WDM capture s-video - Interference/Flicker ONLY on white scenes. Help!

[Muddy Mudskipper]

Hi there,

I have a really annoying problem, here's the setup.

PC

Aopen 'Aeolus' ti4200 - WDM 1.08 drivers
P4 1.8, 1GB RAM

Capturing:

Sky Digibox RGB -----> RGB to s-video converter -----> s-video in on card

Now, the picture is fine--it displays perfectly on the PC. However whenever there is a bright white background (think of the intro to The Simpsons with the clouds) I get major flickering, as soon as the white is gone the picture is perfect again. It literally only happens with bright white backgrounds. I've even captured an hour long TV show without any problems as it never had any white scenes but I really want to fix this problem because it's very irritating. :D

After running some searches I thought it might be Macrovision but I'm using the 1.08 WDM drivers which are Macro-free, right?

Thanks in advance for any help.

[rfmmars]

In you capture software, have you adjusted the brightness/contrast levels?

richard
photorecall.net

[Muddy Mudskipper]

Hi, thanks for the reply. Are these the settings I should be adjusting? Why are the bottom five options greyed out? Is that a limitation of my card or the drivers?

http://www.apdb24.dsl.pipex.com/wdm_settings.gif

In the meantime I changed to the WDM driver 2.13, which seems to be slightly better.

[rfmmars]

Yes that's them.........the ones grayed out simply don't apply to your card, don't worry about it.

What I have found is that each analog device and the source material has different setting for best capture.

Use a commerical VHS tape to set them for the first time, you need some type of standard.

Brighness and contrast are the key ones.

richard

[Muddy Mudskipper]

Adjusting those settings has zero effect on the flicker. :(

I think I'm going to go for a hardware solution (Canopus) because this is driving me up the wall. :D

[Arachnotron]

In the video decoder tab, do you have a VCR option? Does that one make any difference? (probably not, but who knows...)

I have run into a similar problem with a video in which there was a CGI special effect involving lot's of pure white. My personal theory is that the chip mistakes the clipped white in these lines for vertical sync signals, thus causing it to start a new field in the middle of the old one. This causes loss of sync and in my case dropped frames too. Untill now I have not found an answer yet.

Any answer would probably involve messig around with the gain, and most drivers do not allow access to those settings. (so far only the BT878 with the vdub bttweaker and the SAA7134 in combination with FlyTV 2000 )