Capturing From Satellite

[reckless67]

Hi I am new to capturing and I am looking at capturing from my ExpressVu satellite receiver and then making dvds in the end. My system is Asus 9600XT, AMD @ 2.2Ghz, 512 DDR, 1 Seagate 120GB SATA, 1 WD 120GB ATA100 8MB cache, and 1 WD 120GB ATA100 2 MB cache.
I have tried VirtualDub using the Huffyuv and Picvideo codecs @ 720x480 res 29.797 fps but I keep losing frames. Should I just capture right to MPEG-2?
If I was to capture right to MPEG-2 what is the best program to use to get the best quality?

Any help for a newb is appreciated.

Thanks

[Tommyknocker]

Try capturing at 352 x 480 or 352 x 240. Also, try to turn off every application not in use, and do not touch your system while caturing. Also, if you can add RAm, do that as well.

[oldfart13]

I have a similar system but went the standalone DVD recorder route. My process is to cap using the recorder, edit on the recorder, copy to DVD-RAM (I have a Panasonic E80), copy to PC HDD, author with TMPGEnc DVD Author (accepts the DVD-RAM VRO file as well as AC-3 sound), burn with Nero 5.5.10. Couldn't be simpler and I got rid of all the problems I had with capping to a PC. Rundown of time:

2 hours to record programs
5 - 15 minutes to edit material
30 min. to transfer to DVD-RAM
30 min. to transfer to PC HDD
10 - 30 minutes to Author DVD
15 minutes to burn to DVD-+R (4X Pioneer A05 or LG 4040B)
DONE

[lordsmurf]

The source of Bell is almost always 480x480 (or so says my Canadian dish source, and I believe him). So 352x480 would be a fine capture, maybe 704x480 if you really want to.

Look and see if you can use MainConcept 1.4 to capture. Download the trial from www.mainconcept.com ... avoid PowerVCR and WinDVR/WinDVD Recorder.

[reckless67]

Lordsmurf, thanks for the info, I have downloaded MainConcept, but what Video/Audio compression should I use? Also under Color Space/Compression, what is the difference between UYVY and YUY2?.
I tried 480x480, and 352x288 with both the Huffyuv and Picvideo MJPEG compressions with audio being PCM. I shut everything down that I can see in task manager, and I am still losing frames.

Thanks for your help.

[FulciLives]

Lordsmurf, thanks for the info, I have downloaded MainConcept, but what Video/Audio compression should I use? Also under Color Space/Compression, what is the difference between UYVY and YUY2?.
I tried 480x480, and 352x288 with both the Huffyuv and Picvideo MJPEG compressions with audio being PCM. I shut everything down that I can see in task manager, and I am still losing frames.

Thanks for your help.

Something is not right here because I can capture NTSC (704x480 at 29.970fps) and not get dropped frames on a P3 650 Mhz 256MB RAM computer.

So in short your computer should NOT have any trouble capturing in regards to dropped frames.

What type of capture card are you using? Does it use VFW or WDM drivers?

If it uses WDM drivers then try TheFlyDS or iuVCR or even VirtualVCR

BTW I mostly use PICVideo MJPEG on the 19 quality setting and of course PCM 16-bit 48k Stereo Audio.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

P.S.
I have WinXP and 2 HDD and capture to the second HDD (not the "boot" drive with Windows on it).

[bottle-necked]

Your system is fast enough to capture 720x480 no problems is setup properly.

I'd start over with my system and video/capture drivers. I have seen a single driver cause loads of trouble on capture. Finding the problem drive/drivers might/will be a problem.

It's best to start from scratch and rebuilt Windows back up testing your captures along the way. That's the fastest way. When you install the problem driver your system will start dropping frames and your CPU usage percent will go way up. Or, when you upgrade the problem driver your problem will go away. Either way, it sounds like a conflict to me.

Good luck

[reckless67]

FulciLives, I am using the Asus 9600XT w/ Video In to do my capturing, which uses the ATI Rage Theater chip. I use the Catalyst 3.10 drivers from ATI, not the Asus ones. (not sure if that matters?) I take it this uses WDM drivers?

bottle-necked, I think I will take your advice, and reload Windows.

Am I right in saying that the catpure drivers go in with the Catalyst drivers? I don't think I need to use the drivers from Asus do I? It's a Radeon 9600XT card so I don't see any problem using the Catalyst drivers.

Under "Sound, video, and game controllers" I have "ATI WDM Rage Theater Video" drivers, also "Legacy Video Capture Drivers", and "ATI WDM Specialized MVD Codec"

I'm not sure what software is best for me to use with this card, or what mode to capture in (AVI or MPEG-2).

Thanks for all your help.

Steve

[bottle-necked]

reckless67, your system is plenty fast to capture both MPEG and AVI video. This hast to be a driver issue. Either its a system driver, sound driver, or video driver. It may be very hard to find or easy to find. You may need to use a standard Windows driver or a supplied driver. It's going to depend upon your 'combination of parts and software'.

I don't know which chipset you have, but I had a VIA chipset in my old system and it had problems. It took me a lot of work to figure out what was wrong. Why I recommended you install from scratch is because that's how I finally fixed my system. I did a clean install, installed my video card from it's factory disk, then ran some capture test. Note CPU usage, video quality, and audio sync of your captures. It's a good idea to also watch hdd activity. Windows XP lets you monitor all these items and knowing them will let you find the problem driver. That can do it too. Been there.

As you install and upgrade system drivers (one at a time) you'll know, just by watching these reading, when you find the problem. Even before viewing the captured file, guaranteed. Just keep notes so you can avoid this problem driver in future installs.

Good luck

[reckless67]

bottle-necked, I am using the nForce2 chipset, and I am using the nVidia 3.13 chipset drivers.
I just reloaded windows, then installed the nVida 3.13 drivers, then the video drivers off the Asus cd that came with my card. I installed iuvcr and the Picvideo and Huffyuv codecs. I tried iuvcr with the Picvideo, but it won't let me choose anything other than the UYVY Color format/Compression, which only allows me to go up to 320x240 frame size?
I also tried Vdub @ 720x480 using the Picvideo, 29fps, 44Khz stereo, and i still am dropping frames.
It definitely isn't too much cpu usage, that i have verified, and I don't think it's a hard drive speed issue either.
It must be a driver issue, but i can't find out what one, unless it's something with the nVidia chipset driver? Or I guess it could be the video/wdm drivers from ati, but they are the ones that come on the driver disk.
I am at a loss, don't know where to go next.

Thanks

[bottle-necked]

Dropping frames with your system with a 320x240 AVI capture is sad. You've got something badddddd wrong.

HDD speed: You HDDs need to be on their own channel. Don't have HDDs on the same cable as a DVD or CDR drive. That will kill your speed.

Windows XP installs some pretty decent IDE drivers by default, but check and make certain your motherboards supplied drivers are installed. Sometimes it's hard to get Windows to except them. Check your Primary IDE Channel (where your HDDs should be) and make certain it's using Ultra DMA Mode 5.

VirtualDub has a neat little program supplied with it called auxsetup.exe. Run it and do the benchmark drive test on all your drives. For a reference I just did and my drive C: was 656410KB/s and 27483KB/s, and my Raid-0 array gave 812698KB/s and 44252KB/s. (substained read-substained write). I dont' have any problems so check your drives. You should be close to my C: drive readings. It's fast enough to capture 720x480 AVI/HuffYUV. (6.4MB/s.. give or take a few k.)

Everything I've ready about nVidia chipsets has been positive. Maybe it's just a conflict with something else. Most troubleshooting articles I've read says to have the latest drivers and BIOS but I find that's not always good advice. It depends upon 'your collection of parts and software' as to what needs upgraded and what doesn't. That means its going to take some testing to find out for sure. I did it and I finally got it working right. Now I've upgraded the major components in my system and may haft to do it again. My tests so far has all been good so maybe not too much changing.

Got to go for now.
Good luck.

[Gritz]

Don't know your motherboard but I see 3 hard drives and I suspect a cdrom or dvd writer attached also making at least 4 units. This means a couple of storage units riding on secondary channels which may or may not cause problems. An older motherboard might limit the speed of the 3rd hard drive to the speed of the cdrom/writer (which would probably be on the same ide) .... which would not be good. For testing you might try capturing to the second drive on the primary channel and just unplugging the ide cable of the secondary channel. Also defrag the hard drives ... If you're set up right you shouldn't have any problems with this system.

[reckless67]

ok, I think I may have found my problem. My motherboard supports 4 IDE devices on 2 channels, and also 4 SATA devices using the onboard Silicon Image Sil3114 PCI to Serial ATA controller. My setup is as follows, 2 Hard drives on the primary IDE port, 1st one being the Master (WD 120JB 7200 8MB cache) which is partitioned into 20/100, the 20GB being my c drive and where WInXP resides. The other 100GB are for spare/backup stuff. The other drive on this channel is a slave, WD 120BB 7200 2MB cache which is also a backup drive. The secondary ide channel has a DVD-R/RW drive as the master, and a DVD-ROM drive as a slave.
The 3rd hard drive is a Seagate SATA 120GB drive on the first SATA port. This drive is empty, and is the drive I dedicated for capturing.
One thing I did do was turn off the System Restore on all drives, not sure if this really helped, but I will look into that further.
When I was capturing with Vdub, I would always set the capture file to go on the Seagate drive. By mistake I forgot to set it to that drive and it defaulted to my C (WinXP) drive, and I wasn't dropping frames, except for the odd 1 every few minutes, which I read was due to the separate sound/video capturing devices? I read about Virtualdubsync, so I decided to try it, but it was worse. Maybe I wasn't setting it up properly?
So anyway, it looks like there may be a problem with the Silicon Image drivers for the SATA channels. It seems every 20-30sec something is either accessing that drive, or it's a problem with the drivers. Until I can figure this out I am just going to move my backups to the Seagate drive and use one of the WD drives.
I have tested the speed of all dives too, and the Seagate comes out as the fastest?
I will post back after I do this.

Does anyone have any recomendations on my drive configuration, and also the Pagefile.

Thanks for your help.

[OkAtanAdam]

I noticed that If I use a VirtualDub version other than v1.4.10.13870, I have extraordinary Frame Drops, even with the Huffyuv Compressor...
Of course, I haven't tried them all but that one works good for me...

You might want to try that specific Version...
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=9649

I'm using an old AIW 128Pro on a P3-733...
Along with the WDM driver...
And my PicSize setting is 400x300 with Canadian Broadcasters feeds...
This might sound as an odd setting, but as long as you respect the 4:3 standard rule, you shouldn't have any problem...

[spiderman2k1]

Get a Dazzle 2 read more about it at www.dazzlegeek.com best MPEG 2 capture card

[reckless67]

Well, I decided to do some more testing. I just happen to have a spare SATA card (Promise SATA150 TX2 Plus), so I put it in, connected the Seagate to it, installed the latest drivers, and well, looks like the onboard SATA is my problem. I am still dropping a frame every few minutes, which I guess isn't that bad anyway.

bottle-necked, I tried the auxsetup in Vdub, and it seems wierd, but the C drive has the best sustained write, beating the Seagate drive by a couple MB/s. I am about the same as your C drive too.

Thanks

[Bodysurf]

Does anyone have any recomendations on my drive configuration

Put every HD/IDE device on its own controller, especially in situations where you need maximum HD thoroughput.

My own system is set up this way:

Primary IDE controller on MB: 120GB WD 7200 SE ATA-100 drive set to master.
Secondary IDE controller on MB: 120GB WD 7200 SE ATA-100 drive set to master.
Primary IDE controller on Promise UltraTX2 100: 200GB WD 7200 SE ATA-100 drive set to master
Secondary IDE controller on Promise UltraTX2 100: 16X LiteOn DVD-ROM drive set to master.

And if I need more HDs, then I'd throw another Promise controller in there. SerialATA has it right when it only allows one device per controller.

Note: There is only ONE device per controller -- that is, I never use slave drives. This allows each controller full and exclusive access to the HDs and the controllers are never "fighting" for access to a HD because some other device is using it. IDE, unlike SCSI/FC-AL, does NOT allow multiple devices to be firing simultaneously on a single controller without a significant performance hit.

If you are still dropping frames, which you shouldn't, then consider RAID-0 for capturing.

[bottle-necked]

reckless

That 120BB (your slave drive) is a good drive, but it's not as good as that 120JB drive for capturing video. The JB has a larger buffer and it's WD's Special Edition made for that purpose. Either drive is fast enough to capture video without any problems.

Your SATA drive is your fastest drive and I'd fix its driver problem and use it for capture. Format it NTSF w/64k allocation size and turn off restore to that drive.

Finding what is causing that conflict is going to take some time. Since your drive speed tests looks good then your problem might be caused by a service or autorun program. If so then that's easy to fix.

I usually streamline Windows the best I can and I don't let any autorun program start that I don't need. You may want to do the same thing.

Another simple test. Run 'perfmon.msc' and add a counter for each of your hard drives. Just right click in the lower part of the screen, choose Add Counter, choose Physical Disk, Disk Bytes/S, and add one counter for each hard drive. Start your capture program and begin a big capture. Switch to Performance Monitor (perfmon.msc) and monitor what's going on. For a big AVI capture you will need to change the Vertical Scale on the Graph so you can see the upper limit of the write by using Properties. Your capture drive should write smoothly on this graph. The 'tune' of your system will reflect in that graph.

Good luck and keep trying. You'll have it Rock'n in no time.

Fill out your system profile..... ok

[reckless67]

Well i've got my dropped frame problem fixed, using the Seagate drive on the Promise card, it's been working great in various programs.
I've got one question about video compression, I see what looks like horizontal lines or grains when there is fast motion happening in the video. I'm using the PicVideo MJPEG @ quality of 20, subsampling 1/1/1, 2 fields if more than 240 lines. I got these settings from one of the guides on this site.
I still have alot to learn now on proper compression/settings for what I am trying to accomplish.
I've tried VirtualDub, mainconcept and virtualvcr all using the picvideo codec. I also tried mainconcept using the mainconcept mpeg encoder, but i'm not sure if i set it up properly, and it was ok.

I appreciate all your help.

[FulciLives]

Well i've got my dropped frame problem fixed, using the Seagate drive on the Promise card, it's been working great in various programs.
I've got one question about video compression, I see what looks like horizontal lines or grains when there is fast motion happening in the video. I'm using the PicVideo MJPEG @ quality of 20, subsampling 1/1/1, 2 fields if more than 240 lines. I got these settings from one of the guides on this site.
I still have alot to learn now on proper compression/settings for what I am trying to accomplish.
I've tried VirtualDub, mainconcept and virtualvcr all using the picvideo codec. I also tried mainconcept using the mainconcept mpeg encoder, but i'm not sure if i set it up properly, and it was ok.

I appreciate all your help.

I was under the impression that when using the PICVideo MJPEG codec that the best setting for the sampling was 4:2:2 as opposed to 4:1:1 or 1:1:1

Am I wrong?

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[nizar]

i have captured movies from satellite with my 8500 aiw magic card it really does wonders and made dvd from sonic my dvd 4.0 no problem not one frame drop to capture from dv camera i use dv studio 8 great programe and also make direct dvd from it

[Bodysurf]

I've got one question about video compression, I see what looks like horizontal lines or grains when there is fast motion happening in the video.

What motherboard (and chipset) are you using? Are the lines green in color?