Virtualdub and VirtualVCR problem

[hardwork12]

I have the http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/ drivers installed. This allowed for me to capture virtually any resolution.

I can now capture with both virtualdub and virtualVCR at up to 720x480 with zero dropped frames. So here is what bothers me:

I did a capture at 640x480 using VirtualVCR and encoded different ways using TMPGEnc and got terrible results. Things were not smooth the images were fuzzy and ghosty and showed jagged edges with any kind of motion.

The I did a 640x480 capture (same settings as best I can tell) using virtualdub and the encoded image was smooth, no jagged edges and much clearer. Not great but maybe what I might expect for VCD from a VHS tape.

This just makes me wonder if virtualVCR does not work that virtualdb works better but maybe not at its best.

Settings for both:

640x480
YUY2 using Huffy compression
29.97FPS
The sound for both were perfect.

Could I have a driver problem. maybe the one I referenced above is not the best one for me to use. Just want to make sure I am getting the best quality captures I can using my AverTV Stereo card.

Thanks

[hardwork12]

Just an update:

I did a capture in both VirtualDub and VirtualVCR 352x480

Encoded both with TMPGEnc for CVD and viewed on the PC (my DVD player can not play the CVD.

The problem I had described was gone I must have gotten a bad capture for some reason for my original virtualVCR test.

The encoded CVD files both played very close to each other but I would have to give a little edge to the virtualVCR encoded capture. Seemed to handle more complex motion and related detail a little better.

No idea what happened the first time I did this I don't think it was that I captured at 640x480.

[gf]

Hi hardwork12

I have a question for you. Did you anything special to get vdub to work at that high resolution to have no dropped frames? I have a XP1900, All in Wonder Radeon, WindowsME, Asus A7V333 mthr brd. I was hoping you could work me some magic.

Thanks
Steve

[hardwork12]

gf

Just so you know I have a Duron 900mhz 512meg ram and have no processing issues with that speed. You have what I wish I had an XP1700 so that is not the problem.

The key for me was making absolutely sure I had the FPS capture rate set to the same as the source. I use NTSC so that is 29.97FPS. I am sure you tried this. BTW: I am using win2k so I am using the WDM drivers from the link below (this too may be the key they are "hacked" for capture). They are also listed for use in windowsME so maybe worth a try (could cause problems so consider a backup of you current operating system). The problem with these drivers is that my vendor supplied software for the PVR capability of my AVERTV stereo card does not work.

http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/

OK now my computer side advice (some thoughts):

Make sure you have the latest VIA 4 in 1 drivers for the VIA chipset on the motherboard you have.

Test your memory with memtest86 just to make sure you do not have a system issue. Go to the following link http://www.memtest86.com/ Download V3.0 This will self extract and install to floppy. When you boot off the floppy it will run the test.

To solve the issue of the driver for my PVR and for Capture needing to be different I have two installs of windows2k on my system. One for capture and one for everything else. This has a second advantage of not having as many background processes running so less possibility of issue it is a clean install.

To backup my system before I fool around with it I make a GHOST on CD. The program is Nortons GHOST a lifesaver. about 1gig of backup fits on each CD-r and the software splits for you. To restore you just boot off of disk 1 and feed the other disks. In 15min you are back where you were. Alternative: If you have a spare hard drive around disconnect your current one (power and signal cable) and install the spare drive and do a clean install on that one and see how things go. This lets you play around in a much safer way. I also ghost this install so when I kill it I can recover in 15 min and try something else.

In reading much about the different capture boards there is alot about AMD systems having troble with ATI boards. I do not know what you capture card is or exactly what the issue is but in the "captue cards" section under "OTHER" on this site there is a wealth of advice and knowledge about capture cards.

Also welcome, a fellow AMD'er.

Just some thoughts.....

[darkelf]

hardw: You say you were able to get the AverTV card running @720x480 using the btwincap driver.

But you never said what OS you were running. I would like to have this capability on Windows 2000 (ie cap DVD rez with VDUB).

Also, did you need to install any VfW-->WDM wrapper in order to get the btwincap driver to work with VDUB?

thx,

[hardwork12]

I have windows 2000 PRO with all of the updates from microsoft. the updates are a must.

I will test again tonight and post just to make sure it was not a capture at 704x480. Also my source was a standard VCR onto the composite input I did not use the S-video input just for the record.

NO vfw to WDM not needed for win2k with the btwincap driver.

I also used a clean install to play with maybe that helps. This install of windows has only my Video software stuff in it. I set my system up so that I can boot two different installs of win2k. Doubt this makes a difference its just what I did.

When you say yours will not capture 720x480 do you mean that it will not let you run at this resolution or that you get too many dropped frames at this resolution?

[darkelf]

Thanks, I would appreciate it.

in RE: to above post. I cannot capture anything with a vertical resolution that ISN'T 240 or 288 (pal). For MPEG caps (AIW card) I can pull 640x480 before my machine craps out. For AVI caps of any kind, the WDM driver I have (btwincap isn't supported by my card) 352x288 (PAL) is the best rez I can do. Preview/Overlay checking/testing didn't do anything. Neither does custom format or any sort of de-interlace feature under VDUB. I've been looking and found that even my WDM/DirectShow DVR programs also have this limitation when capping to AVI.

I've installed Win2k, SP3, DirectX8.1 fresh just to prove a point to myself that my drivers are a limitation.

---

I've heard from others that 720x480 is a valid MPEG1/2 resolution (my AIW supports it somehow) and 704x480 is a valid rez for an AVI file. If you can pull (anything)x480 to Huffy-AVI, that's the ticket.

I have been looking for a verifyable answer to this question for some time. I'm looking into an AverTV-xxx card because it still supports old VfW proggies like VDUB. All I need now is verification that this card will work under Win2k with any cap-to-avi better than 352x240 (with prefs for that 704/720x480). I can work with dropped frames, it's those darn 'brick wall' driver issues that are biting me.

-elf

[hardwork12]

darkelf:

I did a few test captures using virtualdub with btwincap drivers. other than the avertv drivers needing to be installed first and then the btwincap drivers. I did not install any other drivers.

I have the Avertv stereo PCI card. Also take a look at my rig that may help also. Icon upper right.

I did a test capture for 10 minutes of both a TV station and using the composite input with a VCR as the source.

Captured 720x480, HuffyuV 2.1.1 compress but was getting 0.5% dropped frames. This is due to my CPU maxing out. Running at 98 to 100%. Both the VCR and the TV were the same.

Captured 720x480, PIC Video MJPEG codec set at quality of 20 (max setting) Compress I got 0% dropped frames since with this compression plugin my CPU was in the 70% range.

Not sure the advantage of PIC VIdeo over Huffyuv 2.1.1 but seems like most here like Huffy but is apparently both a CPU hog as well as a disk space hog but there must be benefit.

[darkelf]

The reason Huffy is preferred is that it performs lossless compression as opposed to PicVideo's Motion-JPEG. Aside from the signal loss when converting RGB data to YUV2 (as listed in the Huffy config box) there is *NO* loss of quality after that, provided you have a machine that can keep up with the frames, and you keep using Huffy.

PicVideo uses JPEG compression. Even when set to 20, there is some loss of data due to the nature of the JPEG algorithm.

It's more of a purists battle really. For 95% of the world MJPEG quality is fine. Then there are the other 5%. We are the reason that AMD has a purpose!

And if your rig can handle Huffy video (at whatever rez) you can rest assured that any other compression scheme that comes down the pike can be handled by your machine.

I really appreciate the time you took to run a few tests for me. Thanks!

-elf

[hardwork12]

Thanks. I plan to continue to use huffy now I have a reason to. I just ran PIc video so that I could make sure the limitation was my CPU so I could post something useful.

I have a 1.2ghz CPU on the way that is the fastest my EPOX mobo can support but hey for $30 worth it over my OC'd 700@900 I have now. Love that AMD .

Next system a DUAL CPU

[gifty74]

hey guys, just found this post so i decided to jump in. i too cannot capture greater than 240 NTSC with my leadtek winfast200xp deluxe capture card. i found some drivers last night from iulabs.com, but could not get them setup right. they installed ok, but no picture. there were a lot of things to configure, so i might have been missing something else. however, i'm going to try the btwincap drivers tonight, so hopefully i'll have more luck. i too will do some capture tests. i do know that i did a 320x240 capture last night, using huffy, and the file was HUGE! i guess that's just the way it is, and that's the best codec for capturing if you plan to burn a high quality SVCD. what do you guys capture to if you plan to only watch on the PC? what programs capture in divx? can virtualdub do that? thanks.

steve g

[darkelf]

Actually source is my main determining factor when considering what format to save files into.

When source is DVD rip I encode either to SVCD (to enable playback on console systems) or divx (just large enough to fit on a single CD). Sometimes both, since needing one format and not having it is a real pain.

When source is anything else I encode to huffy. Since I haven't been able to get more than 352x288 (which I then crop to perfect VCD 352x240 NTSC, tho with no de-interlace) the bandwidth hasn't become a problem. Nearly all of these caps are saved XVCD because the frame size is VCD compliant with my setup, no resize is necessary. I can then up the bitrate to fill a CD with any particular program. All of the XVCD'z I've made thus far play fine on my Daewoo 5800 player. Most of my source is VHS tape that is at least 4 years old, so the frame size is fine until I run out of tapes and move on to something else!

The third option is when I am capping strictly to ARCHIVE. All of these caps are sent straight to huffy and then (regardless of the source material) encoded to a high-bitrate Divx (usually 3.xx). For a given file size, divx generally gives the best video quality, which is needed to save old home movies. There are many holy-wars going on out there about conversion from Divx-->S/X/VCD and that its bad. Personally it doesn't matter to me. I sometimes make an XVCD from my huffy source too, just to save the headache later on with converting.

All of my XVCD'z will change to XSVCD/SVCD as soon as I can get one of these AverTV cards to cap above 352x288. Then I think I'll save to both high-bitrate Divx and SVCD.

Nearly all of my caps are burned very soon after they are encoded. So for me it is not really a problem to save things to larger-sized files (ie S/X/VCD vs DivX). If I were to leave everything on my machine and watch it there exclusively, I'd use some Divx flavor because it seems to have the best quality at any decent bitrate.

I suppose it sounds crazy to make two different encodings from the same source material doesn't it? I only do this for certain files that I know I'll want to watch on my telly. I use divx because I don't want to have one copy of a tape that is spread across 2-3 XVCD CDRz. The divx option makes for a handy backup.

Yes, VDUB can encode directly to Divx (any flavor) with no dropped frames (this is STRONGLY dependent on your CPU horsepower). Just select it under VIDEO->Compression instead of huffy. If your machine can't do realtime divx, then saving to huffy and converting afterward to divx is the best route methinks.

I'm sure I've repeated myself plenty of times so far in this post, so I'll send it off.

-elf

[gifty74]

gee, thanks for all the info. about the cap size you're getting with vdub, have you tried the iulabs tweaked driver? i thought with those you can up the resolution on any cap application and cap at whatever resolution you want. let me know what other WDM drivers you have tried. later.

-steve g

[darkelf]

The problem that I have now is that my cap card (AIW PRO 8meg) utilizes the BT828 (NOT 848/878) chipset. This card is specifically excluded from support with both the btwincap drivers and the iuLAB version. Yea, I tried 'em, and they didn't work.

This is the main reason that I am asking all of these questions regarding real-world results with these other cards. I've been burned in the fact that I didn't get a card with a graceful upgrade path (with regards to ATI'z AVI driver support). That and I hate wasting $$$.

I love VDUB, for what I need to do it is the best. Simple and to the point. That's why it is so important to me that these new-fangled cards support this most useful VfW tool. Same goes for VirtualVCR.