generell question about tv capture card choice

[awe007]

hi,

i´ve some problems with my old tv capture card hauppauge (bt 878). although i´ve a new cpu and hdd i get several dropped frames in high resolution capturing. i tried several work arounds (change irq, other drivers...) but i´m still very unhappy with the hauppauge. now i´m looking for a new capture card. i´ve read other threads with comments on other cards wihtout any solution to me. i´m looking for a card which gives me a good performance in high resolution capturing (no dropped frames, full pal) and is able to work with the btwincap driver. i´m running windows xp.

perhaps someone can give me some suggestions or comments on his card. moreover i´m not sure about this fact: does only the bt 8x8 chip support the btwincap driver..?

At last i want to say that this thread does NOT ask for the BEST CARD (so i hope i don´t violate the rules..). i´m just looking for some comments on other tv capture cards which fit to my needs...

thx

frank

[ppera2]

Yes, if you want to use BT Wincap driver, you need card with BT 8x8 chip.
But, I think that your problem is driver, and not card - see my thread 'How an Earth...'. Problem by Wincap driver is that it requires VFWWDM wrapper for work with Virtual Dub in XP. (I assume that V Dub is reason why you force Wincap drivers). It increases CPU load, plus as I see Wincap driver has some other problems.

Solution is to use other program than V Dub for capture, what is not luckiest because of features, or capture in Win98SE.

Pinnacle's WDM driver in XP for example works very well, and I don't have any framedrops in full PAL on XP 1900 system.

Back to card choice: I doubt that Hauppauge is so bad. But if you want other card, perhaps try some with newer capture chip than BT 878. All depends from how much money you want spend.
Pinnacle has good quality and software, and it's with BT878, but installing BT Wincap driver may be a problem (however you better don't bother, it's not worth).

And of course, reason for dropped frames could be software nature.

[awe007]

hi ppera2,

thx for you information. i´m a little bit confused as you said to try a newer chip than the bt 878. all specifications about new cards telling me that hey´re using the bt 878 chip. so are the´re different versions of these chip on the capture card? you´re right some of the pinnacle system studio cards look very nice. moreover a freind of me told me that capturing with windowx xp isn´t the best choice because of the wdm driver which often causes problems. at the moment i only use the bt driver because the hauppauge driver doesn´t give me the option to capture in full pal (only vcd, half pal). The same problem occurs by my friends with their hauppauge cards.

it seems that changed the os with which you´re capturing can eleminate some of the problems...

thx

frank

[ppera2]

It's not hauppauge's driver who is prevent cap. at full res, but incompability of V Dub with WDM drivers - try capturing with Virtual VCR (it's free).

About newer chips: I thought on some Philips chips, declared that have more bit depth by capture and other benefits. Which cards use it - you must search around WEB and forums. And new cards still outcome... Problem with them could be worse software support, because BT 8x8 chipset is best supported... So, your choice.

But I doubt that you will gain anything with buying another BT 878 based card.

[Arachnotron]

At the moment there are three chips being used on TV / capture cards.

First is the old and trusty Brooktree BT878. It is still being used on a lot of TV cards, but it often has problems with shared interrupts and the like and can be difficult to get running stable on modern computers.
However, there are a lot of guides out there based on this chip, and if you use the BT8x8 tweaker integrated in virtualdub it offers the most tweaking options.

Second, You have the Philips SAA7134. It is more modern, and uses a 9 bits ADC.

Third you have the Conecant CX2388x based cards. The CX2388x is actually the successor to the BT878 since Brooktree first went to Rockwell, which was taken over bu Connexant. It has a 10 bit's ADC, but I have read somewhere the full bit depth isn't being used by the drivers at the monent.

I own TV cards with all three chips. So far, I would say (but without extensive testing !!!) that both the Philips and the Conexant have better picture quality than the BT878. Without extensive tuning and testing I cannot say which of the last two is the best. I think the CX2388x is slightly better with color, but again I have to test this first.

Right now I use the philips based card (Terratec Cynergy 400) since I want to capture PAL 60 (NTSC VHS tapes played on an PAL VCR) and the Philips reference drivers have this option.

Actually all three chips can do this, but the BT878 only using the BTwincap drivers, and I could not get this card running stable with them. Also you cannot use overlays, wich means previewing during capturing can be troublesome.

The CX2388x can do PAL60 too, bit so far I haven't found any brand of card which came with drivers that used the PAL60 support.

As soon as some decent drivers come out for the CX23881 I might switch cards.

[awe007]

hi Arachnotron,

at first thank you for the detailed description on the different chiptsets.

as i suggest changing one bt 878 card into another bt 878 card would not solve any problems. at the moment it is not possible with my tv card (hauppauge bt 878, btwin driver) to capture in full pal. the captured movie contains lots of horizontal lines with crap in it (wrong color, black lines etc) and i don´t know what problem causes these problems (when capturing i´ve no dropped frames). so in my mind there´re only two things that are going wrong:

problems with the bt878 card in this resolution

or

very bad source singnal from broadcast (cable). the problem is how to find out which of the two things is the one which causes the problem.

did you install all three tv cards in your pc or do you change them from time to time depending on which chip you need..? as you mentioned the philips and the conecant are superior to the bt878. do you know where to get information about the driver. as i said earlier in my message it is very inportent to me that the driver is able to capture full pal and btwin doesn´t support the philips / conecant chips. therefore you haven´t the possibility to change the driver....

does your terratec cynergy driver suppport full pal..?

thx

frank

[ppera2]

About horizontal lines with crap: I had something like that when CPU Cooler software was active. In any case, you must deactivate it while capture (perhaps need look in BIOS settings too). See IRQ conflicts in device manager.

In any case it is something what can't be because of bad driver (in praxis). Perhaps incompability, but I duobt it. Check software, IRQ conflicts.

Last possibility is that card has failure.

[awe007]

hi,

i chhecked all possible things (irq conflicts, additional software that is running on so on...but everything is fine....i reinstalled windows without any additional appz). however no success. still the same problems. therefore i thought the tv card or the driver might be the source of the problem....

i uploaded some pictures frome the captured avi which show the strange artefact...perhaps someone can take a look on it....

http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/frank.hechtner/test2.JPG
http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/frank.hechtner/test4.JPG
http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/frank.hechtner/test.JPG
http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/frank.hechtner/test3.bmp


thx


frank

[Arachnotron]

> did you install all three tv cards in your pc or do you change them
> from time to time depending on which chip you need..?

I gave up on the BT878 (an older model Hauppauge WinTV Radio FM).

For a while I had both the Terratec and the CX23881 installed (Hauppauge WinTV Radio Nicam I think), but this sometimes gave me trouble in selecting the correct tuner or device settings tab (Brightness etc. sliders) so for the moment I have only the Philips installed.


as you mentioned the philips and the conecant are superior to the bt878. do you know where to get information about the driver.

As far as I know you cannot download generic drivers from either Connexant or Phillips. However, most manufacturers use the standard reference drivers supplied by them unmodified.

For Philips, this is version 1.4.00 I believe. Flyvideo does it's own driver version (not branded phillips any more) but I have no idea if they are simply recompiled standard drivers with their own branding and version numer in them or if they modified something.

For the connexant it seems most manufacturers recompile, but again I don't know what has been changed.

In the end I would go with a manufacturer with good continuous driver support. Sadly, Terratec is not one of them. Hauppauge is a better bet I think.

> as i said earlier in my message it is very inportent to me that the
> driver is able to capture full pal

Both the Terratec (which uses the 1.4.00 Phillips drivers unmodified) and the Hauppauge with the latest drivers can do this. I assume you mean 720x756. I havent tried 768x756 yet. Will do it tonight.
I used virtualVCR for this.

The btwin driver is only for the BT848/878 chipset, it is not a generic capture driver.

As an aside, if you run into troubles take care you are not running DirectX 9.0b. There are capture and tuner related bugs in it. Either go back to DirectX 8.1b or download the patch at

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=8DFD1B6D-E177-4A0E-91D0-B4310675B02B&displaylang=en

[awe007]

hi,

thx for the information. with full pal i mean arround 750 * 560. you said that the hauppauge supports this with the latest driver. that sounds strange. to me it was impossible to capture in any other resolution than vcd with the hauppauge drivers (in vdub). only the tbwin driver enabled higher resolutions. i have a old hauppauge with a bt 878. are there any differences between newer modells from hauppauge because they´re still using the bt 878 chipset.

another question: to make it clear to me. you can capture with your cinergy in virtualdub at full pall 750 * 560..? sorry i don´t know the exact values.

thx

frank

[Malcolm]

Hi awe007,
i just had a look on your test pics. i know these sort of artifacts. a friend of mine bought a used BT878 card some time ago. i helped installing it, but we encountered the same artifacts as you did. i tried different things, installing the btwincap drivers multiple times and so on, but it didn't help. so we gave up. i guess there are some incompatibilities between our card-model and the driver.
i have another BT878 card in my own pc running with no problems. i use DScaler, VirtualVCR and the btwincap drivers. no artifacts ever and usually no framedrops (except one time where i was capturing a very old and bad quality vhs-tape).

bye, Malcolm

[jggimi]

Are you using a built-in Tuner? It looks to me like it's possibly RF interference. If the problems do not occur when using non-RF video-in (e.g.: composite or S-video), then RF interference is likely.

Inside-the-PC tuners can get interference from the motherboard, the PCI bus, or other PCI cards.

[Arachnotron]

Hauppauge makes cards with both chips. They have different drivers, look on the driver page (CX881 = CX23881)

Also, since Vdub uses video for windows instead of directshow, you might run into problems there. Try virtualVCR, and see what happens.

http://www.digtv.ws/

[ppera2]

awe007:

I dl.-ed first picture (btw. your host is extremely slow).

It's not like CPU cooler soft caused green lines (by me), it's certainly not card's interference with motherboard (components).

It looks like something interrupts wether CPU, wether PCI data transfer. Do you have similar artefacts with all cap. drivers?

If yes, it's some trouble, perhaps even bad motherboard, CPU, cap. card.

What you need is to replace components. If you can, loan another cap. card and try it.

And must repeat that in XP you will not get above 288 lines vertical in V Dub capture. Exception is BT Wincap driver, which is abviously hacked to override some limitations of vfwwdm wrapper, but people reports many troubles with it.

[Arachnotron]

with xp and Hauppauge CX23881 based I can get 576 lines.

[awe007]

thx to all for the help. i tried different configurations so i´m sure it is not a problem of irc etc. conflict. it seems i have to try another capture card. cpu, hard drive and so on are 100% ok. also i try to change the source (line in, s-video and non rf, thx jggimi). as you said Malcolm you / your friend had the same problems. maybe my card has the same problems with whatever...:-((

@ ppera2: all pc components are new (athlon xp 2200, msi mobo kt 400). the problems only occur in resolutions higher than vcd (therefore only with btwin because the hauppauge driver doesn´t support higher res)

i didn´t mention it but i always used vdub vcr but there´s no difference between vcr vdub and vdub.

ok.....lots of things to do....the only problem is to get a new / other capture card for some more capture test.

[awe007]

Arachnotron,

i can´t see how to determine which cards from hauppauge have the CX23881 chip. on the english homepage there are no information about the chipset

http://www.hauppauge.com/html/products.htm#pci


on the german page i see the following information

WinTV Express Videodigitizer Chip Conexant Fusion 878

WinTV-GO2 Videodigitizer Chip Conexant 881

do you know the name of the card with the CX23881 chip.

thx


frank

[Arachnotron]

All Hauppauge cards are called WinTV something, but if you look on the drivers/software page for the WinTV series you will find that

881 based boards have the following Model numbers: 34xxx

878 based boards have the following Model numbers:
61xxx
44xxx
39xxx
38xxx
37xxx

Also, there is a three digit model number on the side of the box. I will look it up tonight when I am at home again. (It's 15:35 pm over here )

Please keep in mind that for now at least these drivers cannot do PAL60, so if you want to capture American NTSC tapes using a PAL VCR it won't work.

[awe007]

hi Arachnotron,

thx for the info....i´m living in germany (next to netherlands..:-)) therefore i think we both have the same pal 50 systems. i´m still a little bit confused. does 881 (on the homepage) mean Conecant CX23 88x chipset..??


thx

frank

[Belgabor]

When my wintv (BT878) died end of last year, the replacement I got already had the new Connexant chip. Therfore I guess all new Hauppauge cards ship with it (if you don't get an old one in the store ;)).

[awe007]

hi Belgabor,

thx for your information. may i ask you what´s the name / modell of your new replaced card. as you said the card has the new connexant chip. i will check on the hauppauge homepage which description for the card are given there (e.g. chip description).

by the way....as you see by the length of this thread it is a little bit confusing with the cards and the chips on it..:-((..sorry for my questitions...but i´ve got to be sure when i purchase a new one...

thx

frank

[Arachnotron]

Here in the Netherlands you can still find old models with BT878.

The CX23881 = 881 on the Hauppauge site. If Brooktree hadn't been sold to Connexant, the chip would have been called the BT881.

By the way, there are other TV card brands with CX23881 chips around. But Hauppauge is specialised in TV cards, so the chance of continuous availability of decent drivers is larger.

[awe007]

hi Arachnotron,

thx for this important information. now it gets more and more clearer. it would very nice if you can check when your at home what maximum resolution you can use when capturing with the hauppauge driver (not the btwin driver..). as you said in the last mails you´re satisfied with your hauppauge 881 card..??

thx for your help. i realy appreciate this because it helps me to find out which card should be purchased by me..

thx


frank

[Arachnotron]

I will check it tonight.

I am running my system dual boot at the moment because of the directX 9.0B issue.

One is a clean windows 2000 with directX 8.0b which I keep clean and use only for capturing
The other OS is WindowsXP pro SP1 with DirectX 9.0B with the capture patch applied.

My box is a P4 2.4 GHz, 845PE chipset, and a Promise sx4000 Raid5 set.
For audio I use a Terratec DMX 6fire LT. (On board AC97 sound is not recommended for capturing)

I will try both, using virtualdub and virtualVCR and let you know.

[awe007]

Arachnotron,

thx for your help. the basic question to me is whoch of the cards /chips support full pal (the hauppauge 881 [with/without btwin] or the philips saa 7134 such as terratec cynergy).

by the way...you´ve to nice machines..:-))...i´ve only a athlon xp 2200 with kt 400 for capturing and encoding (running with windows xp).

most times i use virtual dub vcr or vdub.

thx for your efford

frank

[Arachnotron]

No problem. But the BTwin is only for the BT848/878 chips. So you cannot use it with any of the CX23881 based cards, like the newer Hauppauge cards.

> thx for your help. the basic question to me is whoch of the cards
> /chips support full pal (the hauppauge 881 [with/without btwin] or
> the philips saa 7134 such as terratec cynergy).

[awe007]

..ok understood....but the main question about the max res still the same except if the hauppauge driver isn´t able to capture with full pal res with the 881 you haven´t any other possibility like btwin and bt 878...


again..

thx

frank

[Belgabor]

I'll have a look when I get home. What I can tell you that I can capture at at least 704x576, maybe 720x (can't remember exactly at the moment) with the Hauppauge WDM drivers & VirtualVCR.

[awe007]

Belgabor,

thx for the information. i would be very happy i you can check this (which card model have and the max resolution...). but i´m still confused because on the hauppauge homepage you can read that all the wintv cards are only be able to capture with vcd resolution

"Videos im AVI-Format bis 384x288 Pixeln / 25 fps aufnehmen" sorry it is in german but in my view strange.....therefore i thought that higher res aren´t possible..

thx for your efford..

frank

[Belgabor]

Ok, info update:
- I have a German WinTV PCI-FM model 718
- I can capture 768x576 fine with VirtualVCR

[awe007]

hi Belgabor,

thx for the information....by the way..i´m living in germany, too. so why writing in english. your information sounds good. but i´ve still a question. you don´t use any additional driver such as btwin? you´re using the original hauppauge wdm driver?

...but the important question is:

http://www.hauppauge.de/prod_pcifm.htm this page refers to your card. just read it and tell me why hauppauge tells something about max capture resolution of 384x288..?? sounds strange to me..:confused:

if you want you can email me in german => cyrus007@gmx.net


thx

frank

[Arachnotron]

hi awe007

as promised I tries both cards.

My Hauppauge is a WinTV-PCI FM model 747. There is also an older model 647 which I think is the BT878 model. On my box the model 647 was relabled (but only on the side!) with 747.


As you already know from Belgabor it captures full PAL ok.
Using the standard WDM drivers (they are the same for all WinTV models with CX23881) it captures 768x576 ok using virtualVCR , huffyuf and YUY2.
Virtualdub wouldn't work at this resolution on my sytem.

The Cinergy 400 TV (Philips SAA7134) using the latest drivers from Terratec also does full Pal with the same settings in VirtualVCR

Again, vdub wouldn't capture at this resolution. (in fact, if I try to many settings my system will reboot)

this is both under w2k/directX8.1 and WinXP pro /directX 9.0b patched.

By the way, the limitations mentioned by Hauppauge are most likely the limitations of the included software, not the driver.

[Arachnotron]

@Belgabor, OT:

Hi Belgabor,

do you know if anyone is working on a directshow capture option for vdub?

[ppera2]

WDM capture support is announced for Virtual Dub Ver. 2.
When? No idea...

[Belgabor]

Directshow capture in vdub was indeed once announced for 2.0, but as far as I know Avery canceled that because it has too many issues. Honestly, why should you want to capture in VDub when you can use VirtualVCR?

@awe007: I have honestly no idea why they write that on their page.

[Arachnotron]

@Belgabor

> Honestly, why should you want to capture in VDub when you can use VirtualVCR?

It's not a request for a feature in vdub, just curiousity.

When hunting around for capture guides and instructions I found that most still refer to vdub as the capture application of choice, but by now there won't be many systems left on which it actually works.

VirtualVCR works fine for me. It would be nice if the histogram function worked with other color spaces besides RGB24, but that is a minor issue.

The only reason I tried to get vdub working was because I had a BT878 based card and I wanted to use the BT8x8 tweaker. But I switched cards by now.

Now if only I could program... :D

...I would try to include the tweaking options in the Vdub BT8x8 tweaker and Dscaler in a capture app. Especially to be able to position a frame before caturing would be great for capturing PAL60 because on some cards the frame doesn't center so you loose a part of the picture (mostly a few lines at the top and a few pixels on the right)

But ten again, I suppose this sort of detailed tweaking would result in blocks of code dedicated to specific hardware and soon result in something impossible to maintain.

Sort of defeats the purpose of a general purpose capturing app.
Things like that are better left on the driver level I suppose.

[ppera2]

Originally posted by Belgabor
Directshow capture in vdub was indeed once announced for 2.0, but as far as I know Avery canceled that because it has too many issues. Honestly, why should you want to capture in VDub when you can use VirtualVCR?


V Dub has some nice features: vertical reduction by capture, noise filter, crop, BT Tweaker etc... It's old, but still most featured.

[Owen]

I second your opinion Arachnotron.
Vdub should not be recommended for capture with modern hardware.
VFW capture applications have had there day. WDM is here to stay.
Virtual VCR and FlyDS are much better options.
I personally have a preference for FlyDS but it is not freeware like VirtualVCR.
Vdub is a great program but it is no longer appropriate for capture.

As for filters, VirtualVCR can use Direct Show filters like ffdshow during capture.
Much more powerful then anything in Vdub IMHO.

Regards,

Owen

[awe007]

hi,

at first many thx Arachnotron and Belgabor for the information. now it gets much more clearer to me. as i said earkier to asked these many questions because i wasn´t sure about the full pal resolution and the homepage doesn´t realy helps someone to get more information (in fact it is telling nonsense..:-(( ).

so to put it in a nutshell both chips ( bt 881 / philips ) support full pal res but because of the wdm driver and vfw you can´t capture in vdub :mad:

i just want you to ask a personel question. what chipset would you prefer regarding to your experiences (the bt 881 or the philips)?

Again thx to all who gave me some very valuable information about the mystery of the different capture card chiptsets :D ....

frank

by the way: which capture sofware do you recommend for capturing? virtualvcr or are there any other solutions like a new coming up vdub version

[Arachnotron]

My very personal :D answer would be...

I depends. I think (without extensive testing) the CX23881 gives a slightly better picture. Also, the Phillips chip (or the drivers) do a few things automatically, which I hate (I like to make my own mistakes :D ). The most anoying one being that the driver switches automatically to whatever videostandard it detects, and back to the default (PAL_B in my case) when there is no signal.

BUT if you want to capture PAL60 (= NTSC tapes played on PAL VCR's) go with the Phillips, because up to now the 881 drivers won't support this.

As for the capture app, also it depends ;).

I use VirtualVCR at the moment because it allows me the most freedom.
But I am only interested in capturing from VHS.

If you want to capture TV, there are a number of other WDM based capturing apps, though not all are free.

For me there only a few things a capture app must do:
- select the input source from within the app
- select the video type (PAL_B etc)
- have a histogram function to tune brightness and contrast
- allow to set resolution and framerate manually
- good audio/video synchronisation
- report dropped frames.

A lot of commercial programs will silently drop frames without telling you about it.

[ppera2]

Originally posted by Owen
...
Vdub should not be recommended for capture with modern hardware.
VFW capture applications have had there day. WDM is here to stay.
Virtual VCR and FlyDS are much better options.....
Vdub is a great program but it is no longer appropriate for capture.
As for filters, VirtualVCR can use Direct Show filters like ffdshow during capture.
Much more powerful then anything in Vdub IMHO.


And what use of playback filters in capture program? How them will affect CPU load?

I say that for Win98/ME users V Dub is still best solution for capture. It stays special for BT 878 card users.

I think that shouldn't formule things so one-sided: "... no longer appropriate..." . Are writers of capture guides all stupid?

[bjy999]

awe007

I had the same problem with the lines in video capture using a WinTV+Radio card and what I was told was to In the BIOS enabled 'PCI Master Read Caching', 'PCI Delay Transaction' and 'Master delay Transaction'

That fixed my problem with the lines.

[joshyg2]

I own a Hauppauge WinTV (878 chipset).

I capture with the following settings:

* 768x576
* 25 fps

audio: 44100 hz 16 bit Stereo

and i get absolutly NO dropped frames using:

Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP1
AMD Athlon XP 2100+ 512 mb DDR333
Western Digital 120 gb 7200 rpm 8mb buffer (ATA100)
using btwincap drivers, with AVI_IO

even if the source is really noisy, still no dropped frames.

edit: about the BIOS settings, make sure you set the:

PCI Latency to 64

[awe007]

hi,

thx for the help....i´ll check the bios setting. but now as i bought a new maxtor 7200 rpm udma 133 120 gb hdd i´ve another problem. i get dropped frames when i´m running the hdd with the promise ultra 133 controller (pci, latest driver). as soon as i switch the hdd to the onboard ide controller i get no droped frames. although the drive is an udam 133 windows xp says " udma 5 " in the settings....realy strange...

does anyone know some information about the strange behavior...?


thx

frank

[Owen]

ppera2,

Quote.
“I say that for Win98/ME users V Dub is still best solution for capture. It stays special for BT 878 card users.”

Who in there right mind, would be using Win98 or ME on modern hardware?
Every new PC comes with WinXP. You can’t even buy 98 or ME any more.
Unless you have used ffdshow filters during capture you should not be so quick to dismiss it. It can be very usefull to filter during capture.
Modern PC’s have more then enough CPU power to do this.
If you have an old PIII or Athlon running Win98-ME then Vdub capture with VFW drivers is a good choice. But with a 2 – 3Gig P4 or Athlon, WinXP with WDM drivers and a WDM capture application is a much better choice.

So I stand by my statement:

“Vdub should not be recommended for capture with MODERN hardware.”

Regards,

Owen

[Arachnotron]

To get back to the original question :D

I just spent some time digging through datasheets.

The SAA7134 driver can output full PAL... but
It's ADC samples on 27 MHz, both for PAL and for NTSC. This means 780 pixels / full scanline. So the active part of the line contains only 720 samples. If you capture at 768x576, a scaler calculates 768 square pixels using only the date from these 720 samples.

With a SAA7134 you can better capture at 720x576, do your filtering and resize to the desired target resolution as a last step.

The BT878 and the CX23881 both sample at 910 pixels/full line for NTSC and 1135 pixels / line PAL. This corresponds to about 764 samples NTSC and 947 samples PAL for the active part of the scanline.

So if you capture 768 pixels / line , these pixels are based on 947 samples.

also:

- the BT878 and the CX23881 can use these extra pixels to compensate for slight variations in line lenght which may be caused by the mechanics of an VCR or tape problems;

-The CX23881 is a newer chip than the BT878, so it is PCI 2.2 compliant (BT878 is PCI 2.1)

-the cx23881 has a better comb filter (used to separate a composite video signal in separate Y and C). For S-VHS, you already have separate Y and C, so this is only important if your VCR has no S-VHS out.

So in the end, unless you need PAL60 now, I would take the CX23881 and run :cool:

[awe007]

hi Arachnotron,

thx for the additional information. unfortunaly i just bought the terractec cinergy 400 withe the philips chipset. now i´m still having problems. the picture quality increased in comparison the bt 878 cjipset but i´ve still lots of dropped frames although i just reinstalled the system, took the latest driver and have an udm hard disk. very strange.

may i ask you if you´ve have any dropped frames when capturing in full pal....? moreover i seems that the dropped frames increase when i install my sound blaster live card. capturing without sb live gets no droped frames in the terratec recording tool. i don´t know what problem occurs with the combination of terratec and sb live.....hmmm looks like i´ve to buy another card with the bt 881 chipset..:-((

thx


frank

[Arachnotron]

I have a few dropped frames with the Terratec, but in the region of 1 in 1000-1500 frames. That's normal.

What this card doesn't like is if you capture at vertical resolutions above 480 NTSC or 576 PAL. If you do that, it will start dropping every second frame. (it will capture though; I went as high as 720x800. Totally pointless, but fun )

I don't think it is the card. I know the soundblaster live series is notorious for giving problems with a large number of motherboards and cards. If you can borrow another soundcard, I would try that first.
And of course changing PCI slots, messing with PCI latency etc. etc. Both are modern chips, so I don't think switching to another capture card will solve this problem.

Another thing: I was talking about the difference in specs. The CX23881 has better specs than the Philips. How much you will notice of these differences while capturing is something else.

The SAA7134 is a very decent chip, and for normal use you would probably not notice any difference. Switching from a composite source to S-VHS, using good kwality cables, keeping your PC case closed to avoid interference, all those things can have a bigger influence on picture quality than the difference between these two chips.

having 720 pixels per line should be more then enough for normal analog capturing. Search around in this forum for discussions about how much detail is actually available in an analogue source before you decide you need those last few pixels.

One remark is valid though: with a SAA7234 based card, if you intent to do any additional filtering or processing, you are better of capturing at 720x576 and doing any resizing as a last step afterwards.

[awe007]

Arachnotron,

thx again for the help. may i ask you for some additional information..? what capture software do you use (virtual vcr) and what hardware do you use for capturing (cpu, hdd, motherboard, ram, windows version..)..

thx for the information....i used windows xp with a udam 133 hdd...when capturing in 720*576 every second frame was lost...strange in my opinion..:-((


frank

[Arachnotron]

Harware:
P4 2.4 GHz, Gigabyte GA-8PE677 ultra, 512 MB ram
Fasttrack SX4000 RAID5 controller, 4 x 80 Gb HD raid5 set
Terratec DMX 6Fire Lite soundcard

software:
w2k pro SP4, DirectX 8.1b,
(I have some stability problems under XP, but I can capture without framedrops under it.)

VirtualVCR 2.6.9,
huffyuv 2.11 CCESP patch 0.2.2 compression
720x576, YUY2 color format, 25 fps


Dropping exactly every second frame sounds like incorrect framerate setting or having a vertical resolution above 576 pixels. You did enable the 'use custom settings' checkbox? Also, I always disable the preview option during capture.