New capture card!

[az]

Thanks Indiana and DrP, wasn't aware of the issues
But who captures with the default aps anyway? I wouldn't TOUCH WinTV 2000 if I don't have to.

AZ

[Peter B]

Here is a link to fly2000tv, I have just downloaded and yet to try it but it looks interesting

http://auzol.narod.ru/

[DrP]

Fly2000TV is a bit rough at times, it still needs work. The good thing is, the author will answer emails and will take suggestions onboard.

Digital TV is making a slow but steady roll out in Australia. Some time in 2004, it will make it to my town. Hopefully, there will be a DVB-t compatible PC card for Australia's special flavour of DVB-t. Then no more analogue capture for me...... but no doubt a whole new set of headaches getting the stream capture stable.

[Peter B]

You are lucky to be getting digital TV, I think our local road map is planned for about 2005. We do have a "digital" signal from a satellite feed from Sky subscriber TV, but it is only a analog signal digitised for transmission purposes, definately not HDTV.

In fact live broadcast sports are usually very poor quality, I have a SVGA projector set at about 80" from a component and S-Video inputs and you can really see a lot of blockiness on things like Super 12 Rugby matches. They must be compressing it from the source to save bandwidth I guess? It will be a while before Digital broadcasts and HDTV meet I suspect.

[DrP]

It seems that the networks here are skimping on bandwidth or doing a real crappo job of compressing the video. I am seeing compression artifacts on high motion and occasionally low motion (ringing on edges as well as Q blocking) on FTA analogue. I'd be ashamed to put my name to a broadcast that has such obvious technical faults. I have a feeling that the artifacts will be there in a pure digital environment too. I'm more interested in digital to get rid of analogue reception problems. A station here is on the same frequency as another station 800km away or so. There has been constant interferrence from that remote transmitter for years now. Digital would cure that in a flash.

[Peter B]

Maybe or maybe not, as mentioned I have a "digital" satellite decoder, however, it has only analogue outputs, composite, S-video and scart (component out is suposedly possible from the scart socket, however, the service provider does not have the suitable cable/plug! and I can find no one else that sells them locally).

It will all depend on the digital decoder "box" they provide, they usually try and skimp on these units as they sell/rent/give away theses cheap and make money from the subscription, so they want to keep start up cost down.

[DrP]

Hmmm, has anyone else noticed the CX based PlayTVHD seems to be de-interlacing video itself at times? I'm certainly seeing that here. Capture same footage with another card (BT878, Matrox G400 etc) and its interlaced, capture with CX and its not.

[paulw]

I bought one the other week. I seem to remember a check box to enable it..

[Peter B]

There is a deinterlace filter in the capture dialog box, this can be checked or unchecked. I have noticed when capturing full res (720x576) it still appears to be interlaced if this is on or not, though more pronouced if it is off. So it appears to do some sort of deinterlacing anyway. I assumed it was to be used when capturing lower resolutions. I haven't really examined very closely.

[DrP]

I think I might have a rogue DS filter on here somewhere. Might just erase this box and start again. Its probably time to do it anyway.

Which capture dialogue are you referring to PeterB?

[Peter B]

To be honest I haven't done much yet, my system is a bit flaky, I have had windows XP and 2000 installed for over 8 months, I usually reinstall at least every 4 months, as I have a tendancy to install a lot of software and experiment a lot! So it is bit crowded and a number of things don't work. As usuall I have a couple of projects that I want to finish first and capturing video has not been high on the list. I also plan to buy a new M/B processor in the next few weeks and rebuild three PCs for different purposes.

So far I have only done two major captures and I have used YUV2 @ 720x576 for both. I plan to capture 100 minutes today and will use 352x288 as it is destined for VCD and I don't thing my 120GB HD will be able to fit that length at full res. (although I have two identical 120GB drives and a raid card they are not striped yet, part of the plans above). Most of the third party software I have yet to get fully working, but as mentioned it is not currently a priority. I have looked at FlyDS which worked at first but doesn't now (probabaly added to many others) IuVCR looks OK, Fly2000TV doesn't seem to work at all for me, but I haven't looked at it at all really, Showshifter I installed but they have not e-mailed me a trial code and it screwed up the PlayTV software and caused the crossbar to continually switch channels, so I have unistalled. Basically I have it working for my current objectives and will work on the other features in a month or so.

[DrP]

Arg! It appears to be Windows doing the de-interlace. I've gone to the point of doing a clean WinXP (even tried W2k) with no patches, no SP installed, then fitting a BT787a card and using BTWincap drivers (to ensure there are no card makers de-interlace filters involved) and I still get the frame being de-interlaced. Even if I capture via good old VirtualDub / AVI_IO with a WDM based card (vfwwdm wrapper), it deinterlaces. The only way I can do a completely unmolested interlaced capture is by using a pure VFW driver.

Whatever is going on here sometimes screws up and I actually get interlaced output, usually in high motion scenes with affected programs. Other programs are completely unaffected and capture interlaced. I'm baffled!

Is anyone else seeing this?

[cuddles]

Peter

Have you tried a hard to capture (old) VHS tape to this device via the VCR RF output to this card.

Is so, does it reduce drops the way a DV (camcorder) bridge allows dropless capture from old tapes through firewire??

The reason for this question is I was wondering if this card may be a workaround the high drop rates from old tapes.

Cheers
Clem

[Peter B]

No I havn't, just used the composite input, one tape was pretty poor with some poor tracking and some lines appearing on the bottom, but I did not get any drops