USB 2.0 Video capture

[digitus]

I was hoping to get members opinions on USB video capture devices for my laptop. I've been looking around and there isn't a lot of info on any of these devices.

So far, the best choices seem to be the Plextor Convertx, the ADS Pyro, or the Adaptec VideOh! Media Center.

Any imput would be greatly apperciated!

Thanx
digitus

[Arachnotron]

I have some limited experience with a Terratec Cameo Grabster 200. I believe a similar device is also marketed by Belkin.

It has s-video and composite inputs. The composite also loops to an output.

It utilizes a Philips SAA7113 chip, which does not contain a scaler, so you are limited to full DVD resolutions, 720x480 or 720x576. Also, the comb filter is not so great. It is great for S-video, but composite video captures suffer a bit from this.

No on-board compression, you cap using a codec on your computer. This is not an external DV device.

[jggimi]

Moved to DV forum, perhaps in error. It gets hard to tell an outboard MPEG capture device from an outboard DV device.

[bb]

Except for the ADS Pyro none of the above mentioned devices have anything to do with DV, so I guess it's better to move this thread back to "Capturing Video".

Sorry for the inconvenience.

bb

[snn47]

edit cinergy not cameo
Arachnotron I have the cinergy 200 USB 2.0 too.

Did you get your Videotext to work?

Does it switch to BW when signal are too weak resp. do you have moiree when you have a weak signal?

[Arachnotron]

@snn47
Did you get your Videotext to work?
:confused: The cameo Grabster 200 is an external video processor. It does not have a TV tuner, so no teletext/videotext. :confused:

I tried a few video devices before settling on a SAA7134 based card, and I flogged the cameo to someone else. So I did not use it extensively. I had no problems with a DVD player and a VCR as the source.

What I did notice was that it- like many other Phillips chips (the cameo uses the Philips SAA7113) was set to autodetect the videosystem. So it tries to detect if the signal is PAL or NTSC, and when it cannot detect the signal it defaults to composite and PAL.

Are you perhaps using a s-video source?

[edit] I think you are referring to the Terratec Cinergy 200 USB. That is a different product from the Cameo Grabster 200.

[snn47]

Oops you are correct I have the the Terratec Cinergy 200 USB

[echooff]

I have the Adaptec VideOh! Media Center. It works very well for tv capture. I was unhappy with captures from other sources (camcorder, vhs) I purchased the Canopus ADVC-100 for that purpose, but it is fire wire.

[FredThompson]

@digitus, you need to specify PAL/NTSC and your intended final format. Your question is too open-ended.

I have DV and MPEG2 external. MPEG2 is better for NTSC. DV is more convenient for camcorder use. NTSC DV is horrible for thin vertical lines or CGI. There are some ways to limit the problems but errors are easier to see with DV than MPEG2.

Personally, I'm very glad I didn't buy the Canopus device.

PAL is a different situation. All PAL is the same color model so, in that case, DV might be "better" as the datarate is quite high.

[snn47]

I returned the Terratec Cinergy 200 USB 2.0.

I couldn't get even VCD resolution to work without dropped frame and async. audio (MJPEG and no audio compression, WinXP, AMD XP1700, 256MB, KN266 VT8235 Notebook).

Even without trying to grab the TV reception was stuttering until I closed the VCR and other SW that came with the thing. The problem as I see it is that even USB 2.0 is not isosynchronous like Firewire. While it can theoretically provide 480MB/s which is even higher then FW, it doesn't seem to be able to sustain even the datastream when I moved the programms priority to high.

[FredThompson]

It's your hardware, not the device. 256M with WinXP and you want to capture video using a laptop hard drive for everything? No surprise you've got problems.

You need a clean system with hardware that is ready to stream. It's not USB2, it's your laptop. 256M is barely enough to run WinXP with all its bloat. Your system was probably thrashing because it couldn't handle the requirements.

Use something like this: http://www.theorica.mirrorz.com and get a proper hard drive setup.

I pull USB2 full D1 no dropped frames MPEG2 w/Duron 1200 3 256M strips Asus A7N8X Deluxe ATA133 drives.

[snn47]

While XP may be a resource waster too I was trying to mainly make a point on how bad USB 2.0 is for time-critical purposes unlike firewire, meaning you can't use it.

My duo 2,5" HDD case is ~30% slower on USB2.0 then on firewire. While USB 2.0 maybee cheap and therefore convinient to have it's implementation in the OS is compared to firewire buggy.

Even without grabbingI had stuttering TV-display problems just viewing the received PAL-signals, unless I terminated Terratec background processes that exist in startup. Since the fan didn't start the CPU was still running at just 600MHz (CPU-load ~70%, 80MB RAM free). So it's as I see it mainly delayed USB 2.0 response that is at fault.

[FredThompson]

Apparently you don't SEE that I have no problems with a far slower CPU and full D1 MPEG2 over USB2.

You started with an assertion then manufactured circumstances to fit the assertion. That's not proof, it's dogma. You haven't proven anything about USB2 and video capture.

CPU speed does not vary based on system load.

It's your system, not USB2.

[snn47]

I have SSE1 but don't know if the terratec software used it.

I disagree, AMD mob XP can vary the frequency
only the XP Taskmanager doesn't seem to be able to recognize it. The load is always relative unless you know the CPU-frequency

There are programms to show you the frequency, I use a power meter (capeable of meassuring effective power by using a digital signal processor) to monitor my power consumption so Ican tell when the CPU is kicking up speed not only when the fan kicks in. Now operated on 600W and using an ext. TFT I just need ~23W, when I go to ~1500Mhz it will exceed 50W.

[Arachnotron]

USB 2.0 is a relative thing.

There are many buggy implementations around (the add-on cards with via chips spring to mind). Also, with USB, a lot of people will have other devices connected; with firewire this is less likely, since apart from videograbbing and the odd external HD there simply are not that many devices available.

But having said that, with good hardware, USB 2.0 grabbing should not pose a problem. But what will pose problems, like Fred said, is a notebook harddisk. Unlike their big brothers, these drives are designed for low power consumption and shock resiliency. The first thing that will be done to attain this is lowering the rotation speed. Notebook drives are by nature much slower than their bigger 3.5 inch brothers.

Apart from that, notebooks will be running more background processes related to specific hardware and powermanagement. All in all, a notebook is not a good thing for video capturing.

For capping using a notebook, you need an external device that takes as much as possible of the encoding load, to minimize depending on the notebook resources and lower the dataflow to the harddisk. Some external DV or MPG2 device would be best. The Terratec device does not do any encoding, generating both a heavy processor load and pushing the HD.

[snn47]

Again I had the problems even while I was only watching TV!

The TV-viewer was the only program I had opened. CPU load was low and the HDD was not needed.

Still the picture was standing most of the times not moving until I terminated the other programs working since startup. After that the TV-picture was like on any TV moving, nearly no CPU-Load, 80MB RAM and no use of the HDD.

Other devices are a USB Mouse and Keyboard which didn't influence TV-display once the Terratec sheduler was terminated.

[Arachnotron]

Could you cap without dropped frames with the scheduler disabled? (before you returned it that is :) )

Having owned a few other Terratec products, I can believe some of the software is crap. They make great hardware, but the driver and software support can be... problematic. :(

In fact, I just installed a multimedia PC with a terratec PCI card, and watching TV was jerky. I'll try killing the scheduler, see if that helps.

But the point I was trying to make is that USB 2.0 can vary from PC to pc depending on the hardware used (as can firewire I suspect).
Also, if it was a problem with the Terratec scheduler, why do you blame USB?

Apart from that,I do think that capping full resolution uncompressed or lossless compressed on a laptop is pushing things, and you may need something with external compression to do it. Since most external devices do compress anyway, that should not be a problem. :)

[edit] perhaps I should mention that I suspect the terratec device is SAA7113 based, so no hardware compression at all, while Fred seems to be using a device which does the MPEG2 compression externally. So the amount of data transported over the USB is probably not the same.

[FredThompson]

That's really odd. I've never seen any CPU whose clock speed changes on the fly. The circuit-level challenges that would bring are pretty significant. But, for a laptop, maybe it makes sense. If you're running a word processor and it's just waiting for you to press keys, you don't need a lot of power so there's no need for the extra speed, power consumption or heat. It would take some complex support cirucitry or the clocking would all go to hades.

The device you had didn't do the encoding itself? What a piece of junk. It was just a simple A/D converter, so to speak? Yuck.

Yes, I have an ADS USB Instant DVD 2.0 which has the same encoder used in a lot of the standalone DVD recorders and locked audio. It has some built-in filtering but I never use it because it can't compare to what you can do with post-processing. Usually, I'll pull at very high bitrates, like 15 and it's hard to tell after filtering and final compression that the source wasn't a lossless capture. Performance for NTSC capture far exceeds DV because it's 4:2:0, not 4:1:1. For PAL, I don't have enough experience to judge the performance. I've only a handful of PAL tapes and a multi-format VHS deck.

edit: I mean that 4:2:0 performs better than 4:1:1. One chroma value for a group of 4 horizontal pixels is horrible for anything with hard edges or thin vertical lines.

I've often thought the way to do firewire (from a DV camcorder) with a laptop would be firewire to the laptop and USB2 external enclosure to an ATA133 drive with a good buffer. Haven't tested this, though.

I'm running Win2K. Tried XP and had nothing but grief. All the "user friendliness" did was make it harder for me to use. The guys I know who've tried to use XP for A/V work were disappointed. Maybe it would be different with settings from that GameXP program. I hope so. Personally, I'll wait until XP SP2 to try it again. XP seems to have too much stuff going on for good time-critical use. Maybe the built-in firewall and similar stuff is just too clunky.

[Arachnotron]

@Fred

The device you had didn't do the encoding itself? What a piece of junk. It was just a simple A/D converter, so to speak? Yuck.

I am supposing his did, since I owned an terratec USB cameo grabster 200 that did, and his Terratec Cinergy 200 looked like one of those with a tuner tacked on.

On the other hand, you could look at it like this (and I did, it is why I bought it in the first place) :
it stresses the system more but allows you to choose which codec to use for capture. I wanted to use huffyuv, and my system is powerfull enough to take the load. But devices like this are really sensitive to poor (underpowered) hardware configurations.

[FredThompson]

Yeah, if you're confident enough about the sampling of the device, I see how that could be attractive and it's more portable than a display card, you don't have to load new display drivers and risk breaking everything, etc.

[snn47]

Sorry my reply got longer then I expected to answer the questions.

You can see a TV picture on this norwegian site review http://www.dinside.no/php/art.php?id=98367pic ony
http://www.dinside.no/km_bilde/3/114203.jpg.


No dropped frame free, even when I tried only for VCD-res in MJPEG since anything else with MJPEG at VGA or higher or other codecs if they worked at all I got at best a few fps, while I had switched every unneeded task off (VCR, McAffee...).

Since Terratec still requires the pc's audio-Card to capture the audio via a second cable it may be in part my onboard sound that takes the few cpu-cycles needed to get all frames. An old AWE32 soundblaster may rduce the load enough.

The programm displayed captured and input frame-rate. Strangely enough the input never reached the actual 25fps, while the captured rate often exceeded the input rate. Even when I used a VCD on pause as signal it to about 10-15s before the fps stabilized around 23fps. The MediaPlayer Classic displayed somewhere between 20 and 23.

I have a few pics from the HW inside. Beside the turner LG Innotek TALN-M200N (I couldn't find the DS yet),
it uses the Phillips SAA7113 which is a 9Bit AD and
EM2800 USB2.0 Video Controller is a highly integrated System on Chip (SOC) that provides a cost-effective solution for video capture application. As illustrated in the system block diagram, a video capture solution requires three chips only: Video decoder, EM2800 and AC 97 codec. Application of such a system can be TV on PC, Camcorder video capture and editing.
As shown in the functional block diagram, the EM2800 consists of 6 main blocks
¡E Video/Audio Input Port
¡E USB 2.0 Transceiver
¡E Compression Engine
¡E GPIO, Two Wire Serial Bus, AC 97 Interface
¡E USB 2.0 Serial Interface Engine
¡E Color Enhancement
No external memory required, No external USB 2.0 PHY required
 Flexible Video Input Port
8-bit video input port
Bayer RGB
Interlace and non-interlace video
CCIR-601 4:2:2 YUV
CCIR-656 YUV with embedded sync and field ID
Field/Frame drop control
 Bayer RGB Color Processor
Auto black clamping and user-defined black clamping
Gamma correction
Bayer pattern filtering
Gain and offset control in YUV space
Random ratio down scaling
Auto exposure and white balance
 YUV Color Processor
Gain and offset control in YUV space
Random ratio down scaling
2, 3, 4-tap horizontal filtering
2, 3-tap vertical filtering
 Up to 30fps @ 720 x 480 size for video processor and compression
Proprietary compression algorithm for both still image and motion-video for USB 1.1
Auto-adjust compression ratio for USB 1.1
USB 1.1 support 30fps @ 320 x 240 resolution
USB 2.0 support 30fps @ 720 x 480 resolution
 USB Port
On-chip USB Transceiver with High/Full speed compliant
USB 2.0 Isochronous Video pipe up to 24Mb/sec
USB 2.0 Isochronous Audio CD quality pipe up to 1.4Mb/sec
USB Audio Class compliant
 Miscellaneous
Two wire serial bus to program front end video devices
4 General I/O ports and 2 dedicated I/O port
AC97 link interface
2.5/3.3V Low power Technology
64-pin LQFP package

If I understand the data correctly the EM2800 already did the grabbing, only storing would a lot of drive space.

As to speed of HDD it should not pose any problem with any newer 2,5" ATA100-HDD. I am writing a small report on a number of tests I run on my board (MSI KT2 Combo XP1800 512MB RAM, KT266A, VT8235) with a reproduceable setup converting a 570MB DV-file into a MPEG1-file. All ATA 100 HDD I have 2,5" and 3,5" with large and regular cache, 4200, 5400 and 7200RPM performed more or less identical (+- a few seconds for a total conversion time of ~360s). I also didn't meassure a significant difference wether I used the internal VT8235 IDE-controller or my Firewire link and a Oxford 911 FW2IDE-Bridge. Just minor increase of 100 - 200kHz to the system clock changed performance between drives more. So unless the OS has to swap completely to the HDD because no physical RAM is left the drive should be neglectable.


So it could be the audio grabbing or the USB 2.0.

I could not boot from an external USB-device and also had trouble with a number of other USB 2.0 components which performed slower then USB 1.1 ones delays to nearly no response at all(typhoon port-replicator, Mitsumi floppy and card-reader, FW-&USB2.0-cases) on my VIA chipset (VT8235 on all boards).

Do USB 2.0 ports have equal priority?

Then there are also the mouse and keyboard driver since I have a legacy free board so it really can't be a solution having to terminate/deinstall all USB driver.
It seems to be a general problem for USB since I had the same delayed reaction also on an Intel P3 notebook for my mouse, which worked at once once I used it on the OS-port.

[FredThompson]

Ah, yes, I should have thought of that. Syncing video capture through USB ports with audio capture through a card is very problematic. It's hard to make the clocking line up perfectly. That is one reason I bought the ADS device. It does audio internally so no clock matching problems.

I don't know about USB2 ports, but power available to USB1 ports does vary.

[Arachnotron]

Via USB ports are notoriously problematic. Be sure to install the latest VIA 4-in-1 drivers (a good idea anyway)

This is really a funny hybrid. My cameo uses a SAA7113 also. This chip is not just a AD converter, but a ful video processor/decoder. But it lacks a scaler. In my device, the raw (YUV2 ) output directly goes to the USB port. You can only cap full DVD resolutions.

But if you want to do TV you need a solution for sound. And probably some scaling/cropping, since the ITU window of the 7113 is to wide for TV.

So they probably pass on a CCIR-601 4:2:2 YUV stream from the saa7113 to a secondary video processor just for that purpose. I.E scaling, and some sort of sound decoding which then is looped to the soundcard. A few things are being done twice, which does not look good for overall video quality.

Looks a bit cluncky to me. A good single chip solution - at least for the video part- would have been better I think. Especially for the scaling part.

[snn47]

Updated
I forgot about the mob XP CPU, they do change their clk-freq with load. Don't ask me how AMD does detect this because I havn't read about it yet. To more questions I'd go to http://forums.amd.com/index.php?showforum=4

I found another USB device called Compro VideoMate Live USB 2.0
it uses the SAA7114 but you have to choose wether you want PAL or NTSC support (Video Compression ISO/IEC 13818 or ISO/IEC 11172.
), which is strange wording since it doesn't specify if it is only meant for the turner or also the AV-I/O (the SAA supports both).

Audio seems to be captured 24Bit 44,1 or 48kHz (no word on if the dataslicer is useable for videotext...)
Then it's larger 177 x 115 x 23 mm /300 g and has video out as well.


Here is all in one http://www.octek.com.au/otherpro/Compro/videomate_live_usb20.htm

[Arachnotron]

According to the link you posted this one uses a saa7133 or 7134. That is a good thing, since tbis chip has a better comb filter than the 7113. (Important for good color separation from composite sources, which includes on-board tuners)

Also from the table at the end I understand the NTSC / PAL choice does indeed only refer to the tuner, not the format of external sources.

All in all this looks - judging only by the specs - as a better choice then the Terratec for notebook use.

[snn47]

I am trying to understand, but if it's not the SAA7134 which chip does the MPEG conversion.

Another product is from LifeView called FlyTV (belongs to Imagination Technologies) but it does only
Captured up to 704x480 (NTSC), 704x579 (PAL)


Googling arround I found that the SAA7135 from Phillips is the matching world-wide turner for the SAA7130, 7133 and 7134.

[Arachnotron]

I am trying to understand, but if it's not the SAA7134 which chip does the MPEG conversion.

Another chip. :D

It looks like the path is:
1. tuner: creates composite video signal from RF /antenna;
2. SAA7134: digitizes signal, separates chroma and luma, scales, probably produces CCIR-601 4:2:2 YUV data stream which goes into
3. hardware MPG2 encoder/decoder chip, resulting in an MPEG2 data stream which goes into
4. some sort of USB encoder/adapter/thingy :)

[verabgd]

Originally posted by Arachnotron


The cameo Grabster 200 is an external video processor.

I tried a few video devices before settling on a SAA7134 based card, and I flogged the cameo to someone else. So I did not use it extensively. I had no problems with a DVD player and a VCR as the source.



@Arachnotron

As you have some experience with Terratec Cameo Grabster 200 I hope that you could give me some advices. Ten days ago I bought Terratec Cameo Grabster 200. According to recommendation captured video is of very good quality, but after 25-30 min of capturing video and audio went out of synch. I used APCAM for capturing; it is application that came with the Cameo Grabster 200. I tried also VirtualVCR and VirtualDub VCR but they couldn’t capture when I chose “Terratec Cameo Grabster”. I captured VHS tapes via VCR.

PC conf:

ASUS A7V600 VIA KT600 AGP8X/D6.1/GLAN/S-ATA RAID
AMD Athlon XP2500+ (BARTON)
Kingston KVR400X64C3A/512 x 2
120GB MAXTOR 2MB ATA/133 7200rpm 9ms
ASUS V9520 Video Suite 128M GeForce FX 5200 AGP 8x

OS: WinXP SP1

Thanks in advance.

[Arachnotron]

Unfortunately I dumped mine a while back. However, it should work with virtualVCR. vdub will not work with it. You have to set the resolution to 720x480/720x576 though. This device has no scaler, so choosing other resolutions will fail.
Once you have vvcr running, play with the various audio resample options.

[bjorn toulouse]

@digitus
"I was hoping to get members opinions on USB video capture devices for my laptop. I've been looking around and there isn't a lot of info on any of these devices.

So far, the best choices seem to be the Plextor Convertx, the ADS Pyro, or the Adaptec VideOh! Media Center.

Any imput would be greatly apperciated!"

Stay well clear of ADS stuff, I got a USB2 DVD device 6 months ago and just got them to take it back today.
Initaly they got me to rebuild XP 5 times (including slipstreeming SP1 into the build CD, then they wanted me to update my mobo drivers, then they got me to beta test new drivers and software, then they got me to run it all with XP SP1 and nothing else. Read the assosiated forums with each device you consider. Some of the devices out there sound great but my experiance with VHS direct to DVD via USB2 have been poor to say the least.

On the plus side I now know a bit about virtual dub, filters, Xvid, cce, and gordian knot!

The other thing I know is I now want a device that takes in analoge and converts to AVI as cleanly as possible, (file size not an issue) so I can use the likes of virtual dub to enhance the end product prior to encoding in cce or Xvid.

Ideas anyone?