Got a Dazzle Hollywood yesterday (my review-rants & raves)

[Leander]

After doing an hour or so of research on the net I decided to purchase the Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge from Best Buy last night. The hardware was 299.99 plus another 29.99 for a D-Link Firewire card. So right off the bat this type of video capture is a bit expensive.

I installed the firewire card first, I had no problems with that process Win2k detected the hardware and I was able to get the drivers installed with out any hassle. At that point I rebooted and then connected the firewire cable to the Hollywood DV bridge.

Win2k did not automatically recognize the bridge so I installed the software from the Dazzle CD by running setup. The software install took me through the installation of 2 programs. After this process completed I opened up the Main Actor application. I did a preview and it showed me perfect video of a cartoon episode that I had running on RePlayTV. (I'll list the connection details later)

I captured about 2-3 minutes of video as a test and it saved by default as an AVI file. Playback of the file was excellent, the sound and video were of extremely good quality. So basically at this point I was very satisfied, unfortunately everything went downhill from that moment.

I rebooted my machine again and when I attempted to open MainActor and begin capturing I noticed I could'nt preview the video. Thats when I realized after a bit of research that the Device Manager no longer showed the entry for the DV bridge. To make a long story short I had to uninstall the software and reboot and then install the apps again from scratch in order to get Win2k to see the bridge.

So once I again I captured 2-3 minutes as another test, and again I got excellent video and sound. At this point I decided to try and capture a full 30 minute animated episode (Baby Blues) everything appeared to work fine but approx 10 minutes into the capture the application froze. I eventually had to reboot and after Win2k restarted the bridge was no longer in Device Manager.

Since I did'nt have much time thats as far as I have gotten, I've tried looking through Dazzles support site this morning but I have'nt been able to find any information that addresses this problem. I'll send them an email later on this evening.

So to wrap this up in a nutshell, the Dazzle Hollywood bridge appears to have tremendous potential in creating high quality video captures but unfortunately there are definitely some bugs that need to be resolved. Although at this point I'm not sure if its due to the Dazzle product or some other factor.



Sys Specs

Athlon 700
256mb PC100
Western Digital 40 gig 7200rpm UltraAta 100 drive
Promise Technology Ultra 100 PCI bus
DLink Firewire Card

Dazzle Hollywood connected to Replay Showstopper by S-Video and composite cables (sound)

[Dragonsf]

I working with the DV Bridge since MAy 2001 without such problems (I got other problems, but that's a different story).
I'm using Win2K too, but never have seen the HW in the device list (1394 compliant device: yes, but only when the Hw is connected and the A/D LED is green). If the capture-app doesn't see the HW, recycle power and press the mode switch for about 10 secs.Normally this should reset the HW. The put the HW into A/D mode until A/D is lighted green.Now you should be able to preview and capture from the device.
Anyway, capture quality and audio are great, besides some dropped frame here and there (from 1 to 5 per 5 Minutes).

[stag]

I too have the hollywood and have never had a problem but
it has never been listed in device manager as it is trasparent to the system so shouldnt

Ecellent caps evrytime

[Leander]

Update on hollywood


It appears if I unplug the bridge from the power and plug it right back in Windows will recognize it again.

Now my only problems appear to be software related. Here's a few questions I have:

What app can I use to capture DV streams? (other than the software that came with the hardware)

How do I get around the 4 gig file limit?

Whats the best app to edit DV with?


thanks for any help


Athlon 700
256mb PC100
Western Digital 40gig 7200rpm UltraATA 100 drive
DLink Firewire card
Promise Technology Ultra 100 PCI card
Replay Showstopper via s-video to Hollywood DV Bridge

[TheInformer]

An excellent DV capturing program is ScenalyzerLive.

It works around the 4 gig FAT32 limit the same way VirtualDub does, by splitting the AVI files into segments. It does many more things as well, but I'll save Baldrick the bandwidth and just direct you to check out the ScenalyzerLive home page at http://www.scenalyzer.com

I just paid for my registration code online and couldn't be happier! One of the better uses for $33 I've found.

If you are looking for a no frills DV capture program, check out DVIO (a web search will bring it up). Nothing fancy (no segmenting for example), but it works well.

My setup:
T-bird 1.2 Ghz
Gigabyte 7iEX4
256 Megs PC100 SDRAM
20 gig and 60 gig Maxtor drives

Cable --> HiFi VCR#1 --> Sony DVMC-DA1 --> Dazzle DVC2 --> HiFi VCR#2 --> WinTV PCI
(you have to see this to believe it )

[Dragonsf]

I'm using DVApp (from MS DirectX SDK - it's free) for capturing.As P'm using NTFS nor probs with 4GB limit.DVAPP can't split the DV files AFAIK.

[dood]

Cable --> HiFi VCR#1 --> Sony DVMC-DA1 --> Dazzle DVC2 --> HiFi VCR#2 --> WinTV PCI
(you have to see this to believe it )

Just curious....what does this mean?