a brick wall to beat your head on, ATI? I think we have all been there!, Lifeview? HAH! I once managed to get onto the North American support, he emailed support for me, and guess what, they didn't even answer him!

The only card I've ever had decent support with is the Matrox, and its still the best analogue tuner card for capturing with IMO (as far as actually getting it to work (mostly work). Even then I had to regedit in the right TV frequencies for Australia.

How these yahoos are even allowed to operate is beyond me.

[Peter B]

Sounds like you may have another issue, hardware? Note after installing drivers you need to re-select audio as the aux from your sound card

I have excellent sound, nicam and F/M

None of the NZ channels are on the preselected numbers, but the scan sort of works. Doesn't pick up my satellite feed across the RF coaxial cable for some reason, but I can manually select it.

[DrP]

Its a problem within cx88vid.sys. Use the old resolution limited one from the CD and audio works, use the new one from the web site and audio doesn't work.

What driver are you using? Could you post a link to your cxx88vid.sys ?

[Peter B]

I am using version 2.0 which came on a CDR within the pack with a label saying updated software. The files weight in at 5.7MB which I can e-mail if you wish, pays to follow the installation guide and not let win2000/xp find the drivers it's self as well.

Just the cxx88vid.sys and other sys/ini files are just 250k which I can also e-mail if you want, note they have two different cxx88vid.sys files, one for XP and one for other O/Ss.

I would recommend the full files and complete uninstall, but if you have a modem, it may take a few minutes

[az]

The Terratec Cinergy 600 TV card is said to be good, with very good picture quality. It's not based on a Conexant/BrookTree chip, but on a Philips chip and Tuner, like most newer cards are.

It isn't available for the UK, though

AZ

[Indiana]

az, you can't know this since you were away for quite some time.
But there is a long thread here in this forum regarding the Cinergy cards and while the hardware seems fine and delivers good IQ, the capture app is still broken with sometimes spontaneous stops while grabbing.

The WDM drivers don't seem to be at fault since third party apps like iuVCR or VirtualVCR do work fine.

[DrP]

Peter,
I only had two CDs in the box, one for the drivers, one being a combo CD for drivers, the other being powerdirector. The CX driver on the CD is 2.0.67.0. This one lets audio work, but seems to have limited video resolution and no support for PAL with both fields (576). Trying to force a WDM capture with 576 gives an error.

I have installed the drivers by following the proceedure in the book and manually. In either case the no audio problem persists with the download drivers.

If your ISP gives you personal www space, could you upload just the drivers to there and let me know the url.

[DrP]

az,
The SAA7134 based cards give good video. I have used a flyvideo3000. Nice and quiet, no RFI at all. Only problem is (and this is the same experience for the terratec as I know someone who has a 600) no stereo audio. The WDM driver doesn't even let me set stereo audio. Click Stereo, go back and look and its mono. If I use 3rd party apps such as fly2000TV (or for the Terratec using the capture software supplied) I can force the card to stereo and it sounds good. Only problem is, I don't want to shell out more $ for a programs specifically to run a SAA7134 based card (or in the case of Terratec, using a buggy program)

[Peter B]

Try these

[DrP]

Peter B,
They are the same as the drivers I am using now, but I uninstalled the current ones and reinstalled with yours. No audio :-(

Since the audio works with the drivers on the CD but not the downloaded ones, I'm taking a punt the card isn't the problem.

[Marshmallowman]

I got stereo using the default flyvideo 3000 drivers and using ATI's mmc 8.1 for tv tuner/capture.

[DrP]

YAY! Finally I have audio. But what a job it was to get it. To summarize here's what I had to do.

a) Disconnect from internet ( I always do this anyway to avoid Windows downloading its own drivers)

b) remove all references to the CX capture devices from device manager

c) uninstall the prolink software

d) deleted cx*sys in \windows\system32\drivers

e) hunted down and killed all .inf .pnf files in \windows\inf with matching device IDs, or refs to CX88 devices

f) deleted appropriate directories under \windows\system32\reinstallbackups

g) moved all .cab files from \windows\driver cache\i386

h) restarted, did a normal install of the updated drivers from prolink.com.tw.

It seems that windows update has its own drivers for the CX88 and at some stage had downloaded them onto my PC. Even more annoyingly is that when you tell windows to specifically use driver xxx, all you are doing is telling it to reference a specific .inf file for the driver info. If windows can find a match for the actual driver file before it gets to searching in the same place as the .inf, it will use it instead of what you imagined you are specifically telling it to use. I did a double take just to make sure I wasn't telling it to also search in this area for the driver and I was definitely picking the last option of use this one.

Sigh. Atleast its working now, and even the channels tune properly.

Thanks Peter B for the drivers which started me on the long trek to discover the above proceedure.

[Peter B]

No problem, glad you have it working

[Flying dutchman]

What's this fly2000tv program? Can it be obtained separately from a TV card?