WinTV "broken interlace" captures

[FreQi]

Until yesterday, I was running win2000pro on a p3 600b. Just yesterday I got around to installing my new Tyan motherboard and dual Athalon 1600+'s with 512mb reg ddr, and I re-used all the hardware from the "old" system. So I am using the same video card, capture card, raid card, and even the same raid-0 partition.

My hauppage WinTV-dbx is still able to preview/overlay/capture video, but the captures seem to be "broken". I capture to 640x480 and have tried using both Huffyuv and Pic video's MJPEG codec's, I tried using AVI_IO and VirtualDub, I even tried changing my s-video cable and tried moving the WinTV to a different PCI slot. But in all cases, the interlacing seems to be garbaged, where part of a line in one field seems to be taken from an entirely different frame, and it's very noticeable.

It sounds exactly like what was being described in the VirtualDub capture documentation for the question "Why do I get errors when I try to capture with a height above 240 (http://www.virtualdub.org/docs_capture)" (sorry, there is no anchor to the question on the page). The "answer" does describe the situation I am in (where the overlay looks great, but the capture is garbage), but I don't see a solution. I haven't looked at the Preview, but I thought that looked fine too... can't remember.

Does anyone know what can be done to fix this? I am baffled, and I have Alias comming up soon... :scared:

[FreQi]

After several hours of changing hardware configs, trying various drivers and sleeping maybe 3 hours, I still have not been able to fix this problem. Most recently I tried using the BTWINCAP driver, but the artifacting is still there.

However, I think I have narrowed the problem down to the pci controller on the motherboard. According to the Hauppage paperwork, "Not all motherboards completly support the WinTV" and they recommend using a mobo with an Intel chipset. Sadly, my Tyan TigerMP (S2460) (http://www.tyan.com/products/html/tigermp.html) has an AMD-760 MP chipset. And it seems no matter what I try (Win2000, WinXP, WDM drivers, VFW drivers, bios flashes...), this capture card will not function properly.

Here are some screen shots of the problem:
http://freqi.net/capture/broken-interlace/0.JPG
http://freqi.net/capture/broken-interlace/1.JPG

Please, let me know if you can think of anything to fix this. I haven't been able to find any kind of pci-bridge updates or anything for this motherboard, so now I've have to revert back to my pIII 600 so I can capture.

[Swan]

FreQi, I recognize these awful lines.
There was a thread about this just a few days ago:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=34456

For me, the only thing that helped, was advice I got in a different thread on how to bypass a stupid thing in my capturing software, so that I could select YUY2 color space. The software I am using defaults to RGB24. This produced those darn lines for me. I have a Via chipset, by the way (with the latest 4-in-1 drivers).

If you've haven't already, made sure you're not using RGB24 (which was my problem, I could not select anything *but* RGB24, which produced the lines).

Perhaps "fellaw" has found a cure by now?

/Swan

[Zhnujm]

i have had such a problem long time ago with an old via chipset. (even in yuv mode). i had to disable dma transfer for the harddisk to get rid of the lines.
but then the hd wasnt fast enough anymore for capturing...

[FreQi]

@Swan
I've been using YUY2 mode, and even in Huffyuv I sent it to convert to yuy2 (whatever that option was the the "<--" in it)...

@Zhnujm
I am capturing to a RAID-0 setup which is 2 Maxtor 80gig 7200r ATA133 drives. It's formatted in NTFS with a chunk size of 64k (same chunk size I selected in teh RAID card's bios when I created the striped set). As far as I can tell, there isn't a DMA setting to change. This is the same raid setup I was using on the old motherboard.


I feel like I just wasted over $600.

[Zhnujm]

unfortunately most (if not all) raid controllers doesnt allow (for a good reason i think) manually changing dma/pio modes.
didnt see that you are using a raid array :rolleyes:

[Zhnujm]

just another thought, if you are using a raid controller from promise you can try to lower the pci bus utilisation (there is a setting in the driver, dont know exactly where it is i dont use this controller anymore)
maybe that works.

[FreQi]

Actually, the raid card I am using is from a company called Koutech Systems and it's called the I/O Flex PIR133 (http://www.koutech.com/proddetail.asp?linenumber=105). I am also using the latest drivers that they have available for download from that site, and I do have one drive on each IDE port (so drive 0 and 2).

I am sure there is a ton of bus activity since the pci capture card has to send everyting to the pci raid card, but since It all works dandy on the old Asus P3B-F (rev. 1.03), all I can think is there really is a problem with the AMD shipset on the Tyan board.

Maybe I can tweak something on the Tyan, but I don't know what to change in it's bios, if anything...

[fellaw]

Hi @ll!

I haven't found a cure yet. First I thought it might be this avi decompressor which I recognized in my capture graph. I discovered something different a few hours ago: I've got a Terratec Tv+. With the software, there comes a filter called ttvideo.ax. This is a DirectDraw video renderer. When I connect this renderer to my capture device, those lines appear, too! But this filter doesn't use the avi decompressor. So this issue has to be DirectDraw related. I'll install DirectX 9 Beta 2 next week, let's see what's happening then. I'll try to run exactly the same driver/hardware combination on a mobo with a southbridge different from via. If that's the cause, I'll sure switch my mobo once and for all.
I tried to mnimize the pci utilisation(only gfx+capture card, usb controller disabled) and closed all background programs. Didn't help either.

[flubber01]

Hi

I've had the same problem with my WinTV PCI card. I thought it was something to do with the deinterlace settings in WinTV2k.
I tried to turn them off and now when I capture 720x576 in iuVCR I get no such problem. I haven't tried to turn them back on (I will not tuch them not that everything works).
Can it be something like that? That the deinterlace filter that Hauppauge use (from the DShow project I think) is not working as it should?

[fellaw]

flubber01:
what kind of mobo do you have? athlon+via chipset or athlon+other chipset or p3/p4+intel chipset?

[FreQi]

I noticed that hauppage has a WDM driver for Windows XP (http://www.hauppauge.com/xp/software/xp_wintvpci.htm), where Win2000's is a VFW driver. The deinterlacer they talk about is either built into the driver, or their viewer application, and it comes form Dscaler (http://www.dscaler.org/), which is a great program (but is missing timmers to allow scheduled captures).

I did try this WDM driver when I was running XP for a few hours, but I could never get the thing to remember the video format (640x480, NTSC-M, YUY2, "CD Quality" audio). At least not until I installed the btwincap (http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/) driver. So I never got the benifit of a built-in deinterlacer, which might have nullified this problem. Although I don't know if it would have IVTC'd the source as well ass deinterlaced it...

Last night I was reading an article on 2cpu.com (http://www.2cpu.com/Software/win2k_sp2_via/win2k_sp2_via_1.html) where the author talked about Win2000's Service Pack 2 fixing some problems with the VIA chipset. It never occured to me until then that maybe I should install a service pack. I was just using windowsupdate, which I guess doesn't do the same thing. So last night I downloaded the full 130meg Service Pack 3. I'll see what that does...

[flubber01]

Athlon 1.3GHz, VIA Chipset, WinXP, the latest 4in1 and the latest Hauppauge drivers for XP.
I use iuVCR to capture and I've had the problem there but I played around with the deinterlace settings in WinTV2k (which seems to affect iuVCR too) and I managed to get rid of them.

[FreQi]

What is this 4-in-1 and where do I get it?

[Swan]

http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=2

From the installation help file:

"VIA 4 In 1 driver includes four system drivers to improve the performance and maintain the stability of systems using VIA chipsets. These four drivers are: VIA Registry (INF) Driver, VIA AGP VxD driver, VIA ATAPI Vendor Support Driver and VIA PCI IRQ Miniport Driver."

/Swan

[FreQi]

Ah, so it probably won't do me any good for my mobo with it's amd chipset. Curses. ;]

[fellaw]

FreQi:

You sure will profit from those 4 in 1 drivers, as you 100% got a hybrid mobo, with an amd northbridge and a via southbridge.
I tried this deinterlacer, too. All I get is a black picture. Then I tried the dscaler (http://www.dscaler.org) app, and I get those lines, although the picture is deinterlaced! So the error must be before the dscaler. So it isn't a driver issue, too, as DScaler uses it's own driver to access die BT8x8 hardware!

[FreQi]

Well, I just spent about 3 hours reinstalling Win2k and I'm affraid I have no good news to report. I did a fresh install of Win2k, then did all the windows updates, then service pack 3, then the 4in1 drivers. My captures are still broken. Here's a couple pics:

http://freqi.net/capture/broken-interlace/avril2.jpg
http://freqi.net/capture/broken-interlace/avril3.jpg

These frames were fairly close to each other. In the second image you can see that the lines which are out of place are actually taken from a frame much like the first image. I figure that because the lines are skin tones, and the earlier image is avril's face.

So... I am open for other suggestions.

edit: On a side note, it did seem to improve the performace of my SB Live 5.1. It used to crackle on start up, but now it's all dandy. Not that it does me any good.

[FreQi]

I don't know why this didn't occur to me before, but I have found a work around to this problem.

I decided to try doing a capture to my c:\ drive, "just because" and suddenly, the nasty lines went away! Since a 10gig drive wasn't going to be enough to do full length captures with, I quickly dismantled my RAID array, and put one of the 80gig drives in as the master on IDE2. Sure as shit, it work. So, the problem lies in one of two places:

1) It may be the raid card
Seeing how it worked once I removed raid from the equation, this is a seemingly obvious conclusion, but

2) It may be the PCI controller.
There is a ton of data getting sent over the pci bus, coming in from the pci capture card then to the pci raid card.

I am more inclined to believe the second reason, since on the old motherboard, the raid card was used with no problems, so all this data on the pci bus was being handled just fine. Anyway, I guess I have a few things to consider now that I only have an 80gig drive to capture to instead of 160. Software raid maybe... Perhaps try a different raid card, or pester Tyan for some driver/bios updates.

One more thing to note, Tyan has some poorly documented driver updates (ftp://ftp.tyan.com/chipset_AMD/S246x/Win2000_XP/) on their ftp server for my Tiger MP. It included an AGP update, an EIDE update and a Power Managment update. I installed all three before removing the raid card, but they yielded no results. But at least now I can use the dualie to encode something
:D

[fellaw]

I even get those lines when I'm not capturing!
I don't get them in such an amount like you, but I get them!

[ThNoctus]

I had some time ago the same problem, but maybe not with so much broken lines as on these images before... I'm using via kt133a chipset and I found that I have to (I can't remember correctly) DISABLE or ENABLE "PCI to DRAM prefetch..." or something like that in BIOS to use my wintv capture card correctly.
I had also more broken lines with higher resolution (e.g. 512x576)
You could try that, I thing this bios setting is pretty common by mobo makers.

Best regards,