theater 550 -> huffyuv capture... 32.374fps?

[swiego]

Capturing from a 550 Pro card to huffyuv 2.1.1, using MMC 9.13, source is SVHS over s-video. No unusual or wacky settings.

Capture rate set to 29.97fps, however when I open the resulting .avi in gspot, it reports around 32fps. I've tried this several times with different tapes, SVHS players and inputs (composite vs. s-video) and the frame rate in gspot is always around 32fps.

I noticed this earlier but disregarded it. However in postprocessing I've noticed a lot of jumpiness that I've traced to chunks of IDENTICAL repeated frames within the original interlaced huffyuv file. (By identical I mean completely identical... I don't think it's a telecine issue, even the noise is the same and often I have 5 of these frames in a stretch.) Don't know if these two things are related...

Any idea where to look to fix this?

[FulciLives]

ATI as more bugs with software than most major card maker's and the theater 550 has more bugs than all the other ATI products put together.

The solution is to buy a capture card that works like a Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250 etc.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[swiego]

Could that explain why I have identical fields in my interlaced huffyuv capture?

[FulciLives]

Could that explain why I have identical fields in my interlaced huffyuv capture?

I could be wrong but my understanding is that this ATI card is a pure hardware MPEG encoder type card and those kind of cards usually are made to capture to MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 and nothing else (well sometimes MPEG-4 but not often).

I don't think the card is designed for AVI capture.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[mikiem]

MMC 9.13 is a bit buggy to say the least. From ati docs seems that one of the goals of re-write is to enable what they call avivo processing on your card & top end aiw model, but from other reports support for your card is far from fully implemented yet. Don't believe ati recomends/lists it as download for your card yet either.

Also John is right according to ati docs, and your card is designed with hardware processing -- what it'll do once the new MMC gets working is still open.

[FulciLives]

Sorry I didn't mention this earlier but it just kinda came to me ...

According to things I've read about this ATI capture card ... people have said that they get good results using GB-PVR as a capture program.

So give that program a try.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[swiego]

Will take the advice here and try some other problems. I was having some issues with GB-PVR and Virtualdub for captures, initially, but will give it another go.

The 550 Pro does capture uncompressed, you can bypass the HW mpeg if you want. The quality isn't bad, the comb filter is fantastic if you're running in composite, but some of the hardware filtering is only available within the tuner section. MMC 9.13 has worked OK for me (at least it's stable and talks to the 550 Pro) which I can't say for a lot of other software. What a dreadfully unsupported card---boo to ATI.

That said, I noticed that gspot says the capture is multipart opendml avi with "33434 frames in the first part, 2654 frames follow, garbage at end." If I take the first number and divide it by the length of the capture in seconds, I get my expected 29.97. Adding the "2654 frames follow" is what results in 32.x fps. Any idea what this is?? Haven't seen this in my AVIs before... will continue to search.

Thanks!

[hrlslcbr]

That seems weird. I have a theatrix and I've captured a lot of uncompressed (and compressed with huffyuv) avi, and I've never had frame rate problems like the ones you're describing.
GB-PVR works fine for me (to schedule recordings and watch TV). I use graphedit to capture too; to MPEG-2 and avi, and I don't have any problems.
I suggest trying graphedit to see if you have the same (fps) problem.

[swiego]

Fixed, switching to virtualvcr completely solved this problem. I can't believe how terrible MMC can be. I've stopped using MMC, virtualvcr is a better capture program in nearly every aspect!