Good AVI capture with ATI-All in Wonder Radeon?

[dewbie]

I'm trying to get best quality capture for VCD with the ATI card. I've read that AVI is the best format to capture with, especially with VirtualDub.

However, I've tried various settings in both VirtualDub and ATI software, and all the AVI capture appears jerky and not so good quality. Surprisingly, the best capture I've managed to get is with MPEG1 using ATI software?? The motion was much smoother than with AVI.

What do I need to get the sort of awesome AVI capture that everyone talks about?

This is the setup I have:
PIII 850 with 320M RAM
Win2000
ATI All in Wonder Radeon AGP
Soundblaster Live

I have installed:
ATI Multimedia Center 7.0
VirtualDub 1.4d
TMPGEnc beta12h
HuffyUV 2.1.1

I hope I have given enough info. Thank you for your help!

[disturbed1]

Alot of times AVI captures aren't ment for viewing.

Also if your capturing at a high bitrate above 3000KBYTES/s (avi is usually in bytes, not bits) it may appear to stutter, right click on media player and select statistics to see if your playback matches the fps it was in encoded at.

If you capped at 30fps, but are only playing back 25fps, it won't seem as smooth, you may need to raise your avi cache. By default it's usually 2mb, setting to 4mb could help.

[patrickm]

are you dropping frames during AVI capture?

[dewbie]

Actually, yes, VirtualDub seems to show a lot of dropped frames, even when I capture at 160x120 size, 11Khz audio and 25fps. The avg frame rate is something like 18-21fps??? yikes...

[Akito Tenkawa]

This is a known issue with VDub and the ATI capture card family. Unfortunately, this is one issue that is not going to be resolved.

Basically, the ATI capture cards start capture below the specified rate. As time goes on, the card will speed up its capture routine, and the end result is a captured video faster than the rate you wanted. For example, you tell the card to capture at 29.97 fps, the card after 20 mins captures at 30.06 (which is normal). With a program like the ATI MMC, you will probably not get any frames dropped. But with VDub, which attempts to force a constant frame rate, every extra frame created by ATI card beyond the frame rate you tell VDub to capture is dropped automatically, thus the high number of dropped frames.

To get around this problem, you would need a different program for multi-segmented AVIs, like FreeVCR or AVI-I/O to perform video capture, then use VDub for post-processing.

I hope this provides some insight into some of the issues that you have been experiencing.

Akito Tenkawa

[dewbie]

That's a shame, but thank you very much to you all! I'll try the programs you've recommended

[CoCoNiPs]

"If you capped at 30fps, but are only playing back 25fps, it won't seem as smooth, you may need to raise your avi cache. By default it's usually 2mb, setting to 4mb could help."

How Do i raise the avi cache?
ThanX
CoCoNiPs

[patrickm]

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This is a known issue with VDub and the ATI capture card family. Unfortunately, this is one issue that is not going to be resolved.
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maybe with the radeon drivers, but not will all ATI's. i have the AiW 128 Pro AGP which uses the same capture chip as the radeon, and i can capture for an hour at 640x480 without dropping a frame and usually <25% cpu. i'm on an athlon 900 with 256M pc100. so i'm hardly overpowering the first poster's computer, as they seem pretty similar.

[Belboz]

Just to side along with patrickm,

I have a Radeon AIW and can capture with Vdub at similiar resolutions as he mentioned with not a single dropped frame.

And the system I am running the AIW on is a Pentium III 500.

[dewbie]

I've tried capturing with freeVCR and AVI-I/O, but to no avail. The frame drop rate is still horrendous, even with a modest res setting.

It's reassuring to know others have been able to use ATI and VDub. Perhaps there's something inherently wrong with my setup, codec, setting etc. rather than software? Perhaps I'm missing something?

I'd like to provide more info, but not sure what info to provide.

Alternatively, I can wait for a godsend to write a guide for VDub capture with ATI.

[patrickm]

make sure DMA is enabled on your drive.
capture to a drive not containing the windows swap file or temp directory.
shut off basically all the crap in your systray except the volume meter.
try a sound card other than the SB Live.
make yuv, uyvy or yuv2 the base capture format (NOT RGB)

don't do anything else during capture like surf the web or whatever. that should go without saying, but you never know...

[Betamax]

Don't look further !
As I have already tried, with ASUS's Combo and Pinacle's DC10+; capture only works in Windows9x and WinME.
Forget about WinNT4 and Win2K. The problem is just that all capture-cards have bad drivers for NT-environments, forcing to use the standard VfW-drivers. This results in many, many lost frames.
To solve this, you do not have any other choice than install Win98(se) or WinME at your system.

You will see, the problem will be solved, as soon you use Win98 or -ME!
The cause is that not only VfW is choppy, but in NT a lot of other things are running in the background (taking away valueble processortime, which you need to precess the many data of the capture). Also, most lost frames are caused because the sound cannot follow the video-stream.
To keep a bit synchronized, VDub will drop a lot of frames, so the video gets synchrone with the Audio.
There isn't a solution for this, except if you would use a capture device that does its own audio-capture (not via the soundcard at your system).

[ironwood321]

If you are capturing from an analogue source I recommend using a tool such as avi_io this is worth its registration fee as its a capture program which won't burden your machine when capturing. The codec you should use is huffyuv and you should capture in uncompressed audio. 352x576 PAL or 352x480 NTSC if you are capturing from video. Full resolution if capturing from live footage 640x480 NTSC 768x576 PAL. You need a fast processor 800mb+ and hard disk with a lot of space about 20GB. Capture your footage and resize if necessary and then re-encode / edit using something like virtual dub and save as divx+mp3 or mpeg.
Remember when reducing use bilinear and when increasing use bicubic smart filter. Also you might want to use smart deiniterlace to make your captures progressive by deinterlacing.

With the ATI card I experence problems at 720x576 scince the All in wonder 32mb 128 pro card ATI rewrote the software and used custom hardware. As a result its software spend most proccesing downsizing from 768 to 720 or upsizing from 640 to 720. The all in wonder 16mb version ok has it uses brooktree hardware.

Do as I did get a cheap BT878 or 879 card with video inputs from say a car boot sale or something. Track down generic drivers and you should have no problem. The Cybertaiment card not that bad if you don't mind lack of tuner.

Disable virus killer and screensave and low power settings then end task everything except explorer and systray. Right clcik and show properties of mycompter on the desktop, select performace and set your type of computer to network server. this increases priority to the hard disk.

You did register your avi_io and not download an old cracked version as there have been a lot of bug fixes related to ati cards.

[etchris]

Hi!!

I have the AIW Radeon as some of you have. Bought a 40GB 60GXP IBM to do the capture in Raw AVI or with some lossless codec like Huffyuv to reduce the size.


1. In ATI's MMC 7.1, 3211 Beta driver under Win2K Professional, I can capture using the UYVY native format which is rated at 20 megabytes/second at full resolution of 704x576. No dropped frames and excellence quality.

2. Same setup, but with Huffyuv codec 2.1.1 without any check in the options (settings of the codec in Hardware device) but using the best setting under the RGB option dropdown list. at about 8.8 megabytes/second at 704x576 I have no dropped frames at all, unless I move some things, which I shouldn't in the first place.

3. Using the same setup, but Virtual Dub to capture, wrapper installed. Set to various compressions from No Recompression, Uncompressed to Divx etc etc, dropped frames like no tomorrow even if I know that I have no DMA on for my Promise ATA onboard controller, which surprisingly did 20 megabytes/second in the ATI.


I have a Duron 750mhz which can go as far as 975mhz on a 130mhz FSB, but display of video encoded/captured show artifacts due to possible AGP bus sensitivity. All tests are done through the 750mhz default speed with 512MB PC133 CAS 3-3-3 setting.

TV capture is excellence as what I see, although TV Tuner is not so good as TV itself....... S-Video input seems grainy from the miniDV Camcorder.

Cheers

[ebaldino]

Hi all.

I recently found out that with Virtualdub when I zeroed all of the buffers (under Capture->Settings) and disabled the windows write buffering (under Capture->DiskIO), Virtualdub suddenly began to like my machine! I was then able to capture at 720x480 with no dropped frames at all, whereas before it was dropping frames like it was going out of style...

This happens both under W2K and W98.
Don´t listen to naysayers about W2K. I have a dual boot system and hardly ever try to do anything under W98 anymore. Everything works under W2K, although sometimes you have to be stubborn about it.

FYI I have 500PIII, 256Mb, 45Gb UDMA100, and AIW 128.

best regards
EBaldino