VCR Capture

[tassaido]

Hi

I am literally tearing my hair out over this one. I have hooked up my VCR to my capture card (Nebula Digitv) and it plays fine. The problem is through capture.

I first started with VirtualDub and although when it manages to capture properly things seem fine, it more often then not crashes during the capture process, which I think is due to my card being WDM rather than VFW. I also believe I have the VFWWDM wrapper installed although when I try to select my capture device it picks up my capture card rather than the wrapper which I thought would be listed separately. Even when I do manage to get a complete capture (30 mins or so), it ALWAYS crashes on trying to edit the video (eg trim, append etc)

I have then tried VirtualVCR, which does not crash at all, no dropped frames but the audio sync is terrible (no so in VirtualDub). I currently capture in max resolution but if I try a smaller resolution on play back the picture is heavily distorted, so that method seems to be out. Most reports I read from people suggest they can get fine sync at least for a large part of their capture - mine is out from the start and progressively gets worse.

One method I tried to resync was using "adjust frame rate to match audio and video" which I think is the third option under the Video-Frame Rate option in VDub. It worked on a very small clip but not at all on the full length clip. Perhaps I need to be more sophisticated on my treatment of this problem?

If anyone has any suggestions on alternative WDM capture tools or might think it is the capture card itself I would be grateful

FYI 2.6Ghz P4, 512 RAM, Soundblaster 2 Audigy soundcard, PicVideo MJPEG codec, PCM audio compression are my hardware/settings

[ToiletBowlGuy]

i used amcap 2.72 cause it lets me capture directly to divx... when i play it in windows media player, the audio is in perfect sync with the video but when i try to encode it to mpg with tmpgenc it goes out of sync...

i have the amcap master stream setting to audio... when i set it to video, the audio gradually goes out of sync as the video goes on...

unfortunately, i am able to go back and install my old VFW drivers so i can use virtualdub but it freezes on me... it gets annoying when i capture an hour worth of stuff and its almost finished then it freezes and i have to start all over... i use a wintv go pci card...

i think the newest version of amcap doesn't let you compress your avi file... you can find 2.72 at http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/

[tassaido]

Thanks for that. I shall try your AMCAP suggestion. I have recently tried AVI_IO capture program. Roughly 10% dropped frames, which I believe is quite high, but as yet have not seen what it looks like on a DVD when burned. At least it does not crash during capture! If anyone has any suggestions on whether this dropped frame rate can be reduced I would be glad to hear it.

A slight side issue. I have attached a picture of the VirtualDub error I keep getting, both when capturing and editing my capture. If anyone has seen before and has any suggestions as to why it occurs would be gald to hear it

[racerxnet]

tassaido,

What are your specs on your PC, and are you set up to properly capture at the maximum capabilities of your setup? How much of your system recources are you using when capturing. The Via chipsets have a known latency issue which has been addressed with George Breese and the 1.05 patch from Via. There are some excellent articles on how to maximise your box for this application. As an example from me, I have modded the Soyo board with the added capacitor and the removal of C130. After the mods I can run a XP 2400 Tbred at 140 x 16.5. Also installed the Lumberjack bios for full raid on one of the boards. The other has the 3ware 6800 card which is even better for capture to the hard drive. Other modds are Crucial pc 2700, good cooling, and other tweaks to the system resources. Your software install could be the culprit also as you have noted. I just have a habit to make sure the ducks are in a row before capturing video to the HD.

Thanks MAK

[tassaido]

racernet

Thank you for your reply. I think I should have put my question in the newbie section because I understand about 10% of your reply.

Not knowing what specs you want to hear, here goes some

P4 2.6Ghz, 512MB Ram, 80 GB hard drive using UDMA (at lease it says so in Win XP), Nebula Digitv card, Composite video in, Soundblaster Audigy 2 card. Using VirtDub with 720x586, PicVideo MJPEG compressor with quality 19; RGB24 format (error message saying cannot handle if I choose another), PCM 44100 Khz, stereo 172KB/s sound compression/quality.

I did the other night enable the DirectDraw option (both fields) and did not get an error while capturing - whether that was by luck or design I don't know but will monitor since the other setting I have mentioned have been used before.

Hope this helps