Showshifter experiences?

[Flying dutchman]

Just wondering if anyone uses ShowShifter for capturing and what the experiences are.

I'm looking for a good replacement capture program for my Terratec Cinergy 600 /Philips SAA1734 based) that:


(1) is WDM based
(2) allows to tune the TV channels in Megahertz instead of channel numbers, because the TV channels in my town are on horribly crooked frequencies,
(3) Minimizes dropped frames and keeps lip synchronicity


If only Marcus Zingg developed an Avi_io for WDM...

[Marshmallowman]

have not used it, but some people rave about it, have been considering it myself.

[Sciascia]

Same here, I haven't used it, but I have heard some people rave about it. I am using an ATI card so being able to capture with WDM is nice. Supposedly it is pretty nice, I may get around to checking it out one of these days.

[DrP]

Flying dutchman, have you looked at fly2000tv? It can do the tuning you want and has basic scheduling in it. Haven't really looked at it in depth though.

[Indiana]

I'm having VERY good results with iuVCR and the Cinergy400.
Don't know about the frequency thing, though since I only used the automatic scan and this gave good results here.

[Flying dutchman]

Unfortunately, Iuvcr is dropping frames (both video and audio!) on my system which is very noticeable. Especially when recording from VHS. Recording from TV gives better results.

[DrP]

From when I tried the flyvideo3000 (Saa7134 based) and later on a borrowed cinergy 600, running it at 720 x 756 on a VIA mobo was not possible at 25FPS only ever got to around 23FPS (ye olde style PCI bus capacity). On the same hardware a generic BT card could do 720 x 576 25 FPS without trouble.

Initially I put this down to the via PCI problems, but even on an intel mobo 845PE etc, the SAA seems to drop frames. Don't know if this is adriver problem, or a PCI bus problem. In the same machines, ye olde Marvel G400 and numerous other cards all perform faultlessly.

[landrover]

I bought Showshifter about 3 or 4 weeks ago after trying it out. The trial version only works for 15 days, which is a bit short. Had I been able to try it out a bit longer, then I probably wouldn't have purchased a license. Now that I laid down the money, I decided I had to use it anyway and I'm reasonably happy. It's very user-friendly, if not idiot-proof and the standard DivX capture profiles give adequate results. It also comes with PicVideo, which hasn't been successfull (yet) on my system. The program is fairly CPU-intensive as it comes with it's own GUI and provides the user with TV watching, time-shifting, capturing, DVD viewing, audio CD support and even a picture viewer, most of which I don't use. Most capture profiles are based on 384x288 resolution for PAL capturing using the DivX (pro if you wish) codec, which results in quite adequate quality for watching your average TV program. I wouldn't use it for captures that require editing or are to be burned to DVD or CD. For that I use my Terratec Cinergy software and the HuffYUV codec.

[Flying dutchman]

Is capturing full-res Huffyuv not possible with showshifter?

[AndrewDV]

Hi ya,

I use ShowShifter on my HTPC. It works really well for an HTPC. You can capture Huffyuv then set ShowShifter to recompress using available codecs.

I am not sure you would want to use it as a video capture tool. Yes, it can do basic video capture. However, it does not have a lot of customization features (like AVI_IO).