Capturing in Vista

[Piper]

...well someone had to finally admit to it! :sly:

I recently completed a new computer build and for kicks I thought I'd go all the way and install Vista on it. The new capture card is a ATI Theatre 550 which works very nicely with Windows Media Center.

VirtualDub 1.6.17 also works well aside from a couple of quirks and I'm curious if anyone else has experienced them. The first is if I enable audio preview while capturing, which is turned off by default. When turned off, video playback is nice and smooth (overlay mode), but turn it on and video becomes choppy. Try capturing with audio preview turned on and it's dropped frames city. It's not a big deal to capture with audio preview turned off, but it's something perhaps worth mentioning.

Another issue I've discovered is if I enable the source preview window while encoding, the entire window will be green. Again, not a big issue as the final encode is fine, and I typically don't have it turned on in any case during an encode anyway (saves CPU cycles).

I just thought I'd throw that out there. I have read that Avery himself hasn't yet jumped completely to Vista and honestly I'm surprised I didn't run into more significant snags using VirtualDub in Vista.

[communist]

The reduced performance when enabling Audio preview might be because Microsoft decided that DirectSound calls no longer need direct access to hardware :rolleyes:
Note that the Vista DirectSound emulation sends mixed audio content to the standard OS audio path, and offers no “direct” path to hardware at all. Since the whole point of DirectSound acceleration is to allow hardware to process unmixed audio content, DirectSound cannot be accelerated in this audio model.
Taken from http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=Vista&message.id=1694

[Piper]

That would certainly help to explain the audio issue. I wondered if it were due to the new hardware abstraction model in Vista. It now appears that it may in fact be a likely cause.

[chipzoller]

Did you try with the latest drivers? ATI/AMD released new ones a few days ago (and frequently update).
Have you tried capturing with VirtualVCR?

I don't have Vista, otherwise I'd test myself.

[Piper]

@chipzoller: The latest Vista drivers from ATI/AMD for the TV Theater 550 is version 7.1 dated Jan. 31, 2007 which I've had installed now for quite a while.

A side note, Vista's Windows Media Center works quite well when it's working. Occasionally it simply throws up an error "Windows Media Center Receiver Service stopped working and was closed". This error is driving me mad. I managed to get around this error once by going back to an earlier restore point, but a few days later it's back and no amount of restoring to earlier versions is correcting it. Such is the perils of jumping to Vista so early I suppose.

[chipzoller]

The latest Vista drivers from ATI/AMD for the TV Theater 550 is version 7.1 dated Jan. 31, 2007 which I've had installed now for quite a while.
Ah yes, you're right. I was somehow mixed-up with the WinXP drivers.

[squid_80]

In virtualdub, do you select the theater 550 as the audio device or is the audio passed to the sound card and captured from that? I tried to figure out by searching but the answer wasn't completely clear to me:Digital Audio Processing - the 550 PRO processes audio streams internally and then transferred to the sound card via internal buses; since both video and audio streams are handled together by the same chip, synchronization issues are avoided.
If it goes through the audio card and it's an audigy, they can (not always, but sometimes) have all kinds of trouble with virtualdub.

[JohnnyMalaria]

That would certainly help to explain the audio issue. I wondered if it were due to the new hardware abstraction model in Vista. It now appears that it may in fact be a likely cause.

Exactly. Any DirectShow-based application that relies on the DirectShow framework to automatically create the audio rendering part of the filter graph will end up using DirectSound. This is emulated in Vista and there is a very real performance hit. For one of our apps, I've had to add the option for the user to override the automatic choice for the audio rendering. By selecting a non-DirectSound driver, the performance issues go away. Note - it's still using the same hardware but a different way of getting at it.

[Piper]

In virtualdub, do you select the theater 550 as the audio device or is the audio passed to the sound card and captured from that? I tried to figure out by searching but the answer wasn't completely clear to me:
If it goes through the audio card and it's an audigy, they can (not always, but sometimes) have all kinds of trouble with virtualdub.

The Theatre 500 is selected as the audio device and is not connected to the sound card. I have had a few ATI Capture cards over the years, but this is the first which handles audio in this manner. I did a double take when I first installed the card and noticed there weren't any audio connectors.

[ronnylov]

I have tried capturing with VirtualVCR using my Terratec Cinergy 400 TV PCI card in Windows Vista 32-bit but I get audio synch problems when I select the TV card as audio source. Trying to connect it through the sound card does not work at all because my Cretive Soundblaster Live Value does not work to record any audio with (I think there is a driver problem). However I don't get any more dropped video frames than I get in Windows XP. So you say I get a performance drop in Vista audio using directshow. Perhaps I should try using a less demanding video codec like mjpeg or huffyuv instead of lagarith and see what happens. But I think my dual core AMD X2 should have power for video capture...

Is there any workaround for the audio in VirtualVCR in Windows Vista?

Regarding performance I tried to switch off the aero glass in the properties of VirtalVCR exe file and it seemed to improve a little bit.

EDIT: My performance problem was solved by installing an other driver for my soundcard which enabled the audio inputs of the soundcard and then I could connect audio out of the TV-card to an audio input of my soundcard and use that as audio source in VirtualVCR.