MPEG2 Hardware Encoder Capture Issues?

[aramkolt]

Hello all,

I'm working on comparing a variety of capture devices and methods and I've come across an older external USB capture card a Dell Angel USB TV Tuner. It has a fairly high build quality and even contains organic polymer SMT capacitors inside that will never go bad. Usually companies reserve those for higher end products as they cost anywhere between 5-10x as much as regular ones.

It hardware-encodes to an interlaced MPEG2 stream, so apparently traditional capture programs don't really know what to do with this since they are expecting uncompressed streams to then encode themselves.

I've downloaded the actual drivers and while the card is visible in all of the traditional capture programs like Virtualdub, iuVCR, VirtualVCR, etc, none of them will display a preview or allow recording in Windows XP. Crossbar does work to select the appropriate input and video standard.

What I'm told is that these originally came with with Dell Media Center Edition (MCE) machines, so they worked natively to capture through windows media center, but my understanding is that Media Center is not something that can be installed on top of a regular XP install and is basically its own operating system.

For some reason, An old trial version of PowerDirector 6 sees the card just fine (though is kind of stuttery probably due to the XP machine I'm using). I'm not sure if the more recent PowerDirector supports 20 year old cards like that, so I don't really want to pay for something that I'm just going to be trialing for testing purposes.

My question is if there's any sort of trick in general to get MPEG2 hardware encoders to work with any of the usual capture programs, or if there's any specific programs that are geared towards being able to identify that the card in question just needs to have the MPEG2 stream saved as is?

[lingyi]

I suspect your card may be MJPEG, an obsolete video format that was used in some early video capture devices. I had a Compaq Presario with built in video capture (160x120 @ 15FP/s!) that used MJPEG.

Standardisation

Unlike the video formats specified in international standards such as MPEG-2 and the format specified in the JPEG still-picture coding standard, there is no document that defines a single exact format that is universally recognized as a complete specification of “Motion JPEG” for use in all contexts. This raises compatibility concerns about file outputs from different manufacturers. However, each particular file format usually has some standard on how M-JPEG is encoded. For example, Microsoft documents their standard format to store M-JPEG in AVI files,[4] Apple documents how M-JPEG is stored in QuickTime files, RFC 2435 describes how M-JPEG is implemented in an RTP stream, and an M-JPEG CodecID is planned for the Matroska file format.[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_JPEG

[jwillis84]

Uses an NEC chip, built-in TBC. Its unique in that it produced MPEG-PS not MPEG-TS, so the recording are TBC and stablized as delivered to the file system complete. Not many people today would bother with them since in the USA they were imported by Dell and targeted with a Microsoft certified device driver up through 64 bit for Windows 7 and intended to partner with the Windows Media Center.

I haven't tracked if they ever removed the native Windows device driver up through Windows 10, but they left the legacy Firewire device driver in, so its probably still there. I could check but haven't really looked in years.

As for third party, the Monsoon SnappySoft software works with it fine. Its probably got the most comprehensive suite of controls perfectly matched to the device of any capture program ever made. But the software is no longer sold, the company ran afoul of the GNU GPL licensing of some of its components and decided to cease sales and development rather than deal with the licensing. You can still download the Monsoon Snappysoft installer and it will detect and let you interact with it, this software works on Win7 with problems. You can use it with XP. You can also use it with WinXP Mode on Win7, 8, 10, 11 if you load the Win XP image in Oracle VirtualBox and use its USB device pass thru on those later operating systems. Win XP Mode is BIOS activated so its portable using VirtualBox to later operating systems. But WinXP mode is only officially licensed for use on Windows 7. The fact it still works on newer and faster hardware is an unintended accident on Microsofts part.




You can also use GraphEdit to load its device driver and decode or record from the device, but you have to configure the MPEG-2 Demultiplexer manually in GraphEdit. The stream IDs are a little unusual. 0xE0 for video 0xC0 for audio. The Output is as said MPEG2-PS and 48 KHz Stereo. There is a TV Tuner component if you need to manually switch channels, there were multiple models, some NTSC only, some NTSC + ATSC some for Europe.. mostly though that is not of interest today.





OBS Studio won't deal with the retconned "standards" for streams today, its not flexible enough to allow you to set the stream IDs. I know of no easy to use shim for mapping them for you.. which comes to the final point.


AMCap works with it just fine, the XP version or the later versions for Win 7, 8, 10 and however far it goes. It costs money but its worth it. You (Do) have to go to Options > Video Device > Properties to launch the crossbar abd select "Default" to reset the Bright, Contrast, ect.. to see an image the device driver defaults to zero and it appears there is no image until its reset to Device Defaults and that makes the video image appear.






http://noeld.com/


Audio can make some pops and clicks while previewing due to USB hardware and operating system playback performance while its recording, but they don't show up in the actual recorded file when its played back. Weirdly AMcap will record to a .ts file which implies MPEG2-TS, but if you check the file streams with MediaINFO it will report the streams in the file as MPEG-PS like it should be.


Since its MPEG-PS audio/video drift or de-sync is not expected, I've never personally experienced it.. but I think to be part of the old Windows Media Player tuner list it had to be rather immune to de-sync.


You can setup Windows Media Center to use it as a Satellite Box with an S-Video or Composite Input and then use Media Center to record to its native .wtv or other formats .dvr-ms ect.. you might then want to use something like Wonderfox to convert it into other formats or file container formats, .mp4 or .mkv




AmarecTV can't deal with the stream mappings.


I would "guess" VLC could deal with the mappings based on its unique libavcodec use.. in theory.. but I've never mapped the pins correctly.


thats a quick summary of the options i know of.. but its not my first choice to record things these days.

[jwillis84]

I guess I should have been more explicit about OBS Studio.. it is a native Streamer tool.. so it deals only with uncompressed frames or h.264 sources.. it would need a transcoder to handle an MPEG-2 stream.. and I don't know how you could do that.. possibly with VLC as a frame server.. or some other ancient frame server tool.. I think VirtualDub would frame serve.. and I Think VirtualDub-MPEG2 included MPEG-2 support.. but it was a branch and controversial at the time.

VirtualDub-MPEG2 comes the closest to actually working with the Angel USB device driver, it constructs a graph that can be seen with GraphEdit remote.. but declines to preview or capture the video on the basis of not being able to start the graph. What is wrong is the MPEG-2 Demultiplexer is not setting up the stream IDs correctly so it doesn't understand how to decode the stream based on the device selected. I don't know how to correct that without modifying the source code and recompiling, or adding in a feature that allows manual selection of the audio and video streams by ID.

VirtualDub is very old, I have gone back and constructed a Visual C++ build tree and compiled it before.. but its no cake walk. The mere idea of doing this to support MPEG-2 is kind of odd.. a 1995 standard in nearly 2025. The 1980's were closer in time space.

I guess I'm saying it can be done, VirtualDub can be taught to use the Angel USB in 2024 .. but really.. I'll be out of the country most of next week. Maybe someday I'll poke at it.

edit: OBS Studio can use VLC as a source.. not sure its worth it though.. and there is the pin mapping scheme. I would just use the Windows Media Center option first, the AMCap if you want a standalone app .. and explore VirtualDub-MPEG2 if you have a lot of time and really wanted to.. ffdshow should also be able to handle mapping the stream ids .. but you might as well use GraphEdit. Probably Windows Media Center should be the go to tool for using it up through Win10.

[Alwyn]

jwillis, what a post (x2)! Great effort.

[jwillis84]

jwillis, what a post (x2)! Great effort.

thanks


i was just thinking about how many capture apps recognize the Angel USB "MPEG Device" but never bother to configure the Angel USB "Encoder"

That implies they aren't bothering to load it, or the Angel USB Encoder is not registered in the Merit list for the output format of the Angel USB MPEG Device Output Pin.. if thats the case then its no wonder they don't load the MPEG-2 Demultiplexer.

It makes me wonder if one could "trick" more capture apps into using it.. if the output format of the MPEG Device were associated in the Merit list for the Angel USB Encoder.

I'm not a regular DVB programmer and know only enough about DirectShow to make myself queasy.

GraphEdit2 or Next GraphEdit might be the places to play around with that idea.

it would be cool if a registry hack could make it more generally useful.. I could be selling generic capture software short.

ugh.. i got so much to do.. can't think about this anymore