Matrox G400TV & WindowsXP capture formats

[Pompebled]

In the capture card list on this site someone wrote that he has very good capturing results using his G400TV under Windows XP. The drivers are installed out of the XP-box.

My question is which captureformats are supported?
- PAL 480x576 (for SVCD)
- PAL 720x576 (for DVD)

Anyone wanting to share his knowlegde?

Pompebled

[bunyip]

Under WINXP the G400TV card defaults to hardware YUY2 capture - this gives very high quality capture - using a patch you can enable the internal MJPEG capture which will allow long captures but at the cost of quality.

You can capture in RGB at 8bit, 16bit or 24bit but this does not use any hardware compression and you would get a lot of dropped frames - as well as chewing up disk space.

Both YUY2 & MJPEG formats enforce pre-set hardware capture resolutions:
PAL: 160x120, 176x144, 320x240, 352x288, 352x576, 704x576
NTSC: 160x120, 176x120, 320x240, 352x240, 352x480, 704x480

The RGB format supports the following resolutions:
BOTH: 80x60, 160x120, 176x144, 320x240, 352x288, 640x480

I have found that capturing at 352x288 YUY2 gives excellent VCD conversions.

For SVCD I have found capturing at 352x576 yields great quality (using TMPGenc to do the mpg conversion - deinterlacing is essential though).

In my experience I have not seen any quality improvement on the final SVCD by capturing at 704x576 - it just uses more disk space and makes conversion even longer - but that's just an opinion.

I also use the huffyuv compression codec when capturing to save disk space - again in my opinion it does not degrade the final SVCD quality.

I should point out that I didn't use the XP default setup I used the latest Matrox drivers and video tools downloaded from their web site.

[Teshia]

Ditto. Use the w2k_582 drivers, then install vt_210a overtop. There's no Macrovision patch for 210a and VideoTracker.exe was mysteriously dropped from vidtools post 9x versions (and doesn't run in xp so don't bother), but other than that, it's great.

Oh yeah, the blue box doesn't work right on XP. It doesn't feed audio to sound cards in XP (or at least not the SB Live!). Because of this, you'll need to directly feed audio into your sound card from the VCR for sound capture - cable works, but no sound there either. Bizarre, but true. Something in that box doesn't like sound cards in XP.

[Pompebled]

Great, guys. Thanx for your quick and clear responses.

To be honest, I didn't know the YUY2 format is also supported by the G400 hardware. I only knew about the MJPEG. I just tested with YUY2 in 352x576. Just 10-15% CPU usage! Backside: it takes a lot of HD-space.
I have to convert to mpeg 2 still and see what quality that gives.

BTW, what is your way to deinterlace? I use Gunnar Thalin's smooth deinterlace filter for Virtual Dub.
And what settings you use in TMPGenc for SuperVideoCD?

I keep you posted.

[bunyip]

To be honest, I didn't know the YUY2 format is also supported by the G400 hardware. I only knew about the MJPEG. I just tested with YUY2 in 352x576. Just 10-15% CPU usage! Backside: it takes a lot of HD-space.
I have to convert to mpeg 2 still and see what quality that gives.

Yeah, the card has built-in support for both MJPEG & YUY2 but Matrox decided not to activate both. By default you get MJPEG under WIN98 and YUY2 under WIN2000 & XP.

There are patches available that activate both. I have turned both on but I get the best results with YUY2 so I haven't used MJPEG in a long time.

YUY2 does take more disk but if you use the lossless Huffyuv codec when you capture, you can reduce the disk usage by over half.
For example:
1 minute PAL capture at 352 x 576,
MJPEG = 159mb,
YUY2 (uncompressed) = 590mb
YUY2 (with Huffyuv compression) = 240mb.

BTW, what is your way to deinterlace? I use Gunnar Thalin's smooth deinterlace filter for Virtual Dub.
And what settings you use in TMPGenc for SuperVideoCD?

Generally I let TMPGenc do the deinterlacing using the even field method.

Use the SVCD default templates and just change the bit rate as you need - obviously using the 2 pass VBR yields better results but when I am not too fussed about the quality a CBR is fine. The rate is usually determined by whether I want 1 CD or 2.

[Pompebled]

Bunyip,

Thanks again!

There are patches available that activate both. I have turned both on but I get the best results with YUY2 so I haven't used MJPEG in a long time.

Could you provide me the url to the patches?

Pompebled

[bunyip]

Sorry for the delay - I have been trying to track down the site(s) that had these patches but I have not been able to find them. Still looking though - if I don't have any luck perhaps I can email copies to you.
If so, send a private message and let me know of your email address.