Glitches occuring when capturing from VCR to computer's PCI capture card

[STC-Fan]

I think this screenshot (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/menace-59/vidcapture_corruption.png) describes the problem well enough; if you can't see the image, it's showing a still frame from part of a captured VHS recording at 720x576 pixels, with parts of one of the fields (since this is interlaced :P) shifted to the left-hand side of the screenshot. No, I don't have any idea why it's happening, either. Some details of my system specs and what I'm capturing with are below:

Capture Hardware:
- V-Stream TV7134 PCI Capture Card (Philips chipset, don't know the number, unless the "7134" in the card's name IS its number, else I can open my PC and check what it is later)

- Toshiba V652UK VCR (side note: has no remote control :(. Is connected to the capture card via a direct SCART-to-phono cable - composite video runs into the capture card Video In, the red+white audio leads go into my soundcard Line-In through a 2-phono to 3.5mm converter)

Capturing Program + Settings:
- iuVCR v4.7.4.294
-- Video capture codec: Huffyuv 2.1.1 CCESP Patch 0.2.2 @ 720x576, YUY2, 25.000 FPS
-- Audio capture codec: PCM, 44.1KHz, 16-bit sampling, Stereo

Operating System:
- Windows XP Pro SP1 (all background programs except for crtical/unclosable processes closed during capture)

Hardware:

Motherboard: ASUS A7N8X Deluxe
Processor: AMD AthlonXP 2400+
RAM: 512MB DDR-RAM PC2100
Hard Disks: 1x 40GB Western Digital (PATA-66, 5400RPM) + 1x 160GB Hitachi 7K250 (SATA-150, 7200RPM my main capture drive :D)
Graphics Card: GeForce 4 Ti4200
Sound Card: Creative SB Live! 5.1

I have been told by someone that the capture problem may be due to the motor in the VCR stuttering when I begin capturing; playback is flawless, this junk only comes up when I capture. Very annoying. And if there is any way of solving this problem WITHOUT having to buy either a new piece of hardware, please let me know.

[Arachnotron]

This looks like hardware conflicts. I have had similar problems with a Hauppauge card in an A7N8X. Only one specific driver version would not give this problem for me. I have heard of other people with these problems in other Athlon machines.

You can try the standard things:
- shuffling PCI slots
- increasing PCI latency in the bios
- trying different drivers (older or newer)
- changing audio cards (the sb live is notorious for being incompatible with.. well. life actually ;) )
- updating chipset drivers

etc. etc.

By the way, you probably have a SAA7134 chip.

[STC-Fan]

Originally posted by Arachnotron
This looks like hardware conflicts. I have had similar problems with a Hauppauge card in an A7N8X. Only one specific driver version would not give this problem for me. I have heard of other people with these problems in other Athlon machines.

You can try the standard things:
- shuffling PCI slots
- increasing PCI latency in the bios
- trying different drivers (older or newer)
- changing audio cards (the sb live is notorious for being incompatible with.. well. life actually ;) )
- updating chipset drivers

etc. etc.

By the way, you probably have a SAA7134 chip.

OK, thanks for the help! It's past 12 midnight, but I'm still up anyway messing with some other PCs :). I'll have to try this out tomorrow - well, I can try all of those pointers without difficulty except for shuffling slots, because all bar one are occupied, and I don't wanna wind up swapping around 4 different devices, since I'd probably get in quite a mess :p

UPDATE: OK, I checked the BIOS options through & through today and couldn't find any option to alter the PCI latency timing, only options to alter the latency timings on the RAM. Speaking of which, it's not actually fitted correctly *shot* (I didn't put the RAM in the PC, since DDR sticks are a bitch to fit - someone else did, and he put one 256MB module in the black slot and one in the blue slot, so I have an odd single-channel setup, which may be causing the problem. If I'm careful enough though, I SHOULD be able to put one stick in the other blue slot and get the correct Dual-Channel setup).

Also, I think I'll try the onboard NVIDIA Soundstorm chipset instead of my other sound cards, since two of my others are Creatives, and the other is a C-Media (yuck).

I don't know if the chipset drivers have been updated for my board, but I'll go check on ASUS's site once I've tried the onboard sound and put the RAM in the *correct* slots :p

[STC-Fan]

ANOTHER UPDATE (sorry for the double post:P)

OK, in a mammoth two-hour operation today I took the whole PC apart, moved one of my 256MB sticks of RAM to enable Dual-Channel mode, cleaned all of the various parts in my PC, and removed my SB Live! sound card. Put it back together, booted up with no trouble, installed new drivers for onboard NVIDIA sound. And so the video capture now works perfectly...

Wrong! In fact, it doesn't. Thought it would've sorted it as well. However, I've yet to try installing any newer/older chipset drivers yet, so I'll go do that shortly. *prepares to embrace more hours of fiddling around :(*

P.S - I saw a Hauppauge PCI TV card today with a BT848 chipset at a boot sale, and I didn't buy it. Someone I think should have done (didn't even ask the price, had already bought some other junk) :( - or is the A7N8X Deluxe (rev. 1.04) just incompatible with every <deleted - R4> capture card in the world? Cause not - probably just the cheap ones :p

[tedkunich]

Originally posted by STC-Fan
or is the A7N8X Deluxe (rev. 1.04) just incompatible with every <deleted - R4> capture card in the world? Cause not - probably just the cheap ones :p

It is definitly a configuration problem - I have the -E version of that MB (-E adds firewire and SATA) and I have no troubles with my PCI Winfast card. I can capture up to an hour without dropped frames @ full D1 resolution.

Update you drivers and optimize your HD. Also make sure no other apps running as they can sometimes hog processor time and cause drops....

Also, how many other PCI cards do you have in your system? Some slots share an IRQ so if both cards are active, you may be running out of bandwith.

t

[Arachnotron]

P.S - I saw a Hauppauge PCI TV card today with a BT848 chipset at a boot sale, and I didn't buy it. Someone I think should have done You don't want to go there. The older BT chips are not ACPI capable or PCI 2.2 compliant and can give all sort of powermanagement problems. This is the main difference between the original BT878 and the fusion 878 by the way.

Anyhow, i know this is frustrating. I have the simple version of this board (not the deluxe, the plain 87n8X) and in my case only one specific beta driver from Hauppauge ever worked. The final version of this driver broke my system again.

But you wrote you have more than one computer. Does the card work in another system? (My guess is it will)

[jggimi]

I've made a couple of edits in this thread -- STC-Fan, please review the forum rules (http://forum.doom9.org/forum-rules.htm), particularly Rule 4. Thanks!

[STC-Fan]

Originally posted by Arachnotron
But you wrote you have more than one computer. Does the card work in another system? (My guess is it will) [/B]

I'll have to try that out. I do have two other fairly powerful PCs (both with WinXP) - a 1.7GHz P4 (ASUS P4B533-VM mobo, 128MB DDR RAM, Maxtor 20GB HDD, NVIDIA TNT2 AGP card) and a 1.3GHz AMD Duron (ECS K7S5A mobo, 256MB SDRAM, Seagate 20GB HDD, NVIDIA GeForce2 MX AGP card)..

Previously, I managed to capture from the Duron system with a Pinnacle PCTV Rave w/ Conexant Fusion 878, but the software for it only allowed me to do so at 352x288* (hang on, isn't that just a renamed Brooktree BT878? I'm not sure...). Most of the time the video/audio streams went out of sync a lot, and sometimes I got dropped frames - the HDD in it is ATA100, 5400RPM, so I guess it's too slow.

As for the P4, I've never captured video from it before. I should probably have a go at it with that. One more problem though - neither of those PCs support the SATA interface, so I'd have to get one of those SATA PCI addon cards firstly (though I'd have to get one eventually anyway for this main PC, since the A7N8X Deluxe only has two SATA ports - enough for two hard drives, but not if I wanted two SATA CD/DVD reader/writer drives too :p)

tedkunich: when I do captures I have no other programs running at all, trust me, I've checked Task Manager many times to make sure there's nothing else I can close. All that's left are the 20 or so critical Windows XP processes.

And yes, I do have my HDD optimized (i.e. defragged - not with the built-in WinXP defragger, but with PerfectDisk 6.0). As for IRQs, before I got this SATA drive I captured to an old Fujitsu-IBM 10GB, ATA66, 5400RPM drive - I got the same problems I have now, and in addition the onboard SATA was disabled, so IRQ18 was only being used by the capture card. There's a lot of other shared IRQs though. (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/menace-59/irq_info.png)

jggimi - sorry about that. I am used to the rare bit of swearing on other fourms I go on, and that's when I'm NOT going off my trolley about annoying video capture problems. :angry:

Arachnotron: as you will notice by that picture, I'm not using the SB Live! card anymore, instead the onboard audio. Sadly, I'm actually getting worse audio now (too much background noise) but I won't change back yet. Next step I'll probably do is to put the SAA7134 card, SB Live! card and that SATA hard drive in the P4 1.7GHz PC (I currently have no room in the Duron) and try capturing that way. That means I'll have to get one of those cards, so I will probably wait until next weekend to try it. Oh, and I would try using older chipset drivers for this board, but ASUS don't seem to have any for download other than the nForce 2 all-in-one v1.16 drivers...

UPDATE: *slaps forehead*

Well, for once I actually bothered to check NVIDIA's site for updated nForce chipset drivers - and they're much newer than what I'm using. Obviously it would be sensible to give these a try before doing any more drastic hardware-shifting operations :p

[Arachnotron]

Oh, and I would try using older chipset drivers for this board, but ASUS don't seem to have any for download other than the nForce 2 all-in-one v1.16 drivers.. I mostly simply take the ones from Nvidia. Since no mobo manufacturer modifies their drivers anymore you always get the latest that way.

And yes, the fusion is the BT878 with ACPI fixes included.Previously, I managed to capture from the Duron system with a Pinnacle PCTV Rave w/ Conexant Fusion 878, but the software for it only allowed me to do so at 352x288 BTWincap drivers and vdub/vvcr are better anyway.

[tedkunich]

Originally posted by STC-Fan
so IRQ18 was only being used by the capture card. There's a lot of other shared IRQs though. (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/menace-59/irq_info.png)



There are also PCI interrupts that are shared in additional to the IRQ's. Some slots share the interrupt with other slots, while some slots share interupts with things like ethernet, SATA, etc... Look in your MB's manual to find out what slots/devices share interrupts and confirm you have no conflicts. I use slot 5 which shares an interrupt with I believe slot 2, which is empty in my box.


Good luck tracking it down....


t

[STC-Fan]

Originally posted by tedkunich
There are also PCI interrupts that are shared in additional to the IRQ's. Some slots share the interrupt with other slots, while some slots share interupts with things like ethernet, SATA, etc... Look in your MB's manual to find out what slots/devices share interrupts and confirm you have no conflicts. I use slot 5 which shares an interrupt with I believe slot 2, which is empty in my box.
I checked it and found out that PCI Slot 3 (where I put the capture card in first) shared INT-C with the SATA controller, so I whacked it in Slot 4 instead (which didn't share interrupts with any onboard stuff). Same problems recording in iuVCR - whether Interleaving was set to None, Capture or Full, nasty distortion still occured (see screenshot in first post).

So, I found my Pinnacle PCTV Rave again (read previous post(s) for chipset/other details) and put that in Slot 4. Lo and behold, the captured video now looks a lot better - still a little interference, but not much. Then, iuVCR stopped capturing all of a sudden, and for some stupid ------- reason gave me some error about not being able to synchro the crossbar or something like that. Then for no other apparent ------- reason, the Video tab completely disappeared (this being in version 4.7.4.293) and I couldn't get it back.

So I got the latest trial version (4.8.10.343), went through all the settings again, tried recording. This time, I got no picture on the screen except for said distortion that appears on screen and discovered after recording that iuVCR had reset the Video Crossbar and configuration settings (i.e. it reset my choice of PAL_I to PAL_D and switched off all the brightness + colour controls so giving a black picture. (NOTE: Actually, I just managed to capture OK in VirtualVCR 2.6.9 but I got some other kind of distortion (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/menace-59/aaarrrgghhh.png) to appear this time - damn, I am/my mobo is good at doing this...). Oh, and apart from the Pinnacle drivers, I've also tried the alternative BT8x8 drivers from iuLABS and BTWincap - the former refused to install at all, the latter caused the preview to become very flickery.


Anyway, thanks to all those here for their help, but I am not going to ---- around with this tomorrow. Simply because moving the stuff into another PC is going to cost me another x amount of £s because none of the other PCs have SATA ports. NOW I wish I'd just bought a *ahem* good-ol' Parallel ATA drive. But no, I just had to jump ship to the new technology without realising the (evidently) dire consequences*.


*I'd imagine this includes the pitiful death of this topic as well, since nobody's replied today. :p - of course, if there any other solutions other than buying a SATA PCI card to put in another PC with my hard drive, I'd appreciate them.

[dilly]

I have the same problem since flashing my BIOS last week. Asus P4S8X (SiS 648 chipset) (crappy board, was trying to fix memory issues, the flash made things worse), Leadtek Winfast 2000XP. I'm going to have to do some hardware swapping.

[Arachnotron]

I'd imagine this includes the pitiful death of this topic as well, since nobody's replied today. - of course, if there any other solutions other than buying a SATA PCI card to put in another PC with my hard drive, I'd appreciate them.

There is not much left to try really. You are moving into the truly esotheric solutions now. I suggest sacrificing a goat at full moon to see what that brings. Apart from that it is waiting for new drivers and hoping those fix the problem.

[STC-Fan]

Originally posted by Arachnotron
There is not much left to try really. You are moving into the truly esotheric solutions now. I suggest sacrificing a goat at full moon to see what that brings. Apart from that it is waiting for new drivers and hoping those fix the problem.

...I'll probably just wait for newer drivers then :p

As I might have said earlier in this topic, it took NVIDIA many many driver revisions before conflicts between my old GeForce2 MX card and Windows XP were ironed out (the card didn't use a standard NVIDIA BIOS but rather Hercules' own solution, which was bad because for a while it meant having to use their outdated-and-never-updated drivers which caused problems in many 3D games - if I used the revision of NVIDIA Detonator drivers out at the time (about 2 years ago) the problems with the games ceased, but then DVD playback was magically disabled! It wasn't until about Detonator v45.xx that all the bugs were fixed. So waiting for newer nForce drivers to fix this problem is nothing new to me :)

Maybe in the meantime I may write an e-mail to ASUS and/or NVIDIA to ask for them to fix this problem, in case they don't already know about it... or do they? I was checking the FAQ on my board on ASUS' support website but a lot of the entries were repeated, and there was so many I got tired of reading through them all, so I don't know if this was mentioned there.

UPDATE: NVIDIA don't have any customer support e-mail addresses except for their NVDVD software. So I'm going to send a message to ASUS tech support and see if they can help.

[STC-Fan]

(regrettably, I forgot to include a link to this topic in my original tech support submission, so this could explain why their response was so "detailed" - anyway...)

--Start of response--

From: "Michael Mullen" <tsd@asus.com.tw>
Subject: Re:<TSD> Motherboard A7N8X Deluxe
To: -----------@hotmail.com
Content-Type: text/html;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 17:11:48 +0100
Message-ID: <CSCNEWS1JXDvCeqTPca0000149f@cscnews.csc.asus.com.tw>
X-OriginalArrivalTime: 20 Aug 2004 16:11:48.0109 (UTC) FILETIME=[651F5BD0:01C486D0]
X-MAIL: Thunder.asus.com.tw i7KGBmdq098952
Return-Path: tsd@csc.asus.com.tw

Dear Rob,
You need to check your resolution matches, and that you have the correct connecting cables.

Mike Mullen
UK Technical Support

--End of response--

...

But seriously, that's all the response they can give? You guys have given me *tonnes* more suggestions than this in around 3-5 days, yet this is all a tech support person, at the company that *made* my motherboard can give me, in 3 days? As it happens I went and bought a better SCART-to-phono adapter ages ago and still got the same problem, so I am definitely sure it's not that. I'm not sure what he means by "resolution matches", though. In any case, it's crazy that even what is probably the best motherboard manufacturer in the world cannot even provide decent tech support.

Also, they have no UK support number, which sucks. Oh well, I'll just have to abandon this video capture project in the meantime, i.e. until several years from now when I'll need to upgrade. Whether I'll buy ASUS stuff again after this mess is somewhat questionable, though.

Off-topic: A friend of mine captured some videotapes recently with his Miglia Director's Cut, and damn it is good. Rest assured I am slightly jealous of him, but I don't have that sort of money to burn (nor do I want to, since it wouldn't be worth it for the small amount of tapes I have). Having said that, it cost him £130, whereas my Pinnacle PCTV Rave cost just £3, and if it wasn't for those ******* lines appearing on my captured video, it'd be as good quality as his. *sigh*

[Blackout]

um...u dont want to hear this, but its not a mb problem. I had the same problem.

You need to buy a TBC - Time Base Corrector. It will sit between your VCR and the capture input.

your friend was right when he said it was a VCR - head spinning inconsistency. Thats what a TBC fixes...it puts the fields back in the correct order and re-clocks them.

You dont see the problem on a TV set or on some capture cards when they are DISPLAYING video because they have a very wide built-in tolerance for frames, its done on purpose so for crappy reception it doesnt look as bad. But when it comes to RECORDING, theres no room for error and you get freezes, jumps and bumps. Trust me on this.

I suggest the ACE Video Convertor. Thats what i brought. Do a search.

Blackout :)