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  1. Member
    Join Date
    May 2009
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    United States
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    As a temporary solution to my video woes (lack of correct cables), I am sending composite video from a gaming console to a DV-based camcorder and having it firewired to my PC.

    To my mild surprise, there does not, at this point, appear to be any good application out there one can use to display firewired video. I mean, if you play a video file, there it is, in Windows Media Player or KM Player or whatever, and it looks nice, and you can fullscreen it with no borders, and sometimes you can even apply filters to make it look nicer.

    But firewire video seems to be a different story. The closest I have come is WinDV. You can expand WinDV to fit the screen, which results in the video source taking up maybe 3/4ths of the screen (the rest being WinDV's menus), but the image WinDV gives me is horrendous! It's pretty much what I would expect to see if I did a single-pass, low-bitrate Divx encode of a 320x240 video. However, if I actually capture the firewired video and play the resulting DV video file back, it looks great - just what I would expect if I DV-encoded a 720x480 video source. Clearly, WinDV's preview window is not designed to show you pixel-for-pixel what the firewire port is actually getting. So it's not going to work.

    What does that leave? Scenalyzer and Windows' own info window in My Computer both give you a tiny video feed (I would say a quarter of full resolution, or less) and neither can be scaled at all. They are even less useful.

    I'm stumped. Anyone got a suggestion?
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  2. Member
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    May 2009
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    Search Comp PM
    Subsequently I found the following options:

    AMCap - This can scale the image, and, unlike WinDV, it displays the correct resolution and detail. However, since it displays each full (interlaced) frame rather than each field, the resulting video is an unwatchable, interlaced mess, at half the correct framerate.

    VirtualDub - This program never ceases to amaze me. I can scale it, the detail is all there, and it even deinterlaces automatically. However, this program also does something none of the others did: It pauses the video (for a few frames) every 1.0 seconds. (This has nothing to do with potential discrepancies between DV's 60fps and my monitor's refresh rate. No other DV displaying app I've tried has introduced these pauses, regardless of whether I'm using 60Hz.)

    Yeah, I guess this firewire solution is just not going to work. ;p
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  3. Member edDV's Avatar
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    Mar 2004
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    Northern California, USA
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    There is a way to get DV to display and deinterlace in VLC but I'm stuck at machine control disable with this new version.
    Recommends: Kiva.org - Loans that change lives.
    http://www.kiva.org/about
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  4. Member edDV's Avatar
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    Mar 2004
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    Northern California, USA
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    I've just about got VLC working from a DV stream for interlace display but it shuts off when I try deinterlace. Let me know if you want to help debug this. I'm trying to get the PureVideo GPU processor to deinterlace for computer display.

    Hint, start with Media Streaming. Select DV capture device, then experiment.

    Any help welcome.
    Recommends: Kiva.org - Loans that change lives.
    http://www.kiva.org/about
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