BT878 720x480 troubles

[Venner]

I'm getting rather aggrevated now...

Setup: SVHS unit (svideo) to BT878 based PCI card. Capturing raw or huffyuv.
Tried Virtualdub and a couple other programs. BTwincap driver on WinXP Pro.
Goal: Transfer to DVD @ 720x480 NTSC.

I can capture video fine at 29.97 fps at any resolution up to about 360x480.
For 720x480 & 640x480 at anything more than 10-12 fps I get interlacing problems. When there is a scene change, parts of the last field seem to hang around for up to 30 more frames (not necessarily the same parts on each frame either!.) Also some motion problems.

720x480 looks pretty good at 10fps, even with a lot of motion. Really vexing. Is it some sort of bandwidth issue on the PCI bus?!?

What puzzling to me is that, if I do an overlay at 720x480, it looks fine. As soon as I start the capture, it gets the horizontal lines. I'm capturing to an NTFS Serial ATA RAID-0 array with two 160Gb disks, so I think that can be ruled out as the culprit.

Any ideas?

[gshelley61]

Download and try VirtualVCR. It's a free capturing program that usually works well with those types of cards.

[FulciLives]

I have an AverTV Stereo capture card and I've used the Avermedia driver as well as the BTwincap driver.

Most "stock" drivers (like the one provided by Avermedia) needs a NTSC capture resolution of 688x480 to have the correct resolution for a DVD (you pad it out from 688 to 720 for your DVD encoding).

The BTwincap driver gives a perfect aspect ratio at 712x480 for NTSC ... I would then normally crop to 704 then pad to 720

Either way I can capture 688x480 or 712x480 without issues when using PICVideo MJPEG and this on a WinXP Pro 650Mhz P3 with 256MB RAM.

A slow computer by today's standards.

Maybe you don't have the BTwincap driver installed correctly? I know I had some trouble with it before I got it to work correctly although I am currently using the Avermedia drivers with my AverTV Stereo. I find it works better and despite the fact that I miss 16 pixels on either side of the image it really doesn't matter because that is still outside the TV safe area thanks to TV overscan.

So in short I think it might be a driver problem with the BTwincap driver. Either you set it up wrong (easy to do) or it doesn't like your card despite being a BT878 card.

BTW any WDM capture program should work well, My favorite is TheFlyDS but other popular choices include iuVCR and VirtualVCR with VirtualVCR being freeware!

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[snowyplover]

I had similar problem but not exactly same. My old setup was Athlon XP 2800+, Kworld Xpert DVD Maker PCI capture card, and nVidia Riva TNT PCI card. Anytime I set resolution equal or higher than SVCD with realtime software compression, the CPU utilization was reaching 100% and there was lot of dropped frames. I upgrade the video card to ATI Rage 128 Pro AGP 4X card, the CPU utilization was reduced to 60~70% at DVD resolution with no dropped frames.

You should have system to display CPU performance window at the same time, this will tell you whether it is bandwidth and CPU utlization problem or not.

P.S. Even I solved above problem, but sometime my system still crashed with blue screen. I have tried various capture programs, Kworld bundled (made by Honestech), Mainconcept, VirturalDub, Ulead MediaStudioPro 7 capture, etc... they all crashed sometime.

[iantri]

This is really odd.

Could you post a short (say, 2 second (60 frame)) Divx-encoded clip at a reasonable bitrate (say, 1500kbits) of the video so we can see exactly what is going on here?

Have you the latest chipset drivers/busmastering drivers?
I have experienced strange problems on one system with a BT878, btwincap drivers, and DMA. When DMA was enabled on the hard drives, I got strange interference. With it off, it worked fine (in that there was no interference. It did not work find in the sense that it captured OK, since turning off DMA drops the hard drives into PIO mode which is far too slow to capture at). I never quite worked out what was wrong; I put the card in another compter and it worked fine.

Try driver updates, though..

FulciLives; the whole bit about resolutions is a non-sequitor here -- yes, that is an issue, however a seperate one. Venner SHOULD be getting perfectly fine captures (just with the 8 pixel aspect error, of course).

[Venner]

Well, I fiddled around, and Virtual VCR helps...sortof. When I capture with it, I get constant banding on one part of the image. The part of the image affected depends on whether I capture it in RGB24 or YUV2 colorspace.

I put a couple of clips up for your perusal. No audio, divx4, about 2.5Mb each.
(If you don't want to grab the whole files, grab part, cancel, and avifix them.)

[Links removed]

Both were originally captured raw.

When I am capturing audio, I do it to the line-in on my Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. My system is an ASUS A7N8X deluxe with an AMD 2700+ and 1Gb of ram, so that shouldn't be a bottleneck either. (When capturing raw/huffyUV, cpu maxes out at about 22% and there are virtually no dropped frames.)

You know...it's been several years since I pulled out this card and looked at it. I thought it had a BT878 chip, but it might be the BT848. STB made cards with both. Wasn't the 848 band-limited near the top end or something?

Any more ideas?

-- Venner

[Venner]

Update: Yup, Sandra says it is a Brooktree 848. Or at least, that's what the driver says it is

[cd090580]

Most "stock" drivers (like the one provided by Avermedia) needs a NTSC capture resolution of 688x480 to have the correct resolution for a DVD (you pad it out from 688 to 720 for your DVD encoding).

The BTwincap driver gives a perfect aspect ratio at 712x480 for NTSC ... I would then normally crop to 704 then pad to 720

Either way I can capture 688x480 or 712x480 without issues when using PICVideo MJPEG and this on a WinXP Pro 650Mhz P3 with 256MB RAM.


- John "FulciLives" Coleman

And for a PAL resolution, does the same problem occurs ???

I have a WinTV Go (chip Conexant 878).

[FulciLives]

Most "stock" drivers (like the one provided by Avermedia) needs a NTSC capture resolution of 688x480 to have the correct resolution for a DVD (you pad it out from 688 to 720 for your DVD encoding).

The BTwincap driver gives a perfect aspect ratio at 712x480 for NTSC ... I would then normally crop to 704 then pad to 720

Either way I can capture 688x480 or 712x480 without issues when using PICVideo MJPEG and this on a WinXP Pro 650Mhz P3 with 256MB RAM.


- John "FulciLives" Coleman

And for a PAL resolution, does the same problem occurs ???

I have a WinTV Go (chip Conexant 878).

Well I found that with my AverTV Stereo PCI capture card (BT878 chipset) I need to capture NTSC at 688x480 (I add 16 black on either side to get to 720x480) but with PAL I need to capture at 696x576 (I add 12 black on either side to get to 720x576).

Those figures retain the original aspect ratio when I am using the official Avermedia driver for my card.

Now I have read that those figures most likely apply to most BT878 drivers otherthan the BTwincap driver ... I would assume BUT have no real knowledge that the iuLabs version of the BTwincap driver behaves the same ... at least one would think. That driver (specifically the BTwincap driver) is 712x480 for NTSC but I never tested it for PAL so I cannot comment on the correct PAL resolution.

However ... there is a website that has a really neat tool that you can use to test your combo of BT878 capture card and driver to determine the correct aspect ratio to capture in for Full D1 resolution be it NTSC or PAL.

The bad news is my boot drive crashed (hardware failure ... the drive died) and I lost all my internet bookmarks. This just happened a few days ago!

The good news is I will contact the person who had input on that website and I will either post the website here (once he gives it to me) or perhaps he will post himself with that info. I am going to PM him now! The person I am talking about here is known on this website as Trevlac.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[BrainStorm69]

However ... there is a website that has a really neat tool that you can use to test your combo of BT878 capture card and driver to determine the correct aspect ratio to capture in for Full D1 resolution be it NTSC or PAL.

The bad news is my boot drive crashed (hardware failure ... the drive died) and I lost all my internet bookmarks. This just happened a few days ago!

The good news is I will contact the person who had input on that website and I will either post the website here (once he gives it to me) or perhaps he will post himself with that info. I am going to PM him now! The person I am talking about here is known on this website as Trevlac.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

I believe this is Trevlac's link you are talking about...

http://www.arachnotron.nl/videocap/site/capture_area2.html

[FulciLives]

I believe this is Trevlac's link you are talking about...

http://www.arachnotron.nl/videocap/site/capture_area2.html

Yes that is the link!

Thank you

For those of you with BT878 based capture cards scroll down on that webpage until you get to the section entitled:

A special case: BT878 based capture cards

The stuff prior to that section does NOT apply to BT878 based capture cards!

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[iantri]

Getting back to the question at hand..

Ah ha!

This is the exact same problem I had!

I STRONGLY suspect that it is a problem with btwincap.. can you try the offical drivers for your card and see if it works? I can't try this with my card (ATI TV Wonder VE) since it artificially limits resolution to 352x240..

Can you view the video in a program like DScaler (which uses its own internal drivers) without that problem?

I was going to e-mail the btwincap author (or post a bug report) but never got around to it since I figured it might just be me.. I think I'll do so now.

[Venner]

Update: After much fiddling and rearranging of cards in slots, I decided to try capturing a short clip to my much smaller IDE boot drive. Lo and behold, the clip was fine. So it has to be some sort of problem between the TV card and the Serial ATA controller (which for some reason resides on the same bus as the PCI slots. Doh.)

Just verified the problem too. The video is fine in DScaler, then develops the same symptoms when I add a lot of disk activity (file transfers.)

It's not an IRQ conflict. I've also fiddled with the latency of both the TV card and the SATA controller using powerstrip, and not seen any difference. Any ideas?

[iantri]

DMA( on the hard drive, that is)? I didn't get lines when I turned it off.. but of course it didn't capture properly since in PIO mode the hard drive can't transfer data nearly fast enough.. I suspect it has something to do with PCI bus mastering?

Trying the original drivers might be helpful too. (in eliminating drivers as the problem, hopefully..)

[joeboy11111]

I was going to e-mail the btwincap author (or post a bug report) but never got around to it since I figured it might just be me.. I think I'll do so now.

Hi all

Well well, guess what, its now 2009, and I still have this same problem. I get black horizontal lines all over my image, then I run @ high resolution, and by that I mean, above 640x480, I have this same problems with all my bt878 cards, I have bought a brand new 3.17Ghz core2due, because i have the idea it was my old crappy PC that cause the horizontal lines due to oldness, hmmm, I did email the btwincap owner and asked him :


Hi,
Are your http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/ project still active?
Thx


and he said:


Not exactly... Microsoft (andthe current trends on video capture) made it obsolete...




and then I explain to him in full detail with picture what my problem is, and I got no responds!!!

And am I the only person who need WDM drivers for a bt878 capture card????

I hate the original none WDM drivers that come with my 8ch bt878 capture cards, I doesn't make any horizontal lines but the program itself suck, and that drivers only work with that software, the program is Diginet or DvrNet 880 and the card model is DVR SK-2000S3.

Another thing about btwincap, after you have installed the drivers, it takes up to 10 min for the PC to boot up, getting past that windows XP logo

[joeboy11111]

Hi admin, can you please make this thread on sticky. because this is a BIG problem, for the people who have BTXXX cards capture cards, with 8 channels, like me and have some outdated drivers meant for Pentium 2 and capture resolution on 160x120

And putting your drives on PIO mode, is just silly!!

[joeboy11111]

Anyone? I'm I the only one with this problem?

[joeboy11111]

lame, lol

[jman98]

Lame? OK....

This thread hadn't had a post in 4 years until you added to it, which by the way, we generally disapprove of digging up old threads and adding to them years later. I'm sorry you didn't get help, but when the maintainer of btwincap wasn't interested in helping you, you were pretty much out of options. I think most of us have moved on to other capture cards with different chip sets. I use the Hauppauge PVR-350 which uses some Connexiant chip. So yes, you may be the only guy around here that needs to get this old stuff to work. I've been in the forums here for years and I've seen all kinds of crazy posts filled with nonsense that got decent responses. Your first post explained your problem well enough, no problems there. I'd have to conclude that nobody has this problem if you didn't get a response as, like I said, I've seen some pretty bad posts still get responses and people here do want to help if they can. Maybe there's a forum somewhere else dedicated to whatever card you have and someone there can help.

[joeboy11111]

jman98, thx for being honest with me, I appreciate it.

[gll99]

There are still some of us using old bt878 capture cards.

With Virtualdub or virtualdubmod make sure that under "file/capture avi"you have the "video" option set to preview instead of overlay if you want to capture 640x480 or 720x480. If you have overlay selected the bt878 cards won't work at full resolution.

Hope it's as simple as that.

[joeboy11111]

gll99, I'm using my 8ch bt878 card on a CCTV program, its called active webcam, it can input any WDM device on the program, but I have a massive driver issue with my card, its works 100% with 320x240, buts the quality is extremely low, but if I put it on 720x576, its looks like HD, because the cameras support high resolution, and I use 7 channels at once, 8ch card, but that black lines, is the bugger

[vcd4ever]

There are still some of us using old bt878 capture cards.

I'm still using my old and trusted Pixelview PlayTV Pro tv-card (Brooktree 878). This tv-card has worked perfectly for me without any problems, and I have used this tv-card with win95 and vfw drivers, win98se with both vfw and wdm drivers and winxp with wdm drivers. This tv-card can also capture pal60, so I really hope that this tv-card will last forever .

vcd4ever.

[joeboy11111]

Yea its also works with me on 1~2 channel only on high resolution, its extreamly good but I need to use 7 channels at once because of my CCTV cameras at home, its kinda my hobby to play with these stuff in holidys, but i have a huge barrier now to overcome, that horizontal lines

I see this people in this tread that have posted in the year 2004+ they have the 90% exact same problem then I do, but they have forgot to mentions some of the other problems

[live4fun]

Happy to see that this thread is alive and keep going on. I still use this card, if you try to capture pal 60 it’s only allow to capture 352x288 or 352x240.And if you try high like 720x576 or 720x480 or 640x480 it give lot shattering frames. Anybody has any clue about that? your input would be appreciated.

What my experience is if your source is native pal or NTSC it can capture 720x576 or 720x480 or 640x480 in high quality without any problems.

[joeboy11111]

yea man, I'm glad someone else have the same problem then I do, and I really want to fix it because I well needed, I think the main problem is the btcap drivers

[live4fun]

There are still some of us using old bt878 capture cards.

I'm still using my old and trusted Pixelview PlayTV Pro tv-card (Brooktree 878). This tv-card has worked perfectly for me without any problems, and I have used this tv-card with win95 and vfw drivers, win98se with both vfw and wdm drivers and winxp with wdm drivers. This tv-card can also capture pal60, so I really hope that this tv-card will last forever .

vcd4ever.

could you tell me which software are you using to caputre in winxp? is it possible to capture pal 60 in high bitrate like 720x480 or 720x576? Thanks

[joeboy11111]

There are still some of us using old bt878 capture cards.

I'm still using my old and trusted Pixelview PlayTV Pro tv-card (Brooktree 878). This tv-card has worked perfectly for me without any problems, and I have used this tv-card with win95 and vfw drivers, win98se with both vfw and wdm drivers and winxp with wdm drivers. This tv-card can also capture pal60, so I really hope that this tv-card will last forever .

vcd4ever.

could you tell me which software are you using to capture in winxp? is it possible to capture pal 60 in high bitrate like 720x480 or 720x576? Thanks

I capture with a program called Active Webcam, It's a cool professional program with thousands of options but I have its limitations, like for example the video reviewer is not cool. but anyway, I capture PAL I or PAL B or any other PAL, I'm located in South Africa, so we use PAL

But I have a HUGE problem with btwincap drivers, I can't get my cameras to work with full potential because the drivers are 2004 and only works with 1 or 2 channels at a high resolution, or I can only use 5 cameras at 352x288 and with abit of flakes in it, that's uncool and can ruin the image

[cybertheque]

I too use quite a few bt848 and bt878 capture cards and have had good results with them
at NTSC SD resolutions, using btwincap drivers. I have a different issue to resolve, as
described in posts in this forum earlier this winter, involving timing issues that cause
huge jumps in timestamps when the software is run under Windows NT-based O/S
on a variety of Intel mainboard chipsets. The author of btwincap has provided me with
his last unreleased builds of the code and some documentation, and I have built
the unmodified code on a development system, but have not had the time to work
on the patches to replace certain system calls with workarounds for the timing problem.

If anyone reading this thread is serious of maintaining and patching btwincap, please let
me know if you have some time and the inclination to work on this project. For the moment
I am unable to do uninterrupted captures of several hours due to the random time jumps.
I have tried a great many other capture cards for analog NTSC and found that for my
mix of hardware and software, only the Bt cards performed acceptably, so I have a strong
incentive to get this fixed. (Note that I capture uncompressed -- huffyuv -- at 640x480
mostly).

Michael

[joeboy11111]

I would kill to get my bt878 card do 640x480 or higher with more then 2 channels without any black flakes and the long windows xp logo hanging sign booting time it takes after I installed the drivers