News about those ugly lines I wrote about in a thread a few weeks ago

[fellaw]

Here's the related link:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=34456

I ran some tests and I came to one conclusion:
This problem is a BT8X8 <- VIA Issue. I tried several cards based on a BT848 or BT878(Hauppauge, PCTV, Flyvideo). All cards caused those annoying lines. I tried the same cards on an Intel based board with the same hardware(besides CPU, RAM and mobo) and software. What a surprise, there where no lines!

Yesterday, I bought the Cinergy 400 from Terratec based on the Philips SAA7134, and this card has no such issue with my VIA based mobo. I think the drivers are a little bit crappy, because I got massive framedrops on my 1G Athlon in YUV2 colorspace. I solved them by switching to I420 colorspace. I should mention that the Cinergy has a much better picture than the TV+, so I'll keep it.

One more time to say how angry I'm with VIA. Their chipsets are s**t, espescially the southbridges. It might be only me, but I NEVER will buy a VIA based Mobo again.

[Swan]

Fellaw, glad to hear it got sorted out for you. I personally feel it is too soon to blame Via. I had the problem too, but after switching to YUY2 color space, the problems went away.

And the same card you say works flawlessly for you now, Cinergy 400 from Terratec, never worked properly in my AMD/Via system. I didn't get framedrops, but a reduction of the frame rate to about half PAL fps (12.5 fps) as soon as I went from 352 x 288 to 720 x 576.
Also, Terratecs e-mail support is about the worst I have ever seen. They're totally brainless and suggest idiotic things. They clearly doesn't seem to read the problem description from the customer and it takes them about a month to reply.
I'd never recommend this card to anyone.

I bought a Pinnacle PCTV Pro and it's the best card I've ever had (it's also bt878 based).

So, in my view there's more to this mystery than just blaming Via.

/Swan

[fellaw]

Switching to YUV2 colorspace only reduced the frequency of those lines appearing. They still where there, though. I DO blame VIA. I recognized several issues with only their southbridges(686A and up):

1. the PCI lateny bug with 686B and up
2. poor IDE performance with default drivers
3. In some cases very bad ACPI compliance
4. (very rare) wrong IDE mode issues(no UDMA although HD/DVD being able to)
5. this issue

I never had such problems when running exactly the same hardware(besides CPU & RAM) on an SIS, Intel or Ali based mobo.
And you can't expect other hardware companies to compensate those problems.

The Cinergy did it for me, don't have the problems you mentioned. OK, you personally won't recommend the Cinergy. But don't you agree that the SAA7134 gives a much better picture than the BT878 does?

I agree with you regarding the TT support. They think that every customer who writes them doesn't have any notion and they're the chief of the boat. I've only seen one support who is equally worse, the german one from Pioneer.

[bb]

Did you install VIA's latest 4in1 driver pack?

bb

[fellaw]

of course I did!

I installed all latest drivers & bios/firmware for all my hardware.
Of course I have only high end components, e.g. Antec PSU and PC133 CL2 Infineon

[bb]

Ok, fine, I asked because I have three PCs with VIA chipsets, 1 PIII, 2 AMDs (Thunderbird + XP), and none of them had the problem you described. I have an old Hauppauge WinTV PCI, using VfW drivers.

bb

[fellaw]

Hmm, I think I wrote I'm having this weird lines problem only with Windows 2K/XP. Win98/ME didn't have it, at least until I installed the WDM drivers.

[Valky]

I also have Win XP, Athlon 1800+ XP and Via. I use old basic Hauppage PCI which work good in every other situation than going 640*480 or above. Then those lines appear.
That's why I use 320*480 for my captures. I use those modified btw-drivers.

[Swan]

Originally posted by fellaw
Switching to YUV2 colorspace only reduced the frequency of those lines appearing. They still where there,
For me, it did the trick. I *do* get a few lines now and then.
But they are also visible on the TV, and are defintely not caused by an buffer overflow of the PCI buses.
I usually watch the TV as I capture and since I often capture old music videos live from Vh1, the quality isn't always great on the broadcast. Old music videos can have poor sync between audio and video, etc, so I have made it a habit to watch the TV, not the monitor, while I capture. This way I can be sure, later on when I watch what I have captured, that the audio/video issues that may be present, lines, noise, skips, etc, is not due to me.

The Cinergy did it for me, don't have the problems you mentioned. OK, you personally won't recommend the Cinergy. But don't you agree that the SAA7134 gives a much better picture than the BT878 does?
Initially I thought it was incredible; the difference between the AverTV Studio card I had and the Cinergy was that big! Of course, I could only *watch* TV with it, not capture, so I was never able to form an opinion on what full res. captures made with the Cinergy looked like. After I bought my present card, the Pinnacle PCTV Pro, I noted that the Aver card was faulty, that's why I thought the Cinergy had such incredible quality. The Pinnacle produces excellent results. I can't say I saw any major difference between the quality of the Pinnacle and the Cinergy.

I have given it to a friend and when he begins to find his feet I'll be able to see some samples of 720 x 576 captures from the Cinergy. Then I will be able to say if I think the Cinergy's quality is better or not, compared to the Pinnacle.

/Swan

[satgeek]

a couple of things, make sure "DRAM prefetch" is disabled in the bios.
if your board has an onboard promise controller, put your HDD on it.
with win2k you shouldn't install 4in1's(maybe only agp driver). install
latest win2k service pack. or better yet dump VIA altogether
and get a SiS 745 chipset motherboard(or wait for upcoming 746),
SiS has excellent pci bus performance which is a must to get the best possible captures.

[JReiginsei]

I received and installed a Hauppauge WinTV - dbx model 401 from which ordered on the Internet. I installed it with latest VFW drivers and TV app and am getting those same ugly lines. I am using VirtualDub btw. Its too bad I didn't see this thread before I ordered my card, because I didn't know these cards had problems with VIA mobos. So far I've eliminated many of the lines just by disabling my cpu cooling. I've tried various BIOS settings but I don't think I'll be able to get rid of the rest of the lines. I'm thinking of trading my Abit KT7 with my brother's ECS K7S5a. Before I do, does anyone know if the card will produce the ugly lines with SiS chipsets as well? Also, a little off topic but my brother's comp is an ECS K7S5a with a duron 1ghz 100FSB. If I would get that mobo, could I put DDR ram in it, or would I need a new processor for it?

[jr]

Hi. Those lines are known problem with BT8x8 and VIA chipsets. They are just one of many severe problems that exist with VIA chipsets. SIS is another cheap brand that everyone should stay away from.

Back in 1996 when I installed first BT848 card to production enviroment I did mistake and tried to use cheap PC for it. First I tried with SIS based motherboard - no matter what you did it crashed when trying to capture. Ok lets take another motherboard, based on VIA this time. Aargh, those lines! Next I tried with Intel 430FX (Triton) and still these damn lines are there so not even Intel is perfect on this issue. Decided to try once more and bought brand new Intel 430HX based motherboard. It works. Not a single crash or corrupted frame during 4 years it was in use.

About year ago I needed to create another capture machine for my personal use. I thought that chipset manufacturers would have fixed their PCI implementations by now, after all problems were already well known six years ago. I did another mistake and bought VIA KT266 board. Aargh, those lines are still there! It's been years and VIA is still unable to follow even basic PCI specs on their chipsets. Now I really wanted to know what's wrong with these chipsets or is it just bad cards that cause it. Friend of mine had VIA 649X (Abit VP6) Dual-P3 and when I installed Hauppauge BT878a to that one same lines. Next was some SIS based Athlon board - same lines present, not as much but still sometimes visible when using high resolutions. Working chipsets were Intel 440BX, Intel 815, AMD-761. Later I tried with AMD-762 based Dual-Duron and it worked as well.

I was actually able to get rid of those lines on that Dual-P3 by tweaking some PCI related settings on BIOS. You guys might want to try that as it might help with newer VIA chipsets as well.

Problems with VIA chipsets aren't limited to data corruption that occurs when there's high PCI utilization (=BT8x8 video capturing), but also random bad bits from IDE's (there's some fixes that are supposed to fix this one), poor compatibility with some sound cards (SB Live) and then there's this general unstability. I don't mean crashing applications that can usually be traced to some bad component, but simply feeling that something is not right. Sudden slowdown on I/O that's not repeatable like massive loss of frames when capturing when there's no other I/O bottlenecks than chipset itself.

Some time ago I was shopping for cheap PC with fast CPU. Guess why I skipped AMDs? I was unable to find single CPU motherboard without VIA or SIS chipset. I already have two AMD-761 based AthlonXP's and would've bought third one but no more available. Instead got Tualatin Celeron 1200, plugged to 4 year old 440BX Slot-1 motherboard using modified slotket and overclocked to 1600MHz. No crashes. Why not P4? Expensive, Celeron models are slow and motherboards based on Intel chipsets too expensive.

Surely now 20 or so die-hard VIA fans will reply telling how VIA and SIS are perfect and it's plain stupid not to use their products when you need stable workstation or even server. You can have your opinion, I have mine. You might have some limited experiences that VIA works and I have mine that it doesn't. These are issues that hardly occur when someone does 2h test for new motherboard and posts 5 stars article on some hardware site. Besides why would this thread be there if VIA would be so perfect? Why HPQ doesn't use VIA instead of Serverworks for Proliant chipsets? :)

Ok, way off-topic posting, but at least in middle there's one sentence that's on-topic and provides possible solution to problem you're experiencing.

[cjv]

Originally posted by JReiginsei
So far I've eliminated many of the lines just by disabling my cpu cooling.
You can't be serious? :confused: How long can you run your system for?

I am also experiencing lines that I feel are from the VIA chipset, but disabling cooling would fry my Athlon in a matter of minutes.

cjv

[cjv]

Originally posted by jr
I was actually able to get rid of those lines on that Dual-P3 by tweaking some PCI related settings on BIOS. You guys might want to try that as it might help with newer VIA chipsets as well.
I would be curious _exactly_ what settings you tweaked, because I am also experiencing lines related to VIA/PCI bus.
Thanks,

cjv

[JReiginsei]

Hehe, I meant to say I turned off software cpu cooling. I have this program called WPCREST and if I set register 52 to EB, my idle cpu temp goes from 50 celcius to about 30-32 celcius. I've been thinking its time for an upgrade to my comp, after all I've had the Abit KT7 since December 2000. Does anyone with a Hauppauge card experience problems with the Nvidia NForce 2 mobos? I'd like to stay with AMD because their processors are good. If not then I'll get a fast PIV with an Intel mobo.

[GrofLuigi]

Who has problems with VIA chipset can try this patch from:

http://www.georgebreese.com/net/software/

and join/view the discussions in:

http://forums.sudhian.com/categories.cfm?catid=19&STARTPAGE=1

GL

[JReiginsei]

I enabled some settings in the BIOS and now I don't see those lines anymore. I captured from my GameCube Metroid Prime at 640 x 480 for a minute and 45 seconds and didn't see any lines.

[Valky]

could be helphul if upu could tell people what settings were they..?

[JReiginsei]

Originally posted by Valky
could be helphul if upu could tell people what settings were they..?

I enabled "Delay Transaction" and "PCI Master Read Caching." For the Abit KT7 those features by default are disabled because of SBLive problems with KT133 and KT133a. After reading through the Abit KT7 FAQ at Sudhian.com I found out you should enable them if you don't have the SBLive because (here is the exact quote):

"Although this helps resolve issues of corrupted large file transfers with the Soundblaster soundcard, it has a tendency to introduce other errors (video capture, disk, DVD and CDRW related) in the system."

[Valky]

Too bad I am between those bugs :)

I have same motherboard and I red that guide also also. But since I also capture a lot with hauppage pci and my soundboard is SB Live there is some bad luck :)

Well, I'll manage as ong as I keep my capture resolution 320x480 (vhs) or 360x576 with the TV, but can't get higher than that.