ALL captures fine with wintv-pvr-250 until modified, A/V syn

[Tiribulus]

Hi folks,
I'm still new at this, but have scoured the web, forums here and elsewhere looking for a solution to this. I get spectacularly good mpeg2 captures with my Happaugue WinTV-PVR-250 from any source. As long as I leave them alone they play fine except when you try to fast forward them they hang, skip and chop real bad. But the real problem is if I try to cut parts out with ANY program using ANY method the audio gets behind the video. It starts out ok, but after a few minutes gets noticable and intolerable a little while after that. If I cut a piece from the very beginning it seems ok as long as the clip is short. If I cut/trim (m2-edit calls it trim) from later in the piece it's out of sync immediately. This goes for any material from home camcorder movies to tv shows at any settings except really lousy quailty. Have tried every DVD/SVCD/Program/stream template that comes with it and dozens of custom settings. VBR/CBR, audio settings up and down, no go. Fine until cut. Using the Wintv200 app for capture because absoloutely no other program/codec will recognize that there's a capture device present whether I have the wintv app running or not. I have all but lost hope that this will ever get solved. Have been through every guide I can find, same result with what I can do, because many guides say to use other capture programs, but not even the DVD factory that came with the card will not see it to capture. Only wintv 2000. I,m capturing on a P3 800 with 256 megs of memory/143 fsb. Has a Voodoo3 3500 card in it with the tv piece disabled. Win XP sp1. Editing on a an Athlon XP2100+ @ 2006 with, trust me, plenty of power and disc space. Like I say, the original capture is virtually indistinguishable from the original and all synced up all the way through. Any cutting, muxing, demuxing etc. at all and out of sync. Please save me from ditching this whole hobby because it has been no fun so far. Bought my wife a new camcorder so we could do movies of our daughter etc. and only the original is usable which sucks. I'm not very hopeful to be honest because I see numerous posts on numerous forums with sync problems and most people left with no real resolution outside of 80 step long processes that don't usually work according to them anyway. Whatever happens your help will be greatly appreciated and a solution will make you my hero.
Tiribulus
Have tried:
M2-edit
Tmpegenc
dvd2avi
cce
rempeg
vcd cutter
mpegvcr
Gold wave
Premier etc for various parts of this.

[Tiribulus]

I just extracted the wav from a 1 hour home movie with gold wave and made a d2v file with dvd2avi and used tmpegenc to encode just a 1 minute piece and it's out of sync. I'm trying not to be negative, but this is getting old fast. I had high hopes for this whole thing and want to enjoy it, but getting to not be worth it.
Tiribulus

[Tiribulus]

"it should also be noted that this will only shift the position of the audio. if the audio is stretched or shrunken this will not fix it. that is considerably more difficult to fix and requires far more time and patience that any video on earth is worth. / " From the sync guide on this site.
Am I correct in assuming that if it starts in sync and goes out later that it fits this description and I wasted 1000 dollars on video equipment and a DVD Burner? I beg of thee, in groveling sycophantic servitude. Please say it ain't so.
Tiribulus

[Tiribulus]

One further clarification. I'm not even slightly interested in VCD. The quality is horrible, at least to me. I bought a DVD Burner to be able to create DVD or at the very least SVCD video.
Tiribulus

[Barnabas]

I too own a Hauppauge PVR-250.

Here are some things I have read on various forums to try to remedy your problems.

If capturing to SVCD, make your own profiles to use.

ALWAYS re-mux to SVCD BEFORE you cut any SVCD capture.
Use TMPGenc to re-mux, NOT Nanopeg. If your sync is out after you re-mux, there is a problem with your file.

Capturing from video tape can sometimes cause MAJOR sync issues.

Try selecting Program stream for your DVD captures rather than DVD, as that seems to help some.

When converting to DVD from VHS tape, use 352x480, not 720x480.

You need to make sure you are not dropping frames, which sometimes happens with video tape conversions, and colorized movies are the worst for this.

Use the new beta drivers at:

ftp://206.112.34.138/hauppauge/support/pvr250/beta/

Try playing your DVD captured file in MPEGVCR to see if it's in sync before you cut. If MPEGVCR plays it out of sync, you have dropped too many frames and the file generally can't be fixed.

If you want to spend the money, a time base converter is the thing to use when converting from video tape.

Capture to a different HD.

Good luck!

[Tiribulus]

Thank yooo sir so much for your input. Some things I didn't know or try yet. On the resolution thing though. I bought the happaugue card because I thought I'd be able to get full size captures which leads me to one of my own suspicions which you hit on with this. I was thinking maybe the machine was underpowered for this type of large realtime operation and have planned on building another machine which would be based on an Abit KR7a Raid, an Athlon Tbird 1.5, half a gig of DDR memory probably running about 150mhz or so and maybe a different video card with at least 64 megs of DDR sgram. I was guessing maybe it was dropping frames and the Wintv app was compensating for it (thus the in sync originals) and that compensatory benefit was being lost once the video and audio seperated. Is this something like what you're saying as far as the frame droppage goes. If so would going to that the aforementioned faster machine allow me to then capture editable files @ 720x480 or is it a function of capturing from tape at all that's the issue. Does it matter if it's hi8 or VHS? Also what's the difference between program and stream or DVD/program/stream etc.? Whew!! Sorry to bombard you like this, it's just that after so many long hours over several weeks wrestling with this I'm about to start medicating myself and it's killing me how much info there is on this stuff with so little of it actually good for anything except taking up webpage space.
Thanks again and you can't possibly know how much I appreciate your help. I'm a professional computer technician and genuine fulltime home enthusiast. I would never have believed I could have my a** kicked by any computer related topic like this.
Tiribulus

[Barnabas]

For plain VHS tape, 352x480 will retain the image quality fully. Not sure about HI8, as I don't deal with it.

Your box is plenty fast enough, I have only a 750 mhz Athlon, and it's fast enough for this.

The main thing you have to do first is see if your actually dropping video frames, or it's just the cutting, muxing or whatever that's causing this. Stay with SVCD until you can capture and cut those without problems.

The following forum has lots of Hauppauge info that can help you.

http://www.shspvr.com/forum/index.php

My background is even in Video, but this stuff is never really easy, always something new to give you fits. Audio/video sync is a VERY common problem. What causes much of it is video frames being dropped, while audio frames are not. For that reason, I still use a plain AVI capture card to convert colorized stuff to DVD, as VirtualDub can be set to drop frames when needed to maintain sync.

[Tiribulus]

Thank you very much for your help. This site was inaccessable to me most of the day or I would have ansewered sooner. During that time I installed the card in one of my other machines, a Tbird 1500 with twice the memory, faster bus, Geforce3 etc. You are correct, it does the same thing. I also spent two hours trying to get it to run in my main rig which is roughly twice as powerful overall as the one above only to discover that the frickin thing HATES windows 2000. I'll try the lower horizontal res. and the forum you suggest.
Thanks again,
Tiribulus
PS, what would I use to see what kind of capture it's getting as far as dropped frames and so forth. WinTV2000 seems pretty decent, but the rest is lame unless I'm missing something

[Barnabas]

There are many ways to tell if you dropped video frames, but a few ways are:

De-mux the file then re-mux the audio and video again in TMPGenc tools. What the length of the total minutes for BOTH streams.

Import the audio and video streams into an authoring program such as DVD Maestro etc and read the total seconds difference between the audio and the video streams.

In most cases of frame drops, you will be in sync at the start, but slowly go out of sync. When you are really dropping frames, the audio and video seem to go out by about 1 second per 30 minutes or so.

[Tiribulus]

Try selecting Program stream for your DVD captures rather than DVD, as that seems to help some.
Good luck!

Bless God, this fixed it!!!!!!!! Even from vhs @ 720x480!!!!! What's the difference between DVD and Program? Whatever it is I captured 2 hours @ DVD standard, but changed it to program and saved the connfig. Cut a three minute piece from the end and it's in sync!!!! WoooHoooo!!!!!!!!!
Tiribulus

[kitty]

For my 8mm (not High-8 ) mono video cam footage, I have set up a custom template to cap at 352x480 (1/2 D1 DVD), Program Stream, 384kbs MPEG2 audio (mono), 4400 kbs ave, 8000 max VBR video. I can capture 2 hours in the space of one DVD-R (4.37 GB).

I got the Program stream tip from Steve Kittelsen's PVR review (it was in his templates). I must have lucked out.

[Barnabas]

kitty,

Have you ever noticed that PVR-250 captures at 720x480 will sometimes jump every once in a while?

[Tiribulus]

For my 8mm (not High-8 ) mono video cam footage, I have set up a custom template to cap at 352x480 (1/2 D1 DVD), Program Stream, 384kbs MPEG2 audio (mono), 4400 kbs ave, 8000 max VBR video. I can capture 2 hours in the space of one DVD-R (4.37 GB).

I got the Program stream tip from Steve Kittelsen's PVR review (it was in his templates). I must have lucked out.

How do you guys avoid that scrunched up higher than wide look?
Tiribulus

[Conquest10]

you can view it in powerdvd. it will stretch it out to the correct aspect ratio.

[Tiribulus]

Gaaahhhhlee, Silly me

[Tiribulus]

I had put the card in one of my other machines which is much more powerful to see if this could be a muscle issue, but initially, before trying the program setting, I still lost A/V sync when editing the clips. The program setting then fixed the issue. However I have since put the card back in the original P3 800 and at the same settings it goes out of sync again, albeit by a much lesser degree. I can see the dropped frames in M2-Edit frame by frame. When I lowered the bitrate a chunk it does not go out of sync.
Equation:
1>Athlon 1.5/high bitrate/DVD setting = out of sync
2>P3 800/high bitrate/DVD setting/out of sync
3>Athlon 1.5/high bitrate/program setting/in sync
4>P3 800/high bitrate/program setting/out of sync
5>P3 800/lower bitrate/program setting/in sync

This hasn't addressed resolutions or the rest of the hardware, but for the purposes of this post I'm concluding that assuming a certain hardware level the program setting resolves the out of sync issue regardless of resolution or bitrate because I had success with dvd bitrates and 720x480. Under that level in sync edited clips can be achieved by using the program setting, but lower bitrates are required and maybe lower resolutions as well though I haven't exhaustively tested this aspect yet since I've only used 480x480
I hope I'm being clear here.
Tiribulus.

[Barnabas]

Tiribulus,

Just how high of a bitrate are you using? I have not noticed any framedrops on caps from Dishnetwork at a fairly high 5000-9000 kbps bitrate. I only have an Athlon 750 mhz cpu too.

[Tiribulus]

Whatever the standard DVD bitrate is in the template that comes with Wintv2000 is what I've been calling "high" bitrate here. I don't know how into computer hardware in general you are, but that Athlon 750 of yours will stomp all over my P3 800 in every meaningful area of cpu performance in general. In fact it would take a P3 with a clock speed of around a ghz to begin to compete with the Athlon architecture running @ 733mhz. This goes for floting point, integer, multimedia extensions and instructions per clock cycle. This may explain why your Athlon with a technically higher speed is able to do what my P3 800 cannot. There could be other factors too, but the little bit of experimentation I've done has yielded the above results. May, MAY also be the i820 chipset on the Supermicro mobo that P3 is running on isn't helping either since it was never known for really good bus efficiency.
Tiribulus

[Barnabas]

Yes,

I have been very happy with my Athlon's performance, they really are a good choice of multimedia work.

You can see what the actual bitrate of the standard DVD template is by selecting "advanced".

Be sure you go to http://www.shspvr.com (under news) to get the prefilter tweak, as that can turn off all the strange filtering that the 250 uses by default.

[Tiribulus]

I have joined his forum as well as there is some really good info there too. I will definitely check this tweak out. You're saying it helps in some way obviously? What does it do? I mean do you knnow any particulars on these filters and why we're better off without them? I've got 4 Intel and 4 AMD machines on my network. (and 1 old Mac) The Intel machines do the utility work and the AMD machines do the muscle work, though as soon as I get some faster DDR memory for my wife's machine, her memory is going with my extra Abit KR7a Raid, Tbird 1.4 and the rest of the parts in the P3 800 machine now so I can have a faster machine to capture with. That machine also has the other cd burner and the scanner on it aside from being my TV in the computer room. Love those Athlons, not to in any way denegrate Intel whose processors are chugging away in my mail and file servers as we speak. Oh, yeah I knew that the advanced area in capture is where the bitrate is, but I'm at work and couldn't remember what it was. 6400/8000 maybe?
Tiribulus

[Barnabas]

Yes, you WILL see the difference. I simply turn all the filters off myself. They are all on by default, and while they *might* help a noisy video source, they just seem to fuzz up everything to my eyes. They actually filter *before* the encoding.

Also, the sharpness is set TOO LOW in the Hauppauge PVR-250. It's set at 2, but looks best at 7. You have to use graphedit to change that, and will need to set sharpness each time AFTER you start up winTV2000. No way to access sharpness from WinTV yet.

[Tiribulus]

Cool. So the filters are seperate from the sharpness aspect which is handled by graphedit. Is that downloadable somewhere and is it free. How does it work? Interface with the drivers, maybe?
Tiribulus

[Barnabas]

Yep,

Graphedit is a free Microsoft download. In Graphedit, just go to "insert filters, video capture sources, then expand the box to display the Hauppauge PVR-250. Click on that, and hit "insert filter". Once that's open just right click and select "filter properties, then select "video proc amp" Yor can then raise the sharpness to 7. Save your Graphedit preset so next time you only have to run graphedit, open the preset, right click, select video proc amp and raise the sharpness. Sharpness IS built into the driver, but Hauppauge does not let us control it via WinTV 2000 for some STUPID reason.

[Tiribulus]

Here's the part where I go find a busy freeway to play in. The edited files though now in sync begin to stutter and skip after a few minutes Right when I thought I had it. I am just numb with frustration.
Tiribulus

[Tiribulus]

Alllrighty then,
Here's the part where I scramble back out of that busy freeway for fear of messing up my hair for nothing. It appears that M2-Edit doesn't play nice with my mpeg2 files for some reason. I did some cutting with Mpg2vcr and Tmpegenc and they both fast forward, rewind and play without stuttering at all . Aren't I jist a ninny. I LOVE M2-Edit, but waddaya gonna do? Also Barnabas, I couldn't fing the filter disabling thing under the news link, but am trying the sharpness deal with graphedit right now. One question though. Does the bitrate and all the other settings in there mean it's overriding the bitrate in Wintv2000?
Tiribulus

[SHS]

Tiribulus your P3 800 what motherboard dose it have?.

[Tiribulus]

The man gets around. It's a Supermicro P3SCD sporting the Intel i820 chipset which aside from being a very mediocre performer is also afflicted with the now infamous MTH (memory translation hub) bug. Hey I got the board, processor and 256megs of memory for 60 bucks, so tough to complain.
Tiribulus

[SHS]

Have you install the later drv for the motherboard and update the bios
Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility
Intel Application Accelerator
And I think you need this install to
Intel Active Monitor
You want try change the PCI bus to higher or lower number which use lee set at 16 some time 32 try 32 or 16 or even 8.
My board i845 with PC 133 SDRAM P4 1.6GHz
I have agree for 60smucker I wouldn't complain.

Now as for the DVD setting only difference between Program Streams is that DVD Streams are created with packets sizes which are DVD compliant is what they tell me if I'm rigth I think there only a few DVD Authoring Software package that can read this format rigth and or it not something you shouldn't edit meaning you just burn the clip the way it is. I have dig out all DVD Authoring demo and see which one it is I think gear more spec to SpruceUp and Dazzle DVD Complete which also bitching about non compliant audio/video but then again it my as I said wasn't ma to be edit in the first place.
I only had mine card for 2 week and been test lot of other stuff most lee a 3rdparty beta app called SageTV hope lee next week I get to the all thoses DVD Authoring applications.

[Tiribulus]

I haven't checked on chipset drivers for that board in a while. I'll do that. Do dvd and program use a different codec or somthing to make the difference? Also, here's a good question. Is there something special about cartoons for pete's sake. I recorded a TV show last night direct from the digital cable hookup and edited out the commercials with no problems using mpg2vcr. Also captured game 5 from last years Stanley Cup Finals from vhs, edited out the commercials with mpg2vcr and again no problems. Took like 30-45 seconds to trim each clip. I recorded a few hours of looney toons for my daughter intending to edit out the commercials and make seperate clips for each cartoon, but it takes like 20 minutes to clip each 5 or 6 minute piece at the exact same settings as the other captures. What the hell. U know what that's all about?
Tribulus

[kitty]

kitty,

Have you ever noticed that PVR-250 captures at 720x480 will sometimes jump every once in a while?

No, I have only tries full res DVD capture once and it didn't seem to jump - what was your bitrate?