Marvel G450 eTV - A Buggy Capture Card?

[Christrati]

I'm not sure if I'm the only one who is having troubles with this card, so I figured I would post here and see if anyone else is having the same issue(s).

My main issue is with capturing straight to MPEG2. I get aliasing around images (mainly lines and circles) and this is especially noticeable in any animation. So, has anyone tried capturing some Saturday morning cartoons and see if it looks as good as the original?

Other issues I have is Win2k and capturing as well using YUY2. If I capture it raw in Win ME or using MJPEG, the capture quality is great! But if I try the same thing in Win2k, it is horrible. The main programs I'm using are VirtualDub and AVI_IO.

Here are my system specs and if anyone has some suggestions, they would be appreciated.

Motherboard: Abit BE6 lastest bios
Processor: 1 GHZ slot 1 100mhz bus
Memory: 256 megs CAS 2
Harddrives: Western Digital 20gig 7200rpm and Seagate external Ultra 160 18.2 gig 7200 rpm
DVD/CDRW: Sony DVD and Plextor 12/10/32A
Adaptec 29160 SCSI
Sound: Xwave 6000 (yamaha)
NIC: Netgear FA311
Monitor: MGC 770AA

You can reference my log with Matrox tech support with the following links:
http://forum.matrox.com/mgaforum/For...ML/003114.html

http://forum.matrox.com/mgaforum/For...ML/003046.html

http://forum.matrox.com/mgaforum/For...ML/004922.html

http://forum.matrox.com/mgaforum/For...ML/002321.html

http://forum.matrox.com/mgaforum/For...ML/003115.html

[Dr Mordrid]

Welcome to the world of realtime MPEG capture.

There is NO WAY that consumer realtime MPEG capture will equal either the offline encoding of YUY2/HuffYUV video or realtime capture formats that don't use temporal compression (the MPEG feature that makes its files so small). Realtime non-temporal formats: MJPeg etc.

It's not just Matrox's PC-VCR. The same would apply to any realtime MPEG capture software and a card capable of providing YUY2 or YUV signal for it to encode.

Ex's: VideoWave, MSPro, VideoStudio + Pinnacles cards, WinTV, G400-Marvel w/YUY2 patch...whatever.

IMHO the best way to use an eTV: in Win2K with the NTFS filesystem capturing with YUY2/HuffYUV compression to a big RAID. Then encode these clips with a good offline MPEG encoder.

Save the realtime MPEG's for CD use.

Dr. Mordrid



[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 09 May 2001).]

[KRSESQ]

What are you using for your NTSC monitor?

My video (Matrox MJPEG AVIs) always looks worse on my display monitor than on my TV. Aliasing all over the place.

My theory is that the TV "smudges out" the defects that show clearly on the computer monitor.

Kevin

[Dr Mordrid]

Your theory is correct. Don't ever judge video quality on the VGA. The display does indeed always look better on the TV than on the monitor.

Dr. Mordrid

[Mance]

I agree as well, I have a Sigma DVR that does realtime VBR MPG2 captures and I record S-Vid from a DV camcorder (I know, I know, fireware transfers and offline encoding would give me better quality, but I'm addicted to realtime). The files play back pretty well on a monitor, but when played back to the TV (using a Hollywood Plus), they look exactly like the original. (Only the slight artifacting in really high motion scenes gives away its computer origins.)

[Christrati]

Thanks for the replies,

As for the capture playback, I am outputing it to a TV and it looks distorted. But thanks to Matrox, they sent a registry that fixed the capture issue. Now it looks great!


Dr. Mordrid, I can see why you would steer away from straight MPEG2 capture, but you should see how great the quality is now! It's almost identical, at least on the TV. However, I still have distorted playback in Win2k. I'm going to change some bios settings and see if this helps out with my Win2k issue.

The best way I can describe the problem I was having is doing the following test:
1. Capture a short clip using YUY2 at 352x480 or higher res.
2. Open the file in VirtualDub and add a filter for "swap field".
3. Save the AVI file and play it back. That is the best way I can describe the issue I was having.

Chris