Win2K video capture

[Andys]

The System:

Win 2K
1.4 Athlon
Asus A7A266 DDR MOBO
ASUS AGP-V7700 GTS 64mb NVIDIA GeFORCE 2
512 DDR RAM
2 x 40 GB ultra ATA/100 DRIVES

The Question:
I've been trying to do full screen capture @ 30FPS.
This always results in about 60% dropped frame.
I can capture 320 x 240 @ 30 fps with good quality and no dropped frames.
I've tried many programs and codecs including
Premier, virtual Dub, and the Asus LIVE capture Utility.

I have read that I will get better performance in Win 98.
I am at the point of setting up a dual boot system and doing all of my video capture in 98.

Can someone detail out what capture scenario would provide the absolute best quality with the system I have. 2000 or 98
and, what drivers/capture utilities will I need.
how do VFW and WDM play into this.

I am a little confused.
Thanks

[Shabubu]

Win2k is a better os for capture as it makes more efficient use of hardware, it's just it can be finickity to set up. Firstly have one of your HD's as a capture drive, format it with NTFS and make sure UDMA is enabled.

Next if your capping with vdub or AVI_IO then make sure you have VFW capture drivers installed (otherwise your video will be put from WDM driver->VFW Wrapper-> Cap program, this is slow.

Make sure you cap in YUY2 colour space, to picvideo or huffyuv. People say that you should cap fullscreen, you don't actually need to (TV signals are fuzzy in the horizontal direction), just cap at 352-400 x 480 (or 576 if your PAL). The capped file can then be deinterlaced and resized in vdub, then framserved to your encoder of choice. (if you want to save space you can also enable the 2:1 vertical reduction option in vdub when capturing, this will get all the scanlines and do the reduction before saving, saving a load of HD space).

Don't cap audio to anything but PCM, use 44100 16bit stereo (mono if your source is mono).

Hpoe that helps

[Andys]

Thanks for the quick response!
I have a few more comments and questions. . .
The Asus manual that came with my video card actually states that you will achieve better performance in 98 as apposed to 2000.?
The outside of the box states full screen capture (720 by ?) I dont have it front of me now) @ 30fps WIN 98 only.?
Of course I would rather use WIN 2K.
What about uiVCR. This is supposed to be written for Win2K.

[stanwebber]

virtualdub & avi_io both communicate with hardware via the vfw architecture. win2k/xp only supports wdm drivers so you will always be capturing via the microsoft wdmvfw mapper which is buggy as hell(forget about capturing both fields). dual-boot win98se or try iuvcr(see tools section left). i've responded to this same question 3times in the same day. there should be an faq

[homerpez]

Question, then...

I'm on Windows XP now (was 2000), I have an AIW Radeon board, which seems to de-interlace 640x480 perfectly for MPEG-2. Howeverm since there is no MMC capture program yet for Windows XP (and dropping frames is fatal anyway), I want to use VirtualDub to capture.

I managed to get 640x480 capture working, I used the Divx 4.2 codec (bitrate cranked, set to "fastest&quot, and PCM for audio (faster than mp3). However, I still haven't defeated the Interlace problem in Virtualdub.

You say with WDM drivers, "forget about capturing both fields". Why? ATI's program can do it, and phenomenally well! (But, like I said, no prog for XP yet, and frame drops corrupt the capture file)

Is there any way to nearly perfectly remove interlace from captured video in V-dub? This is straight NTSC, 30 frames/sec.

Thanks!

[ryooshi]

quote:
__________________________________________________ _______
Is there any way to nearly perfectly remove interlace
from captured video in V-dub? This is straight NTSC, 30
frames/sec.
__________________________________________________ _______

Perfectly? Not in my experience, but I will gladly stand corrected if someone provides you with your desired goal of perfection.

That being said, have you tried using Vdub's filters? I would avoid using the deinterlace filter that comes with Vdub. I personally use "deinterlacer - area based" that you can get from:
http://vdfilters.netfirms.com/download/GunnarThalin/DeinterlaceAreaBased.zip

I configure it with the following settings:
[Unchecked]Show deinterlaced areas only
[Checked] Blend instead of interpolate
Threshold: 27
Edge Detection: 25

I have had some really great results with this deinterlace filter in my filter chain. Let me know if this helps.

[Shabubu]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
On 2001-11-13 19:04:39, stanwebber wrote:
virtualdub & avi_io both communicate with hardware via the vfw architecture. win2k/xp only supports wdm drivers so you will always be capturing via the microsoft wdmvfw mapper which is buggy as hell(forget about capturing both fields). dual-boot win98se or try iuvcr(see tools section left). i've responded to this same question 3times in the same day. there should be an faq
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

Tell that to hauppage, there driver still reads as VFW in the device manager

[stanwebber]

wdm capture software is available for win2k/xp: see iuvcr in the tools section left. the only perfect way to deinterlace is not to deinterlace, but if your format doesn't support interlaced playback like mpeg2 you're stuck. donald graft & gunnar thalins' deinterlace filters are my tools of choice though. as to hauppauge vfw capture driver....win2k/xp demands complete control over your hardware so communicating with a device thru the vfw architecture is impossible. try the simple task of burning a cdr in win2k and you'll find you need administrator priviledges to directly access the hardware. hauppauge just renamed the microsoft wdmvfw mapper

[homerpez]

OK...

I managed to discover a few things about V-Dub.

1) At 320x240 res, deinterlacing works 100% perfectly! I know that's redundant and stupid, as lowering the resolution to that is beyond scanlines anyway.

2) Huffy codec seriously rocks! But I'm left with 2 really bad problems. SPACE, and SPACE. Ok, 3 problems. The third remains interlacing at 640x480. Speed, no problem!

I'll try out both the "area-based" one, and the other ones... if I can find them...

Just out of curiosity, since I have enough space now for this... does 320x240 Huffy source video work well for re-encoding? Looks pixelated on PC, I'm not used to that and not sure how MPEG-1 or 2 would respond...

Also... what the $&^#%&^-sized drives are you guys using? Even if I get 640x480 (or better) res to be deinterlaced, I still only have enough space for an hour or so! 20 Gigs!

Thanks again... new topic for me (never used V-dub) and I appreciate any info...

[homerpez]

HEY! What happened! The site for the filter is down!

And, stanwebber... you guys both refer to the same filter (same folks responsible). Anywhere else to find it? Search turns up nil. Thanks!

[stanwebber]

http://sauron.mordor.net/dgraft/
uncompressed or huffyuv compressed avi captures tend to look pixelated as hell, but it'll be smoothed out once an mpeg encoder gets ahold of it. i keep running out of space with 40gb as well....i need another 40gb