PAL60 woes...

[Qjimbo]

Hey all,
I recently got a Sapphire Theatrix 550 which I'm very pleased with, however unlike when I used the btwincap drivers on my last software based card, there doesn't appear to be a PAL60 option in the filters, nor is there any control over the tv standard in the Multimedia Center's TV application. I've been using GBPVR as well, which after some research (http://www.tv-cards.com/messageboard/viewtopic.php?t=11903) I thought I'd be able to force into working at PAL60. However this didn't work :( Aaand I tried ChrisTV, which just seemed to ignore whatever TV standard I selected on the channel manager.
Has anyone managed to get PAL60 working on this card?! It's looking like someones gonna have to make some hacked drivers or something, but I really don't want to go sifting through dissassemblys while my brain melts :P
Any thoughts are appriciated!

[zilog jones]

AFAIK the only capture cards that can do PAL60 in any decent way with standard drivers are the ones with Philips chips (SAA713x), unfortunately, unless something new has emerged.

[Qjimbo]

Damn it! There must be some way :( I mean it's PAL just running at 60hz instead of 50hz, that can't be complicated! Unless the chipset simply can't support that level of control. Thanks for the reply anyway.

[mustardman]

I was under the impression that PAL60 is more like NTSC than PAL.

It has the same frame rate as NTSC.
It has the same number of (horizontal) lines per frame as NTSC.

It is really only the colour signal that is fiddled so a PAL TV set can display a colour picture.

For a tape : try an NTSC VCR. You will have to do some research to determine the format of the tape itself - is it simply an NTSC tape?

For a DVD : Your DVD player should allow you to set up for NTSC colour.

Both ways, try capturing NTSC. I suspect you'll get a lot further than trying to capture PAL.

MM

[setarip_old]

The following might provide some additional insight:

http://www.dvdbits.com/buyersguide/video.asp

"Now, DVD player manufacturers recognised this and implemented a video standard called PAL-60 for use when playing NTSC discs. PAL-60 outputs the NTSC signal using PAL colour codes at 30 fps. Most televisions no older than 8 or 10 years are capable of displaying PAL-60 even though they cannot display NTSC."

[Mug Funky]

a couple of things:

PAL 60 AFAIK is not 59.94 fields per second like (colour) NTSC is, so you're likely to get AV sync problems if you capped with hacked NTSC drivers. perhaps you can convince your VCR to output NTSC 3.58? with the kind of bandwidth NTSC VHS has, you wont lose any detail this way (you'll possibly gain some depending on how advanced the conversion to PAL colourspace was).

sadly, not many VCRs in PAL land support native NTSC anymore - manufacturers seem to have opted for making them output PAL 60 instead. there are some models out there (notably by JVC) that will output the NTSC 3.58 that capture cards need.

[Qjimbo]

My VCR (it's a Samsung one) does have an option to change the colour system to what it shows on the menu as NT4.43, but that seems to just output PAL60 but with screwed up colours and still comes up as grainy black and white in NTSC mode. Thats the only other option besides "NTPB" which seems to be another name for PAL60.

I could get another VCR I guess as they're pretty cheap now, but it's hard to know which ones will output PAL60 and which ones don't, I'll look into JVC though. However it seems silly to because I only have one NTSC tape! And yeah I'm certain the tape is NTSC as it's a commerical one, and has NTSC written on it (it's out of print now before you say about piracy, not to mention it's for backup purposes :P)

Oh and if PAL 60 isn't 59.94 fields per second like NTSC is, why does that make it easier for them to output in PAL60? Seems odd, I think it must be the same because when I view it in NTSC mode it's simply grainy and black and white, not a rolling picture or something you'd expect if it was out of sync...

Thanks for the info though guys, I never thought this would be so awkward.

[setarip_old]

However it seems silly to because I only have one NTSC tape!I believe this is the first time you've mentioned that you're trying to capture from VHS tape.

You might want to look into "VirtualVCR"...

[Mug Funky]

no worries about piracy... NTSC tapes show up all over in PAL land for perfectly legit reasons.

i wouldn't get a new VCR just for one tape. rather just scope out all your friend's VCRs and find one that works. where i work there's loads of VCRs, but for a particular cap i had to resort to borrowing my brother's machine because none of the ones around were up to the task.

NTSC 4.43 is sort of halfway between regular NTSC 3.58 and PAL 60. i think it has the same field-rate as NTSC, uses the same colour encoding but with a different carrier freq or something (not quite sure the specifics of a colour system i don't need. yet somehow every VHS that crosses my desk is NTSC. thankfully i've only ever needed the audio).