capturing with terratec cinergy 600tv

[panayiotis]

I try to capture avi uncompressed files with cinergy software.
The capture is perfect for the first 40 minutes(about 70GB),but then i have a lot of dropped frames.If i stop capturing and start again a new capture file ,the first 70GB are again perfect,but after that again the same problem.
Please users of terratec could you help me?

[Marshmallowman]

I am guessinG, but do you want to check your power saving features...eg screensaver, hdd power down(not the capture drive just any other drive connected)

Another possibilty is that part of your drive fragged, so as it fills up it gets to apoint where writing takes to long...so defrag

[mits]

Panagioti kalimera,
can your hard drive sustain the transfer rate required for uncompressed capturing? Usually the transfer rate drops while the heads of a hd move from the outer tarcks to the inner ones.
Are you using a raid0 configuration or just a standalone drive? Is it defragged as Marshmallowman has already mentioned ?
Have you tried to capture using either the picvideo codec at quality 20 or huffy codec and see what happens?

[Flying dutchman]

The Cinergy's capture software sucks. It's unstable on my system too. Have you tried a lossless codec such as HuffYuv instead of uncompressed capturing?


Try a different capture program such as Fly2000TV, it's much more stable.

[Marshmallowman]

The picvideo mjpeg is probably the best capture codec for a system that is hitting HDD bottlenecks.

Its CPU overhead and compression are pretty decent as well.

The latest WDM capture driver (3.20) from flyvideo(prime ) should be compatabile with your cinergy....I know the reverse is true, I have used a cinergy 600 wdm on my flyvideo 3000. But went back to fly's because the cinergy one was crap/(tuner especially) on my system

But please note, you may get some nasty device driver enumeration problems mixing the 2 driver sets..it took my a few days of registry cleaning/tweaking to clean out the cinergy stuff..

[landrover]

Do you use the latest driver package? Terratec released a new set a couple of weeks ago. Haven't tried capturing with it though, as I mostly use Showshifter.

[Flying dutchman]

I've just moved my Cinergy 600 card from a celeron-900 based board to a Celeron-2400 based i845 board. I also swapped the hard drive into the new machine which was straightforward:
I booted from the Windows XP CD, chose to re-install the operating system in the existing directory and let it do a [R]epair installation. Windows then re-recognized all the new hardware, keeping all software settings intact. Everything worked first time. I must admit Microsoft did an admirable job here.



Even though CPU usage never exceeded 70 % in the previous motherboard, It had consistently dropped one frame every 4 minutes. In the new mother board, it drops NO frames (using Fly2000TV) at 40% CPU usage which I'm quite happy with. I haven't tested the original Terratec TV application yet though, which used to stop recording for no reason in the old board.

Now that I no longer use the Marvel, I'm gonna need a "Macrovision hack" for the Cinergy because I have a whole carton full of original VHS movie tapes which I'd like to transfer to DVD. Any clues/links? No piracy intended.


ONe more thing. WinDVR 2 doesn't seem to be able to co-exist with WinDVD. Any clues about this?

[landrover]

I suggest you try out the latest driver package as it features a completely revised version of the Cynergy TV app. I´ll have a look at it´s capturing abilities this weekend.
I´ve got the feeling that the number of frame drops is related more to the software used than to the Cynergy 600. When using the pre-defined compression settings that come with Showshifter I also used to drop a frame every few minutes. But since I have created my own capture profile using PICvideo to compress YUY2 to MS-Dshow AVI, I can capture for hours and hours maintaining perfect A/V sync without losing one single frame.
Don´t know about WinDVR-2 vs WinDVD issues. I ditched the Cynergy´s bundled version of WinDVR because of it´s lousy frequency tuning capabilities and occasional A/V sync flaws.
Maybe a support request to InterVideo could shed some light on this, as it concerns their software.
Oh, and I haven´t had any MacroVision issues when capturing protected video (from VHS-tapes that I own b.t.w.) so I´m curious what error message the Cynergy card generates when encountering Macrovision protected content...

[landrover]

Pardon me, but here the F***k do those strange A´s come from?

[Jkun]

Landrover, did you have time to check the new version of the Cinergy App last weekend? Any improvement?

J-kun

[landrover]

Yes, I have. I did 2 captures. One on the fly, just by pressing the "record"-tab, which ran over 2 hours without any problems. The other was a timer scheduled recording, a 1 hour TV show, followed by automatic shutdown of the PC. No problems here either.
Profile for both captures was 704x576 PAL, YUY2 to PicVideo MJPEG, quality 19 or 20 (not sure). There were some frame drops, but not problematic, and A/V sync was perfect. In the next few days I´ll see what happens when using different codecs.
I´ll definately try out HuffYUV, Mainconcept DV and DivX 5.11

[Flying dutchman]

Hi Landrover,

I was abroad for a couple of weeks (Iran) so I missed much of this thread.
Have you had success capturing using Mainconcept DV codec? This particularly interests me, because the Cinergy's field order (upper field first) is wrong for DV.