Picvideo interlace help needed.

[EAO]

I upgraded my PC and installed all the capturing hardware/software that was on my old PC.

I'm now using a 2700+ cpu, nforce2 motherboard, 512 meg ram pc3200, Winfast 2000xp deluxe tv card, Virtual VCR, Windows XP Pro.

The good news: No dropped frames using either Picvideo Mjpeg or Huffyuv.

The bad news: PicVideo now has interlacing problems I cannot solve.

This codec worked fine using default settings on my old PC. Set it to 19 and it worked all day long.

But now I have jaggies and horizontal bars that run through the .avi capture whether there is motion or not. It is very noticable with overlayed words/captions on the video. Like the kind you see if capturing a news broadcast.

I have tried every setting that I think is possible with MJPEG, and from searching the threads I know that my settings look right. I have tried reversing the fields - once - but that did not work.

The only way to remove the the horizontal bars is by unchecking '2 fields if more than 240 lines'. While I'm at work, I'm capping an hour this way(on timer) that I will check out later on, but everything I read says that this will reduce my quality.

I'm wondering if I'm missing a setting in Virtual VCR, but I have looked at every tab and button. And If I had missed a setting then why would huffyuv cap perfectly?

When I convert from the avi to mpeg using TMPGenc plus, the horizontal bars/banding remains. TMPGenc recognizes the avi as interlaced.

I really don't want to use Huffyuv because it takes up a lot of my 120 gig hd. There are times I like to cap for 5 hours and Huffyuv just wont fit.

My source is Sat TV and my destination is full or half dvd.

[FulciLives]

If I check the SMART TEE video preview option then I get all kinds of wierd looking interlaced field order problems.

If I uncheck it then I get no problems what-so-ever.

So make sure SMART TEE is off and don't use preview at all ... or at least turn it off prior to starting the capture.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[EAO]

You know I didn't think about it until you posted it. On my old PC - an 1800+, I turned smart tee off because of cpu usage.

I'm in the process of converting the avi to mpeg from earlier today. I'll post the results and try your suggestion afterwards.

Thanks for the response.

[The_Doman]

Did you try to change the field order in the PICVIDEO MJPEG settings?
Use the Swap Fields option for that.

It depends on the driver/codec combination which option you need.

MMM, You tried that already I read, maybe you can make a screenshot of the problem..

[junkmalle]

I think The_Doman is right. Change the codec's "Swap Decompress Fields" setting.

This isn't the same as the usual field order A/B issue. In an AVI file the scanlines are normally in order (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6...) regardless of the field order -- field order is just a flag that tells the player whether to display the odd or even scanlines first (on an interlaced display).

Some video capture cards (Matrox Rainbow Runner and Marvel series) actually store the scanlines in the wrong order. Instead of sequentially (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6...), each pair of scanlines is reversed (2, 1, 4, 3, 6, 5...). PicVideo's MJPEG codec fixes this by swapping the scanlines back into order while decompressing. The HUFFYUV codec has a similar option.

[EAO]

sorry to say that closing the preview did not work. I'll run extensive tests on swapping the field.