Greetings,

I have been looking for a 'soft toaster' program for a long time and recently found 'DVMixerPro' which has a lot of promise. I am currently running it on WinXPSP3 on a dual core 2.8GHz intel box with 1GB, ATI X600 PCI-E vga with TV-out and two analog capture cards, the first a Bt848 chip using BtWincap driver and the second a Pinnacle AV/DV SAA7113 chip running the Pinnacle WDM driver. Both capture cards perform well when tested with 'amcap.exe' and other capture programs. When 'DVMixerPro' is running and set up to use both cards for input sources and TV-out is selected, the CPU usage averages about 40% when the workspace and cards are all set up for 720x480 and the card's color depth is set for RGB24 (RGB32 is not available). The main display and TV-out are set up for 32bit color. Watching the TV output (on an Ikegami reference monitor) it is apparent that there are motion artifacts but no dropped frames. I am wondering if the program isn't encoding the input source video to some compressed format for manipulation which introduces the artifacts. On a much slower PC the program performs identically, with CPU usage averaging 90% and the artifacts in the output are the same and without dropped frames, so horsepower doesn't seem to be the issue.

I have tried various combinations of capture resolution, workspace resolution and capture color depth and format, and found that the program works best at 720x480, 32 bit display color and RGB24 capture; none of the alternate settings reduced the motion artifacts AFAICT. Perhaps using other capture devices will reveal different performance behavior at other formats and depths.

Please consider experimenting with this program and posting your experiences here; I would especially appreciate experiments involving analog capture and observation of the quality of the TV output, especially regarding the motion artifacts. I have emailed the authors regarding other issues in the program but so far have not received any replies. It would be good to know if DV-only live sources produce these artifacts in the output as well, so your DV experiments are also appreciated.

I would like to see this program developed to a usable state; it has a library of transitions, built-in C.G. and user interface like a hardware switcher/mixer. Do any of you have experience with any other switcher/mixer programs that use commodity hardware, e.g. 'soft toasters', such as this one? I tried 'Vidblaster' but found it incompatible with all the hardware I have on-hand and very resource intensive, not to mention that the installation broke some drivers.

'DVMixerPro' ver. 1.5 is here: http://www.vanillaon.com/download/trial/dvmixerpro.trial.e.exe

Thanks,

Michael