VirtualVCR crashes during capture of 8mm Analog video....

[Baatfam]

I'm trying to capture some old 8mm video off a Sony Handycam camera...
The video was recorded in fairly short 2-15 minute segments with breaks/whitenoise/?? between many of the sections.
My intention was to just capture the whole thing and cut it up later, but everytime the tape gets to one of the breaks I get that XP pop up telling me we have a problem..."Do I wish to send a report?"
And then, of course, it closes VirtualVCR.....

What to do?

I set up VirtualVCR with Doom9s instructions here:
http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/capture/capturing_VirtualVCR.html
I'm capturing with an AverMeda "soft" card to an empty drive.

Trying to start/stop the capture at just the right time is darn near impossible without losing some footage off the end.

Bob T.

[dphirschler]

A TBC would probably fix you up... but that'll cost ya.


Darryl

[johns0]

Do separate captures between the breaks,stopping virtualvcr at the time of break shouldnt be that hard,just note done the time it occurs.

[dphirschler]

You might try another capture program... one that doesn't exit when those bad frames are encountered. At least then you can get the end of the clips. Virtual Dub for instance will not crash... it will only screw up the frames after the bad frames. So you will still have sperate captures, but at least you will get the ending pieces of the clips. Getting the beginning may be tricky though.


Darryl

[SLK001]

You might try another capture program... one that doesn't exit when those bad frames are encountered. At least then you can get the end of the clips. Virtual Dub for instance will not crash... it will only screw up the frames after the bad frames. So you will still have sperate captures, but at least you will get the ending pieces of the clips. Getting the beginning may be tricky though.

Darryl

It's not VirtualVCR that is doing the crashing. It's my bet that your card is giving you these fits. Probably performing an illegal hardware operation, which XP catches and thus spanks the using software program.

What is a "soft" card?

[Baatfam]

Do separate captures between the breaks,stopping virtualvcr at the time of break shouldnt be that hard,just note done the time it occurs.

Yes, that is what I intend to do if I can't find an easier solution. I was hoping I missed a setting or something.

It's not VirtualVCR that is doing the crashing. It's my bet that your card is giving you these fits. Probably performing an illegal hardware operation, which XP catches and thus spanks the using software program.

I'm starting to think the same thing...I experianced the problem once before with different software. At the time I didn't connect it to the bad spots in the tape, I thought it was the computer. But it does it on my new machine, (with the same card).

What is a "soft" card?

"soft" card.....meaning it doesn't have hardware incoding built in like the Hauppauge cards....

I'm still curious---what is it about the signal between clips on the analog tape that trips up the encoding?

Thanks for the help,
Bob T.

[spectroelectro]

The white noise makes your encoding card freak out because in order to encode video, your capture card has to detect video frames. Each video frame is identified by the vertical blanking interval, a periodic sync signal that lets the TV's electron guns know when to retrace.

If there's just noise and no TV signal, the capture card can't detect any vertical blanking and consequently goes nuts. It keeps waiting for the VBI and never finds it. Eventually some register in the capture card overflows nad produces an error condition.

Alternative solution to doing different captures, incidentally, would be to slap a full frame TBC in between the output of your playback unit and the capture card.