Pinnacle PCTV Pro & Virtualdub - ?

[Pickngrin]

Hi-
I just got my new PCTV Pro card working -- I think. I am running Win 98 SE, Duron 1ghz... while I was able to capture in Virtualdub (capturing from VCR), 9 times out of 10 when I click "VIDEO->CAPTURE VIDEO" I get the following error:
Error 424: Error: Cannot open the video input device.

I've tried rebooting the machine, changing settings, etc... to no avail. It worked once, about 15 minutes ago, but I can't get it to begin capture again... can't find anything on the web re: this problem...
does anyone have any ideas?
the Pinnacle software seemed to capture ok, but the software keeps crashing on me...


Thanks!

[Zippy72]

You get this message when you try to capture above 352x288 with this card. To solve this, select 'Preview' instead of 'Overlay' in VDub. You should then be able to capture.

[Pickngrin]

thanks for responding..hmm.. i had suspected and tried that before I posted the question, and it didn't seem to work properly. last night, I found and downloaded a more generic VFW driver that listed the PCTV Pro as one of its supported devices (the name of the driver is the name of the chipset....BTB4xx??). It seems to work OK now.. though I don't know how appropriate my settings are...I captured a VHS clip that was around 4 minutes long, and the uncompressed AVI file was massive (close to 2 GB).Is that normal?

thanks

[Zippy72]

Sounds about right to me.
If you want to reduce size, try a few different codecs and settings. If you use the MJPeg codec with a setting of 18 or 19, you'll see a big difference in size without losing too much quality.

[Pickngrin]

...now i'm getting blue horizontal bars in my capture...
using Huffy (I tried using MJPeg code, but presumably since it is a demo, it puts its little promo on my AVI screen)

[wertigo]

The Pro card has the conexant bt878 chip......just thought you wanted to know that...

/wertigo

[whiskey29]

pickngrin, where did you download the driver for the PCTV ?
I had a hauppage tv card before and the quality is much better.
WHenever you switch to preview mode, there are some horizontal noise that makes the captured movie kind of dirty.

[Pickngrin]

Hm..where did I download the driver... I did a web search and found that driver..which seems to work (better than the Pinnacle one, anyhow)... I don't have the URL or domain handy...

those bars are pretty bad... I don't have a handle on how to get a clean capture yet... can anyone point me in the right direction?

thanks again

[Hong Kong Phooey]

PicknGrin-What version PCTV pro CD drivers do you have? I just got one of these cards myself, but haven't installed it yet. As it turned out, my CD drivers were Version 5,which according to the info I read here are WDM & make them incompatible with programs like VirtualDub.
I've downloaded a Version 4.02a from Pinnacle's site which are supposed to be VFW compatible, I believe.
I'd like to try & use the VirtualDub/TMPGenc programs to capture analog video from my VCR,as has been suggested, so does anyone know if I should use V4 or V5 drivers.
Being a newbie,I read soooo much info about codecs,VFW,WDM etc. the past few days I'm feeling a tad confused....

[tacosalad]

Regarding the bars:

Are these razor-thin horizontal bars? The Bt878 is strangely prone to this when capturing resources are heavily loaded. I've encountered them and so have a lot of people, but their cause seems to vary slightly from one computer to another. Here are some things to try, at least for experimentation:

1. Make sure to choose the right frame height for your television source. If your source is NTSC (North America) use 120, 240, or 480. If your source is PAL (United Kingdom) use 144, 288, or 576.

2. Try reducing the frame size as an experiment. When you find a setting that works, like 160x120 or 160x144 (depending on your region), gradually work your way up to larger frame sizes again. You may find that the bars intermittently start showing up at some size.

3. Try using a different compression codec. I've found that some codecs can trigger the bars while others don't. Uncompressed it most likely to trigger them, so it's probably a resource issue again.

4. Move the PCTV card to a different PCI slot. Sometimes this is the solution! There are only four PCI interrupts, so PCI devices (including built-in ones) must share them depending on the slots they're connected to. I've found that I'll get those horizontal lines if I put my capture card in the slot that shares INTA with the hard drive, but it'll be fine if I move the capture card to the next slot (which happens to use INTD instead). Don't fret about the specifics, though, just try it.

Above all, experiment!

-tacosalad

[jhannisdahl]

Ah, finally I found the solution to my problem. Now i will sleep good tonite. Tnx Guys

[medievil]

The Best BT4XX drivers are at :

http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/

[medievil]

PicknGrin-What version PCTV pro CD drivers do you have? I just got one of these cards myself, but haven't installed it yet. As it turned out, my CD drivers were Version 5,which according to the info I read here are WDM & make them incompatible with programs like VirtualDub.
I've downloaded a Version 4.02a from Pinnacle's site which are supposed to be VFW compatible, I believe.
I'd like to try & use the VirtualDub/TMPGenc programs to capture analog video from my VCR,as has been suggested, so does anyone know if I should use V4 or V5 drivers.
Being a newbie,I read soooo much info about codecs,VFW,WDM etc. the past few days I'm feeling a tad confused....

Vdub works fine with WDM Drivers. Thats all I use.