Unstable configuration

[dbphillips]

I know this is a long shot, but I'm going to try anyhow.

I have an old Wearnes MediaGrabber (Zoran/Philips based) that actually captures pretty well at 640 x 480, so I think I'd rather keep it than have to stumble through the issues with the Brooktree/Conexant products (though I have an ATI TV Wonder VE in the wings).

So, the Zoran board works great, but only with Wincam from the Tekram driver distribution. Nothing else works, not VirtualDub, Amcap, VStudio 3 (which came in the Wearnes distribution), nor Vidcap. Even the VCAP app from the Tekram distribution fails to execute. The basic response is "can't find the board".

Now, for the most part, I was happy enough, especially since it seems I could use the HUFFYUV codec which I had figured would not be supported by such old stuff. But here're the gotchas: 1) available disk space as reported by Wincam is like 600 MB, when I have 4 GB, and 2) when it does crash, a reboot doesn't fix it. I have to load the LifeView FlyVideo drivers, reboot, load the Wearnes H.32x driver, then reboot. (I guess I might be able to uninstall the H.32x drivers, reboot, then load them again and reboot, but haven't tried.)

One clue to the puzzle might be an error on boot that says the SYSTEM.INI is calling out for a second VDMAMEMD.VXD load that 98 objects to. I ran WinDoctor and RegClean and couldn't get it cleaned out. AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS don't seem to be calling it and SYSTEM.INI has only one instance of it.

As far as the incorrect free space issue goes, I tried DiskDoctor, which found no problems and I emptied the Recycle Bin on the drive. Fragmentation is low at 96%.

Does anyone have any idea what could be causing these issues?

TIA,

Dan

[dbphillips]

Interesting. Lots of people looking, but no responses. Is this because my questions are stupid or outdated? Or is it because no one has a clue what could be causing all this weirdness?

For all you Zoran owners out there, I've made some progress. I think the reason VirtualDub wouldn't work was solved when I went into the Multimedia control panel and turned off the Microsoft WDM Image Capture under Video Capture Devices, i.e. "do not use this device" checkbox. I also rem'd out the VDMAMEMD entry in the system.ini, but I don't think that made VDub work.

Sooo, Virtual Dub works quite nicely, except... When I go for 480 vertical resolution, VDub reports a lot of dropped frames, like 50%. And the average framerate reported is about 20 fps. Funny thing is, the CPU is only running 50-70% and the data rate is under 10 MB/s, worst case (I run an Ultra Wide Seagate Cheetah 10K which Adaptec benches at about 17 MB/s). I've run 352x480x24bit in most cases, and tried turning off audio, turning off compression, running HuffYUV with YUY2 out instead of 24 bit. I even ran 640x480x24bit uncompressed, and on average the dropped frames were about 50% of frames captured, whether I did everything (locked audio, TV filter, HuffYUV YUY2 compression), or nothing (no audio, no filter, no compression). My final VCD output from TMPGEnc actually looks pretty smooth, with good color, but the framerate reported doesn't seem to jive.

Is it just an erroneous output from VDub?

Oh, and VDub realizes I really _do_ have 4 GB free, woo-hoo!

Thanks for any insight.

[snowmoon]

First of zoran chips do native MJPEG, you may want to stick with no recompression of the capture stream since VDub probably has to de compress the mjpeg to compress it with huffy, and nedless to say that's not very efficient.

It's worth a shot. The reason nobody else is responding is probably since it's a very specific question and you have already tried most things people would have suggested.