iuvcr best capture prog !?!?!

[cjaar]

my mate has same pixelview play tv pro and my card is also same. He aslo get the same noise in some channels.

thanks
cj

[begu]

Hmm.. I'm using philips SA1708E chip @ gef4 card.
I'm using onboard sound also. Please people here, (who have no sync problems) post Your audio specs -> BOTH hardware and software.
I mean, that it seems very important and is usually no thought at all.
Well You could post what soundcard (drivers) or what onboard chip using.

ALSO the audio compression methods.
- PCM / mp3 (mp3 codec, what version etc.)
- what sampling rate

This is because I have slight sync problems too. I'm going to try virtual vcr today. I have tried virtualdub, showshifter, iuvcr, intervideo windvr. Virtualdub seems to be the best, but it drops a frame in here and there. Very strange thing is, that if I use mp3 (fraunhofer prof.) with 48000kHz and 160 kbps bitrate I get only few dropped frames. And the VT adjust seems to get positive values.

If I use mp3 with 44100kHz and 224 kbps VT adjust gets negative values!? And the speed of 'vt adjust' increases if I use different kbps setting than mentioned!! very strange indeed. If I use PCM 44100 or 48000 kHz the VT adjust seems to grow always positive. But the best result is achieved with mp3 48kHz with 160 kbps.

I wonder if this is due the onboard audio chip. It must use mobo clock or something to keep sample rate. I have not tried soundcard, I had live installed, but get rid of it after this not so resourcehog onboard chip. BUT maybe the live has crystal in it (not sure) to get sample clock exact.

But as I said I must try that virtual vcr, if it has sample clock sligh adjust to get av-sync. I must ask, how the adjusted sampleclok behaves, when converting in Vdub?? Do You use virtual vcr with PCM or mp3?

And someone said, that lame codec is better to keep in sync than fraunhofer. (he was using showshifter) I tested showshifter and got av-sync quite correctly, but I was unable to hear sound after FF/RWD. I loaded that showshifter file in Vdub, and I got sound if I started to play from beginning. But after setting the bar to middle and tried to play it - no sound. So the showshifter does something to soundtrack.

By the way what is the settings in iuvcr, that read 'sync video (or audio) to system clock' ?

Well that's all so far, this is my first post in here :)

[DaveQB]

yeah capturing in a compressed audio achieves the worse results here

i can keep sync if i capture in a lossless Video codec and uncompressed audio, in any resolution size.

i can keep sync in compressed Video (DivX, Xvid) and uncompressed audio up to res 384x288
then @ the next res that doesnt end up with Banding (768x576) i have a little trouble with compressed capturing there, seems to keep sync sometimes and not others,

luck of the draw

compressed audio in 768x576 res results in terrible sync,
might try a lower res :)

begu,
what res do you use and what video codec ??

[birdy]

I can not understand why anyone would want to compress the sound when capturing! Capturing directly to xvid or divx already requiers lot of cpu and I would let my system foucus on the video and do the best possible job. Once the file is done you can always compress the audio to mp3 or what ever format you want in virtual dub and it takes about 15 mins to compress a 2 hours movies with lame for me!

[begu]

DaveQB:

I have just recently bought the gf4 myvivo card, so i'm testing.
I think that the chip (philips sa7108e)works quite well, I can
even compress full 720x576 resolution in virtualdub. I use latest Xvid codec from nic, which can handle interlaced encoding. I have also tested divx502 and Huffyuv (2.1.1) and picview mjpeg.

I have also sigma's x-card (yes I know it's software is buggy, still good HW). I tested capturing in vdub with xvid (using DX50 fourcc for xcard) and 7000 kbps in interlaced mode. When viewed with x-card at my TV it's almost like live.. 8). My primary point is watching from TV not monitor, so that's why I'm not converting to progressive when using best quality.

With lower quality I captured with 384x288 resolution and used Joveplayer to view that with x-card. Joveplayer adds capability to use software decoders (I use ffdshow) and then re-encode it in the fly to x-card's hardware decoder. So I resize the 384x288 to 720x576 and do some processing (denoise and postprocessing) and have quite good quality with low bitrate. That's why I use compressed video and audio together -- I get ready files directly from vdub, so no need to process anything. But ofcourse for quality I must use huffyuv and PCM and then convert them further.

I manage to compress audio too using fraunhofer or lame mp3 codec. I get 75-85 % cpu usage when compressing video and audio using vdub. And I have tested that lowering cpu usage will not affect to av-sync,
or should I say frame drops. That is because yesterday I was thinkin that I should have zero frame drop to maintain av-sync. But today I figured out in here that v-dub handles it by dropping or inserting frames.

But I have not tested recording over 15 minutes, so I must try longer to see how this is working. The thing why I compress audio is as I said before - somehow the framedrop is lesser with compressed audio. That thing leads directly to problems coming from onboard sound, I believe.

I just tried virtual vcr with PCM 44.1 kHz and dynamic samplerete adjust (or whatever). The xcard didn't manage to play it, but WMP and bsplayer did. So I think that with virtual dub I can compress the audio to mp3. How well will the mp3 codec work with this 'adjusted' wav ? Someone said there is no problems.

I will post my system specs also, I have an OC'd system that I've been saving for a while and now up 'n' running :)
- P4 NW 2.4 133 FSB, oc'd to 2.8 gig
- Abit bd7-ii mobo (i845E) with realtek onboard sound (I believe)
- Corsair mem 512MB with 4:3 ratio in 155 FSB making 413ddr
- Leadtek A250 le 128mb gf4 ti4200 myvivo (philips sa7108e)
- win xp pro
- seagate barracuda ata iv 7200 40gig hd

I'm using separate partition for capture and I think that the hd just is able to capture huffyuv. But maybe someone can suggest better hd. I'm not going for scsi or raid at this point, but extra hd fits well :) (thought western digital with 8M cache).

Back to the topic.

DaveQB: what audio device do you have?

By the way, I tried also the iuvcr's audio/video synced to system clock. It seemed to work quite well. But something was wrong with interlaced capturing. Must try it with huffyuv/mjpeg.

To summ up so far: the best working program is original latest virtualdub (p4 optimized version) and maybe the virtualvcr too. Also the showshifter worked in sync, but it couldn't handle audio after FF/RWD. Also I got somewhat good results with intervideo windvr (mpeg1/2), but I didn't manage to get interlaced mpeg out of it in few tests.

So please bring Your audio hardware and 'software' settings in here to compare them. (as I said, it seems to be the quite important factor here, at least in my own tests)

My problem so far is 'how much frame drop is acceptable' ? I loose about 3-7 frames when encoded 10000 frames (pal 25fps), depending on the situation. How good is that? The 'VT adjust' always increases to about +200 ms during that >10000 frames capture.
-- sorry for 'not so good' english, I'm living in Finland --

[DaveQB]

well just did a quick test and capturing @ 384x288 DivX/Xvid and MP3 w/ Virtual VCR (VVCR) only leads to 55% CPU usage, but terrible sync problems.

whats this xcard ??
sounds like Prolinks Xcapture (???)

Hwd in sig,
for audio i use the onboard APU SoundStorm (nVidia)
rates close to an Audigy in performance but with less CPU usage needed to play audio files etc

i think for your HDD setup you shouldnt be capturing to the same physical drive as yuor OS and pagefile,

a seperate drive would be best,
wouldnt be hard to get two 20gigs and a cheap RAID card (most cheap RAID cards use the Silicon image sil0680 chipset which stacks up very well against the cheaper Highpoint chipsets out there) and set up a RAID 0

the WD JB like you said is a nice solution too, performing close to a RAID 0 set-up

[begu]

See again my last post (I did some edit in the beginning, about xcard with Joveplayer)

X-card is Sigmadesigns product, just like Hollywood+.
H+ is a mpeg1/2 hardware decoder and xcard is mpeg1/2/4 HW decoder.
NOTE : xcard doesn't support GMC or quarter pixel and not div3.
It supports divx4 and later and their own sigma-mpeg4 codec. The latest drivers also support xvid. But beware, there are many having some problems with the card. It 'steals' mpg1/2/4 viewing, for example from WMP or other software players. But the newest driver has option to use HW decoder only when using the player application for the card. So WMP, bsplayer, zoomplayer etc work like normal.

There is Joveplayer in deveplopment for xcard. It uses re-encoding system in the fly to use cards hw-decoder. So with Joveplayer it is possible to view any dvix/xvid file with xcard, because decoding is done in software and after that the videostream is re-encoded (in software) and then sent to xcard hw-decoder. And I use ffdshow to view divx with it and it accepts directvobsub too. But fast CPU is needed if viewing avi files with big resolution. But the developer team is constructing special encoder, that reduces cpu demand and improves re-encoding quality.

I must say that the quality of the video from xcard is suberb compared to my gf4 philips output ! But the drivers and sigmas own software isn't the best on earth. But it works as it is supposed to, in most cases. Link:
http://www.sigmadesigns.com/
check the forum too on that site. There is some info about bugs etc.
And I must point out that if You can live with few frames dropped here and there, You can live with xcard too ;)
-- so too much offtopic -- maybe I should create one for xcard.

So back in topic,
DaveQB, maybe that async problem lies just in that onboard sound.
I have ability to test the capturing with sb live in the weekend, and I'll report then. I think that the onboard audio can sound good, but is it 'precise' when speaking of sampling and timing. I think that most soundcards have their own oscillator to get proper samplerate. I haven't seen any near the onboard audio, so maybe that is problem. The onboard audio must use systemclock or something, I don't know. Try to capture with soundcard.

[DaveQB]

yeah i got an old CMI sound card here,
might try it, but the sound quality will be significantly less :(

[begu]

Does anyone know what is controlling the audiodevice's (onboard or soundcard) samplerate? I mean that how does it know what samplerate to use? Or is it so that it's AD-conversion operates in one default setting eg. 44.1 kHz? I think that there is samplerate converter in kernel level in windows. (I read that in some pc audio article)

So if AD-converter is operating in 44.1 kHz and I choose 48 kHz PCM, what happens? Does the wndows kernel convert it to 48 kHz ? (or if AD-converter is 48 kHz, I choose 44.1 kHz)

In virtual vcr there is samplerate setting and bit setting and mono/stereo. Then there are separate audio compression setting. In virtual dub there is no other setting than audio compression. So how vdub gets correct samplerate (I guess that it detects it from compression codec)

So much assumptions and questions ;) - I'll look somewhere.

edit: one other thing came to my mind.
Maybe there is possibility that running fixed pci/agp with my mobo causes this av-sync drifting and so dropping frames in vdub. 'Fixed' means that cpu/mem-bus speed compared to agp/pci-bus speed is not locked together. Like I described in earlier post, I have FSB at 155 MHz and pci is locked to 33 MHz. So these buses are async-connected (there is no divider, eg. the pci/agp is always default and not depending on FSB).

I must try to change settings so that I use divider to get pci/agp speed. (eg. FSB = 133, divider = 4 --> pci = 33 and is in sync with fsb)

[DaveQB]

VD has all the audio settings that VVCR has
both have sampleRate, bit rate and Stereo/Mono settings,

[begu]

DaveQB check my earlier post 'edit:' (about fsb/pci-speeds).

Where in v-dub there is setting to choose samplerate and used bits (8/16). I see only "compression" and "levelmeter" under "audio"-menu.
Of course there is different samplerates shown, when choosing in "compression"-menu (PCM/mp3 etc.). But I mean, that in VVCR there is different settings for "compression" in audio settings. (I can choose not to use compression, but still can determine 'samplerate', 'bits' or 'mono/stereo' setting) If I choose eg. 44.1 kHz and 16 bits and stereo, and then look compression settings, there is no 48kHz available (unless I choose 'show all').

But it seems that v-dub detects proper samplerate to use from the "compression" settings.

[DaveQB]

which post is that ???

PCM is uncompressed,
so while in VD you are selecting PCM's settings,
thats the same as in VVCR selecting the audio settings with the audio compression box not ticked

try the audio settings @ say 48khz and the compressions settings @ say 44.1khz
and then capture

see the error ya get ?? ;)

[begu]

Well ok I got that v-dub samplerate-thing.

I meant You to see previous post, where is "edit: one other thing came to my mind... " and so on. I try to lock my fsb to pci today, because now i have it in 'async' mode, where the pci is locked to default 33MHz and fsb is 155MHz.

[DaveQB]

what board are you using ???

there are no dividers on the nForce2

the PCI, AGP and FSB are all independant and what one does, does no effect the other

you didnt think they have like 44 dividers to have the AGP settings 66-100 in 1 mhz increments ?? ;)

[begu]

More about onboard sound (abit bd7-ii):
Chip is realtek ALC650. Seems good in specs,and sounds good too.
But maybe it is still causing the sync prob.
DAveQB: did You try with separate soundcard?

Something to think about the chip.
http://www.realtek.com.tw/products/products1-2.aspx?modelid=30
A clip from their website:

"Finally, internal PLL circuits generate required timing signals, eliminating the need for external clocking devices."

So to me this sounds bad, but maye it works, hmmm..?

EDIT:
-- I found out that FSB / PCI settings doesn't affect anyhow to the audio-samplerate drifting problem. So I will test with soundcard (sb live 5.1) to see if it has better PLL's than Realtek's onboard chip.

I also found out that virtualdub_sync (in resample-mode) works better for me than VVCR (in resample-mode). When used VVCR the audio did'nt drift, but was off-sync at the start. So it made constat off-sync to avi. It played correctly in v-dub though, but not in bsplayer / WMP. But when used v-dub_sync, I had perfect audio in bsplayer / WMP / v-dub. And also good result when converted the 'resampled' PCM audio to CBR mp3 (fraunhofer) 160kbps. But that was only 45 min recording. Must try over 2 hours to see how v-dub_sync performs.

So I may be lucky after all, only slight audio samplerate-drifting problem here. Must try soundcard to get it better.

--> Any suggestions for good soundcard with accurate sample-clock ?

[fluss]

May I recommend http://kickme.to/svcdcorder
This is a program to handle timed recordings
(including change of TV cannels) with
Virtual VCR and huffyuv.

Then a post processing step to edit and convert
huffyuv files to SVCD.

I think it is a great application.

Hope This is of use to you.

-- Fluss

[VILLA21]

Originally posted by fluss
May I recommend http://kickme.to/svcdcorder
This is a program to handle timed recordings
(including change of TV cannels) with
Virtual VCR and huffyuv.

Then a post processing step to edit and convert
huffyuv files to SVCD.

I think it is a great application.

Hope This is of use to you.

-- Fluss

The TV application doesn"t work for me, i have Hauppauge"s WinTV and their latest WDM drivers.

[acrespo]

I have Pixelview PlayTV PVR with 2.x drivers (15th October 2003).
I can't use tuner in VirtualVCR. The only mode available is NTSC_M and I am brazilian (PAL_M standard). This is not the only problem, when I change the channel a blue screen is showed. If the problem was only the standard mode I was showed the image in greyscale and it's not the case.
In iuVCR I can change the mode and all function properly, but VirtualVCR uses less resources then if anybody have a solution it's welcome.

[midelic]

If you want a time recorder(you can also shutdown,hibernate the computer after capture) for virtualvcr ,you can find it here:
www.zisoft.de/video
Enjoy