weird problem, ATI AIW 9000 Does not capture right bitrate!

[darkhunter]

Ok, here is my situation.

Ran for about 6mo a pc, P4 3ghz, win xp, and a ati aiw 9000 videocard.

I loved it, that card makes capturing tv easy!

But.... last week I decided to clear out my pc (I usually do about every 6mop to keep things running smooth) I formatted my hard drive, re-installed winxp pro, installed my usual programs like nero, tempeg, and ati of course, however now it does not work correctly!!!

I'm wanting to capture in mpeg 2, dvd standard, bit rate varies depending on how many episodes I want to fit on a disc, but I usually cap at 2-3mb

However no matter what bitrate I select it will not encode at that! For example, no matter what I do, a 45min clip or so comes in at like 700mb.

I can have it set at like 6mb which should make a huge clip, but it still records this small little file. It's gets weirder though, when I look at that clips properties in tmpeg dvd author it says it's what I selected. It will say 720X480 resolution, 6 or whatever mb. But there's no way 45 min of video, 700mb in size can be that high of bitrate, and it sure did not look it.

I dunno, I am just freaking out here, is my card broke? I did search on ati, and bitrate, and wrong bitrate, but could not find any relevant posts. If anyone has heard of a problem like this, or knows the solution, please, please let me know or point me in the right direction!

[Sulik]

This is most likely because of VBR encoding. If you're encoding from a clean source with not a lot of motion and/or black borders, it will automatically generate a low bitrate file.
The only way to guarantee a high bitrate would be to use CBR encoding, but you'll just waste bits (a lot of your extra size will be because of zero padding in the MPEG file).

PS: What version of MMC are you using ?

[darkhunter]

I initially used the most recent from ati's website, 9.0, but when I saw the problem, I uninstalled and went back to the 8.1 on the cd it came with but still same problem.

The thing is i'm just trying to do the same old stuff that I did before that worked. just capping tv. Had no problem getting the exact bitrate I wanted until now.

I made sure everything was up to date, I got all my windows updates, direct x, etc.

[Sulik]

Are you sure you didn't configure the preset to split at 700MB ?
Did you try CBR ?
700MB for 45mins is about 2Mbps. If you ask for 4Mbps CBR, you should get [almost] exactly a 1.5GB file for 45mins.

[darkhunter]

nope got it set to windows limit, which i got ntsf so it should be unlimited.
I can go over 700 too 1 file I did was about 50min, came out around 800 but I had it set at 7mb.

I did not try the cbr, I heard that was wrse quality??? I guess if I have no choice will give that a try, I just don't get what would cause the card to stop performing with vbr. Is the card just going bad??

[darkhunter]

Yeah CBR seems to work, I just did a couple few min clips.
Too hard to see if there is a difference in quality yet, I 'll probably burn them to a dvd and see how they look.

I just don't get why I cannot to VBR anymore. The source is good, it's digital cable from an hdtv digitial cable box.

[darkhunter]

Ok, CBR does not help!

Because I was doing like small clips (30-60 sec.) it seemed like the files were bigger but I discovered right where the trouble is!

It goes bad right at 30seconds into the recording!

No matter what you set it on if you watch the time left to record, like it will start out as 1 day 22hr and stay steady, then 30 seconds into the recording, wham it starts dropping! 2day, later on up to 4 day, you can tell it 's switching to a lower bit rate. It does this be it CBR or VBR!!!

What on earth could be causing this!? I just reformatted the system so there is not much installed on it. And and it's (well I thought) a darn powerful machine. It's p4 3ghz, 1gb ram, 7200rpm 8mb cache HD.

What could be causing the performance drop or is the card just bad?

[Sulik]

Are you dropping frames ? (you can right click to display the # of frames recorded)