Please help capturing at 640x480

[Agent Yellow]

I have an ATI TV Wonder capture card and I want to capture in AVI format at a resolution of 640x480. However, I've never been able to capture at anything higher than 240 lines.

I've tried capturing with ATI MMC 7.1, VirtualDub, and AVI_IO. Whenever I try capturing at a resolution higher than 240 lines, the system either freezes up, or does nothing until I end the capturing session and creates a file with 0 frames and 0 seconds. I've tried setting the resolution in manually in the capture settings and by using the pre-existing selections in the menus.

I'm running Windows ME and I use the VFW to WDM wrapper (from http://shopgeo.virtualave.net/wrapper.zip, which was listed in another area of this site). I've been reading through the site and through posts in this forum, but I haven't been able to find an answer. I would greatly appreciate any help.

[Bstansbury]

Welcome to the world of Video Capture... you have just entered into a new phase of your life,... one that will test your patients, endurance, and ability to withstand great pain.

Now if you are still serious about trying to capture video,... go to the "Users Guides" at the bottom of the list of forums,... in there you will find my post called, "How to tune your system for ATI capture". There is a lot to read and learn. Some of it may apply to your system,... some may not. It will help you understand how to fix your system.

You might also add to your post, a more detailed description of what your system is, and what the settings are currently. This way, we might be able to help you. As it is, you last post really does not have any information that would help anyone figure out what the problem might be.

Bud

[Agent Yellow]

I'm running a computer with:
Intel Celeron 633MHz
64 MB RAM
20 GB Hard Drive
ATI TV Wonder
Windows ME

So far, I've been capturing uncompressed AVI at 352x240. I have DMA enabled and I shut down every other application that is not needed. I have almost no problems with the rate of frames dropped when I capture at 352x240. When I attempt to capture at 640x480 with VirtualDub or AVI_IO, I receive the message, "Error 418: Unsupported Video Format," or I have the application window stay still and not do anything until I end the capturing session. In ATI MMC 7.1, resolutions higher than 240 are not even an available option in the custom menus or in the pre-existing choices in the settings window.

Also, from the previous posts I have read in this forum, I received the impression that my inability to capture at 640x480 may have to do with ATI's implementation of the bt878 chip driver, in which ATI limits the resolutions that the user can capture at. The bt878 chip in the ATI TV Wonder is capable of capturing at resolutions up to 720x480. The users who wrote these posts usually mentioned using "tweaked" drivers for the bt878 chip to solve this problem. Is this a possible explanation for my problem? If so, what/where are these tweaked drivers and could any further explanation be given in installing/using them?

[Bstansbury]

There are parts of your system that is just not good enough. First off with only 64 mb, you will not have enough room for buffering video, and windows will thrash memory around and be moving data back and forth from the swap file while your trying to do capture. Your CPU should be fast enough, but again, it is very marginal. Also, you only have one hard disk,.. and if you read other post, you will see that just about everyone suggest that you have a 2nd hard disk to dedicate just to video capture, and it should be at least ATA 66MBS DMA.

One very clear option is to got to the ATI web site and get the latest MMC 7.5 for your card. Version 7.6 is out but I think their site indicates that it will not function on ATI TV Wonder. The reason you don't have any resolution option is because of MMC that you are using. Find out what the ATI TV wonder can use and get it.

One last point. Get some more education on Video Capture. Look at the User Guides in the VCDHelp forums,... I've posted a guide there called "How to Tune your system for ATI capture"

Hope this helps

[FiEND]

the ATI TV Wonder is a different piece of crap than the rest of ATI's crap, so most posts or fixes are not valid.

mmc75 or 76 have nothing really to do with the tv wonder and dont help one bit, under 9x/me/2k/xp dont matter.

if you want higher rez captures, install mmc71, go to www.iulabs.com and get iuvcr and spend alot of time setting it up for channels etc. (royal pain).

it will do everything you need to capture.

PS he is right, 20GB is a bit low and so is your ram, but should be able to swing it if you download picview mjpeg codec and use a quality setting of 18-19 but you will run out of HD space very fast unless you drop the quality down alot.

[Mirror_Image]

I'm running a computer with:
Intel Celeron 633MHz
64 MB RAM
20 GB Hard Drive
ATI TV Wonder
Windows ME

Can your motherboard take a higher speed Celeron? I think that a Celeron 1000MHz is going for about $70 right now, maybe just a hair more. Increasing your CPU muscle by around 50% can't do any harm where capture and encoding are concerned. More RAM would also be good (too bad this isn't last fall, when RAM was dirt cheap), but a system's CPU is very important.

[Verbatim]

I'm running a computer with:
Intel Celeron 633MHz
64 MB RAM
20 GB Hard Drive
ATI TV Wonder
Windows ME

Find out your CPU clock speed. I have a 1.1Mhz but I go much slower because I have a old motherboard that limits my max speed. You may not be going 633MHz. You should get some more memory at least 256meg.

[FiEND]

i capture with my celeron 600 @ 352*240 at 30% cpu and 704*480 at 75% cpu with full preview showing. definitely get more ram and HD space before a cpu. specifically a 7200 rpm drive with 2MB buffer and a 128MB chip or better.