Video Cap Problem ASUS 8200 T5 Deluxe *White Saturation*

[808state]

Video Cap Problem ASUS 8200 T5 Deluxe *White Saturation*


I am a very unhappy with my ASUS 8200 T5’s video capture quality. The video looks great except for scenes with any white color displayed. White scenes looking horribly saturated, washed out and are lacking detail. I have tried the retail drivers, updated ASUS drivers and of course the Nvidia reference drivers all with the same results. I can’t believe the fact that I spent over $400 for this card and the quality of video captures look so horrible. I am not the only one with problems; I have posted the same question on different boards and found many others are also experiencing the same problems with HEAVILY over saturated white scenes. I have owned this card for 6 months now and have yet to capture a single clip worth saving. To me the card is absolutely useless as a capture device… PLEASE if anyone has a fix for this problem I would greatly appreciate a response.


My system:
OS WinXP
ASUS P4T-E Mobo 106 bios
ASUS 8200 T5 Deluxe
Kingston 512 RDRAM 800MHz
P4 1.9 MHz
Hercules Game Theater XP sound card
O.S. Hard drive WD 40-gig O.S. Controller card Promise Ultra 100tx
Capture drive(s) 2 WD 100-gig RAID RAID Promise Fast track ultra 100tx

[Didée]

First of all,

I don´t have workedwith this particular card. Just some general thoughts and experiences of mine with my ATI AIW 8500DV:

(I assume you refer to very *bright* scenes, in really *white* you can´t see any saturation)
When I watch TV through TV-in, I have raised the overlay brightness some notches, and also a little bit of overlay´s gamma, until I was satisfied with the picture quality.
But it turned out that those optimal settings for watching were no good for capturing, no no ... strange results in the bright areas.

Perhaps you could achieve better results by *lowering* your brightness and/or gamma settings? The capture codecs are so happy when they don´t have to deal with 100%-values in any plane.
For testing purposes, I would try to lower brightness by a more than fair amount, and raise it again after capturing, to see if it loks better this way. If so, you can approximate by try-and-error to the optimal value.

Just my two cents. Perhaps the card or its driver really have a major problem. But you can´t lose by trying the above out.

Oh, what about an attenuator? Some cards have great difficulties with too strong signals!

Good luck

Didée

[StephLG]

Hi,

the bad news is that it is a known bug on asus 8200 cards; I also have this issue, but only in composite capture.
BUT, the good news is: there is a workaround! :) :) :)

I finaly managed to find the original post from MaxReboot where some smarts guys explain how to solve the problem.
Here is the quote:
(rev 1.2)
This procedure resolves the brightness/excessive white saturation problem when capturing NTSC or PAL video with the Asus 8200 Deluxe series (with the Philips 7108e chip) under Windows 98SE, 2000, and XP running nVidia's Detonator 23.11 or higher (including Technogarb's) and WDM 1.08 reference drivers.
---
1. Completely remove all old video & capture drivers.
2. Install nVidia Detonator 23.11 or higher, rebooting as necessary.
3. Install nVidia WDM 1.08, rebooting as necessary.
4. Install capture software (or just use Windows Movie Maker in XP) to test to make sure everything is working so far. I still get a black capture window sometimes but if I reboot it seems to initialize properly and then capture will keep working until I reboot again.
5. Install Video Live WDM from http://www.ab.ru/~lookin/downloads/_downloads22.htm
6. Reboot.
7. Install Video Live Mode from the same URL.
8. Regedit and add or change the DWORD value HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\VLio\EVIPInit = 0x0
9. Create a shortcut in Startup to point to the livemode.exe installed from step #7 with a target of "C:\Program Files\VLive\LiveMode\LiveMode.exe" reg 3 0x00
(make sure to leave the quotes as above if you are doing a shortcut. Or just make a batch file to run it in whatever drive & directory you installed to with the command: livemode reg 3 0x00 )
10. Reboot and capture with your favorite software with no brightness problem on latest drivers!

Note that you are still going to use the Nvidia Universal WDM for capturing. There is no need to install any more Video Live software other than described above.

If you still have the brightness problem you are not running the livemode reg 3 0x00 command properly. You can run it any time after bootup, even while a capture program is running if you want to watch it change the picture.

If you want to play around with the manual gain control and many other settings also download the SAA7111A EVIP manager from the Video Live URL. It will run without messing up the picture as long as you did step #8.

Also, remember if you are just getting a black capture window to reboot. I seem to get it every other time I reboot but then rebooting again will fix it.

Thanks to drracer and to Igor for the Video Live components. No thanks to Asus for their poor quality drivers.

This method works for me, although I didn't create a shortcut in StartUp; I launch the command "C:\Program Files\VLive\LiveMode\LiveMode.exe" reg 3 0x00 when I need it (and before running my capture program)

Hope this will help.

Steph.

[808state]

StephLG

Thanks so much for your response I pray to god I can get my card working properly. Man I wish ASUS had better techie support...it seemed for months they didn’t even have a board up. Now that they finally have their board up again half the forums don’t even work and are dog slow on my DSL connection...very frustrating. I love their motherboards and multimedia stuff but they have crap support.

Anyhow I will give your walk through a try and get back with some results. I am eager to cap the recently ran Bob Marley Bio on VH1 from my DSS Tivo! Will I still be able to adjust the contrast/brightness without screwing myself after the fix is applied?

Thanks again

[808state]

Didée

Thanks for the response but believe me I have tried to adjust the settings. I used my DVD player via S-Video connection and the Video Essentials DVD with no avail.


Thanks

[808state]

StephLG

I thank you much! Contrast problem fixed by following the guide you posted! However I still have a rather annoying problem I didn’t mention before...I’m getting this white line (about 1/8 inch) with about a ¼ inch of distortion at the top of my clips???

Have you or anyone else experienced this problem before and come up with a fix?

Thanks

[StephLG]

Hi 808state,

I'm glad it also worked for you; experience is meant to be shared.

Concerning the distortion you mentioned, I don't have this effect when I plug an S-Video cable directly in the card; I noticed some heavy distortion at the bottom of the screen when watching full Pal res (720x576) from a composite VCR source. I don't know if it came from the source itself (VHS resolution is low) or from the composite input, or from the software tuning. Honestly, I didn't even tried to tune to have a better image. I won't be able to help on this point :(
Maybe you could do a crop/resize afterwards.

Steph.