Virtual Dub

[Catman209]

Hello,

I am new to capturing and I have a P4, 1.5 Gig with two HD's. The main one is 120 gig and the second is 60 Gig. Both are 7200 Rpm with ata 100.
I have 512 MB of Rambus memory. My video card is Asus 6800 Deluxe. Up until know I have been capturing from a VCR tape and using the Asus Digital VCR software. I have been capturing as Mpeg1 and then encoding to VCD in Tgmpeg. My quality has been ok but nothing great so I wanted to try to improve it. I came here and now Im trying the Virtual Dub. I have a couple of questions though. All of a sudden Im dropping frames. Not just a few frames but quite a bit. I did not drop a single frame in Asus Digital VCR but Im dropping a lot in Virtual Dub. Im running XP pro and I can't find anywhere to check to be sure that the hard drive is set to UDMA but im about 99.9 percent sure that it is. Im using the speical cables for that and like I say, I never dropped a frame with the Asus software. Any ideas? Also, Im following the directions here on the website on how to get the best capture but for some reason Im not able to choose 24 bit, RGB. When I go to custom settings and choose that one, it wont let me have it. Any ideas there? I noticed that when I did a test VCD that the color was not very sharp. Also, would it help when Im using Asus Digital VCR to capture as a AVI and then convert to a Mpeg1 VCD? In Asus Digital VCR I have been capturing as Mpeg 1. Can someone also recommend some commerical capture software out there that does a good job? Like I say guys, Im fairly new here so any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Catman

[liquid217]

have you tried some type of compression with virtualdub like mjpeg or huffyuv? that may help out. also, make sure your hd's have been defragged. Uncompressed captureing will give a hard drive a run for its money and will chew up space extremely quickly. A fragmented hd may not be able to keep up. With capturing directly to mpg (as you previously did) hard drive performance is not as serious an issue since its compressed.

[Catman209]

Yes I have tried the two compressions mentioned above and that is where it wont let me choose the 24 bit rgb. I guess the hard drive could need to be defragmented. I will try that. Thanks.

Catman

[vulture]

I came here and now Im trying the Virtual Dub. I have a couple of questions though. All of a sudden Im dropping frames. Not just a few frames but quite a bit.

Catman, I've had the same problem with VirtualDub for a long time. I can't get it to work with my ASUS v7700 Deluxe video card. My system is a 1.4GHz Athlon, 1GB memory, tons of RAID0 hard drive space, everything tuned and defragged, etc. I'm running Win2K. I am unable to capture video in VirtualDub without dropping more frames than I'm capturing. I've tried every combination of drivers, uninstalling, reinstalling, etc., with no luck.

You might want to check out http://www.maxreboot.com/technogarb/. These guys have been tweaking the drivers for ASUS nVidia cards, and some people there have had luck using Win2K/XP for vidcaps using their drivers.

[HillJack]

@vulture

I too use Win2K, although my video card is just a V6800 Deluxe. I've had great success capturing video under 2K using VirtualDub at resolutions up to 720x480 with very few frame drops (maybe 16/hour).

Have you tried the nVidia WDM drivers? The link is...
http://205.158.109.140/Windows/23.11/WDM_1.08.exe
(that's from nVidia's website)

Though I use v1.04 of the WDM drivers, I also use the latest ASUS drivers (whatever ancient version that may be and HuffYUV at its default settings for compression. The ASUS drivers like to install their tasktray icon thingy, which I have disabled (don't know if that makes any difference or not).

Let me know if I can help you further - it was a royal pain to get this to work under 2K, but now that it does, I'm quite happy with the results

[vulture]

Heh...I can use all the help I can get

I am currently using nVidia WDM 1.08 capture driver, along with the nVidia 28.32 video card driver. I've also tried the latest combo driver pack released by the Technogarb guys. Nothing seems to work for me...I get ridiculous amounts of dropped frames. I downloaded a trial version of Ulead's VideoStudio last night and was able to use it just fine (0 dropped frames out of ~20000). However, I'd really like to use VirtualDub because it has so many cool features, and I'd like to use the Huffyuv codec.

But now I can't even open VirtualDub (or AVI_IO, iuVCR, etc). I always get the error message that the "capture device is in use" (meaning the WDM driver), and that I can't use the application I'm trying to open until I close the app that's using the driver. But no apps are open! After I click OK, it takes me to a window where I'm supposed to choose another capture driver, but there are no others to choose.

If you have any advice on any of this, I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

[liquid217]

just a suggestion, you can't use the wdm drivers in virtualdub. There has to be a wrapper (its the same situation with my rage 128 pro), so therefore, running the driver and the wrapper could be too much overhead. here is an excerpt from virtualdub's website....
-----------------------------------------------------------------

VirtualDub needs a Video for Windows capture driver to capture. Most Firewire (DV) devices do not provide a VFW driver, and thus cannot be used by VirtualDub at all. Also, ATI appears to be shipping their current devices with a WDM (Windows Driver Model) driver only; this can be used indirectly by VirtualDub through a Microsoft wrapper, but it is crippled in functionality and it also appears that the wrapper is buggy.

The wrapper will show up as "Microsoft WDM Image Capture (Win32)." If it works for you, great.
----------------------------------------------------------------

if you can find the vfw drivers for your capture card, that would be a huge performance increase. Otherwise i would look to update the wrapper (do a google search)

also, take a look at this....
http://www.virtualdub.org/docs_vfwwdm

[liquid217]

ehh, woops

[liquid217]

gotta quit double posting

[HillJack]

also, take a look at this....
http://www.virtualdub.org/docs_vfwwdm

That link has alot of good info for what you're trying to do. Unfortunately, only the first sentence really applies (thats really all I did - I never edited my registry or copied any files manually). Perhaps you don't have SP2 installed yet? The Dx8 DV Update?

vulture, if you want, I can send you my ASUS drivers and WDM (1.04) install file, that are known to work (I know because I use them I think my e-mail address is included in my profile, so send me an e-mail if you want the files. I'll try to include a description/short instructions/method.

But, other than installing DX8 and its DV update, SP2, then the ASUS drivers, disabling the auto-starting ASUS tasktray crap, then the WDM drivers (in that order)... Thats really all I recall having to do (it was suprisingly easy come to think of it). And VirtualDub works fine and has worked fine for several months now at pretty much any resolution.

Also, in VirtualDub, try changing the format of the video (4:2:2 I think? I'm at work so I can't remember exactly.. I'll update it tonight if I am wrong). 24bit RGB works, but is unecessary.

Good luck!

[Tim Newton]

In VirtualDub, type "c", and this will bring up a window which allows you to select a compression method. If you type "C" (shift-c) it also brings up a compression window. Make sure that you have huffyuv compression selected in only one of the windows; I believe you want it selected in the "C" window.

I vaguely recall having a frame drop problem a few months ago that was caused by me having huffyuv compression selected twice, and I'm guessing this caused the video to compressed twice, so I was getting 100% CPU usage during captures and was dropping lots of frames.

It's a shot in the dark, but worth a try.

[vulture]

Well, believe it or not, I finally have this working!! I've been struggling with it for a long time, so this is a big step forward. Not only was I able to capture video in VirtualDub with an ASUS card in Win2K, I also eliminated the WDM error I was getting when I opened any video capture program.

Here are the relavent specs again, for anyone interested:

• Athlon 1.4GHz o/c to 1.6
  1GB PC2100 memory
  two 60GB HDDs in RAID0
  ASUS v7700 Deluxe video card (nVidia GeForce2)
  Windows 2000
  VirtualDub 1.4.9
  various nVidia, ASUS, and technogarb drivers

I uninstalled anything related to the Display Adapter or Video Adapter, including all nVidia drivers (including WDM-related items), and all ASUS-related stuff. I decided to try the technogarb driver pack again (from www.maxreboot.com/technogarb).

For anyone who's interested in the steps I took, here they are:

1. After uninstalling all display adapters I was required to reboot and reinstall the standard ASUS video card drivers.

2. I then updated the display adapter drivers to the technogarb pack (version 28.32), and rebooted.

3. Next I modified the nVidia WDM 1.08 capture driver .inf files (see http://www.maxreboot.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1738 for more info on this).

4. Installed the slightly modified nVidia WDM 1.08 capture driver, and rebooted.

5. Followed the instructions at www.virtualdub.org/docs_vfwwdm to set up the VFW wrapper for WDM. These settings were already taken care of on my machine, so this probably wasn't part of the problem.

6. Following Tim Newton's suggestion, I verified the video compression settings in VirtualDub. In capture mode, there are two menus for setting video compression. There is "Compression" and "Compression (compatibility)". My understanding is that the latter is related to capturing video in compatibility mode, which is a special mode for troubleshooting (I think...there is more info at virtualdub.org). I chose Huffyuv from the Compression menu.

I'm not sure if all of these steps were absolutely necessary (e.g., modifying the WDM driver) for my situation, but I was able to capture from VHS without dropping frames (one dropped frame per 1000-2000 frames) at 640x480 using the Huffyuv codec, in Win2K. Not bad! I had even better results at lower resolutions, as you might expect. Now I just need to figure out how to make it look good enough for SVCD! I see deinterlacing and noise reduction in my future

Thanks to all for the tips.

[zzyzzx]

If I install DirectX8.1 do I need to install the DV update or is in already included in 8.1?

[liquid217]

the dv update is included in dx 8.1

[jamba]

I noticed that you did not specify exactly what settings you are using in VirtualDub. Just to be sure, make sure that when you are using the huffyuv codec, in Set Custom Format, your format should be YUY2. If you are using MJPEG Codec, your format should be RGB24. These will give you the best results.

Finally, check also your frame rate (in "Capture" then "Settings"). Make sure you are using 29.97 (which will be rounded off to 29.9706 by VirtualDub) for NTSC or 25 for PAL.

I hope this helps and solves your "dropped frames" problems.

[Bondiablo]

for the dropped frames did you ever try changing the "video buffer limit" in Capture > Settings? When I tried using Vdub to capture I was dropping anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 of the frames until i tried changing that, now i'm not dropping any.

now if i could just figure out why i'm not capturing any sound...

is there a problem or a trick to capturing sound in virtual dub by DV and a firewire card?