Quantcast Recording Video: Terratec Cinergy 400 TV - digitalFAQ.com Forums [Archives]
  #1  
08-24-2005, 04:05 AM
the viking the viking is offline
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Good Morning!
A few days ago I bought the Terratec Cinergy 400 TV Capture card.
Ive tried a lot of different capture programs,latest VDub,VirtualVCR
and a real time MPEG2 capture prog. ,WinDVR 3.0.

When using VDub I get dropped frames from the start,about 10 pr minute.
I think thats too much,so I switched to VirtualVCR,that I have used earlier
with my Pinnacle DC10 plus card.

VVCR captures fine,maybe dropping 2-3 frames in 30 minutes video.
but after a certain time,often between 20 and 30 minutes the picture
"hangs" for half a second,and I get 12-13 dropped frames at the same
spot,and this is noticeable when you look at the video.

It doesnt matter if I use PIC Video 3 or HuffYUV for capture,also
the capture resolution doesnt matter.

I capture to a 160GB defragmented HD,512 MB RAM and 2,08GHz AMD
Processor.

Anyone of you have any suggestion for this problem?
Is it a memory problem ?

thanks
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  #2  
08-24-2005, 11:00 AM
kwag kwag is offline
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Hi the viking,

Have you tried "VirtualDub Sync"? : http://www-user.rhrk.uni-kl.de/~dittrich/sync/

-kwag
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  #3  
08-24-2005, 11:26 AM
incredible incredible is offline
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a) Im about 80% shure that the dropping frames issue results from syncing problems of your card where the audio in has also to be synced.

So .... do use as audio capture the wire bridge-jack to your sound in of your board or soundcard. VirtualDubSync maybe will handle this but you need a wdm/vfw wrapper so VdubSync can access your WDM driver. AFAIK only the latest Vdub supports Dshow WDM Drivers, the mod/sync Versions IMHO still dont.

b) HANDS OFF from WinDVR! It just scales the incoming signal in a stupid way from 704 to 720 AFAIK.

c) Why did you switch from the Zoran based DC10 to a SAA 7134 Card (cinergy 400) ? I got also both - 7134 gots a tuner device, ok but the DC Series are superb in their digitizing capabilities. Choose 6MB/sec and its a Quality as good as DigiBetacam!
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  #4  
08-24-2005, 04:12 PM
the viking the viking is offline
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1.) VDub Sync doesnt work with this card,as the card uses WDM drivers as you said.

2.)Yep,I use a wire from the tv card to the sound card.This afternoon I
went to the local PC shop and bought a PCI Sound card ,as the one I got
was a onboard card.But no differences made to the dropped frames.

3.)I have used the latest VDub,1.6.10,for capturing as it supports WDM drivers.VDub also drop frames but in a different way,it drop one and one frame,lets say about 5-6 in a minute,while VVCR drops 12-14 frames at the same spot like this:
Quote:
Dropped Frames
6174
17774
29700
41751
53940
66500
73475
73476
73477
73478
73479
73480
73481
73482
73483
73484
73486
73487
73488
73489

78976
90953
The above is log of dropped frames from capturing 1h03m28s
tonight at resolution 704x576,with Huffyuv .

4.)I still have my DC10Plus card,that I use for VHS cap.
I bought this one for capturing TV.


Anyway,tonight I did a clean install of WinXP with SP2.Installed the terratec and soundcard drivers,and finally installed VVCR and Huffyuv.

And then captured,and as yuo can see off the Dropped Frames log,its still the same as it was before the reinstall of the OS.

If I set the Preview on when capturing ,I noticed the picture freeze for a short monent and then drop 12-14 frames.And the strange thing is that
it happend one time on every capture.

Im no expert but to me its looks like the PC is doing something else at the moment the frames dropps.

But I dont know.I only got one option left,update graphics card drivers,
but I dont think that really matters!
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  #5  
08-25-2005, 02:27 AM
incredible incredible is offline
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There are known issues related to some PCI bus latencies, so whats the type of boeard you got? a VIA or a Nforce2 ? There's a patch for VIA Boards available in the www.

And .... do try changing the PCI Slot! That often helps as maybe your Cinergy Card gets in conflict with other shared things on the PCI bus.
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  #6  
08-25-2005, 05:01 AM
the viking the viking is offline
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I did a test last night,and as you said ,the system drop frames to keep audio/video in sync.Have a look at these screenshots from VDub 1.6.10:






The first one is default settings,and when I use them I got from 3-10
dropped frames pr minute.


But when I change the setting to what you can see from the last screenshot,dropped frames are 0. I captured a two hour long tvshow
last night with no frames dropped.But of course the audio was way out of sync.

But one thing that I was thinking off,I have only a "normal" tv antenna
on the wall of my house.Im not connected to cabel network or satellite antenna.

Does the tv transmitter delivers 25 fps constant,or will the rate
go from 24,8 to 25,2 or somethng like that?
If yes I think thats can be the reason to the frame drops.

Does signals from cable networks and satellite antennas deliver
25 fps ,or does the rate change there as well?
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  #7  
08-25-2005, 05:45 AM
Prodater64 Prodater64 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by the viking
Does signals from cable networks and satellite antennas deliver
25 fps ,or does the rate change there as well?
As I have read none of the systems deliver exact 25 fps.
Also the system is enough flexible to accept differences between a certain range.
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  #8  
08-25-2005, 05:54 AM
incredible incredible is offline
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As you do capture an "analogue signal" the timebase will NEVER be constant at 25fps. So thats why even if No frames are dropped, a stream at for example 24.985 fps could be the result. Thats also why a resampling dynamically while capturing makes sense as it sets the playback speed of the resulted avi in its header to 25 fps and due the resampling the audio in its length gets minimal expanded or stretched so it fits exactly the 25fps playback speed finally.

A full framedrop cant be compensated even by dynamically resampling.
So if you got 50 dropped frames within the capturing process, you need to fix that in avisynth using AssumeSamplerate().

In your case you could uncheck the resampling as you did and finally in avisnth you do simply apply... :

Avisource("My_non-25fps_fitting_caputre.avi")
AssumeFps(25) # < ---- Force the 25fps Playbackspeed
AssumeSamplerate(Audiorate()+x) # < ---- Tune the Sourcerate using little +-x steps until matching a/v sync, higher = faster
SSRC(48000) # < ---- Finally resample the audio to DVD specs.

So you could try AssumeSamplerate (48002) for speeding up the Audio.

As you see above I do assume you did capture the audio at 48000Hz !!, thats IMHO standard and should be default when capturing.
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  #9  
08-26-2005, 03:53 AM
the viking the viking is offline
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Yes I capture the audio at 48000 kHz.

I installed the latest drivers for my Nvidia Geforce graphics card.

But I noticed a thing when capturing with VDub yesterday.
If I capture with "Drop frames when captured frames are too close together" and "Insert null frames when captured frames are too far apart"
UNCHEKED,the average frame rate goes down and after a half hour
the frame rate is 12-12 fps,and the picture in the preview window hangs
and have a very "jerky" motion.

So Ill give the AviSynth method a way.

But I noticed that when I get 12-14 dropped frames with VVCR,
the audio is in sync after the frame drop.
I guess that is beacause VVCR duplicates the last ok frame and
put it where the dropped frames are.

When it comes to WinDVR,Ill drop that,as far as I can see
it captures progressive.deinterlaces while recording.so ill think
that software is junk.
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  #10  
08-26-2005, 10:40 AM
Boulder Boulder is offline
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1) Try using the default settings and then enable "Correct video timing if it is off from real-time".

2) Try using the default settings and some other resolution such as 768x576 or 720x576 or a weird 696x576 (which I use with my BT8x8 chipped card).

3) Try using the defaults and try cropping while capturing, crop the bottom by mod-4 amount of pixels (4,8,12). It helps often with VHS, it might do so for TV caps as well.

4) Try capturing with an MJPEG codec, I think ffvfw/ffdshow has one you can use, unless you have PicVideo for example. HuffYUV can be a bitch at times. There are also some other lossless codecs, they can be found at the Doom9 video capture forum.

5) Try enabling/disabling preview window acceleration.
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  #11  
08-27-2005, 11:39 AM
the viking the viking is offline
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I used the default settings and enabled "Correct video timing if it is off from real-time".
The result youll see on the screenshot.Notice The frame rate ,goes down to 21.93 fps and this was only for a 17 minutes capture.And with 3159 frames dropped.If I continue to capture ,the frame rate goes further down.

I captured this one at 720x576.

I used PICVideo 3 for this cap.at quality 16.

Preview window acceleration was off.

But earlier today I did a capture with VVCR,2 hours,352x288,
PICVideo 3,and heres the frame drop log:

Dropped Frames
4089
11997
19768
27447
35207
42919
50542
58188
65880
73559
78234
78235
78236
78237
78238
78239
78240
78241
78243
78244
78245
78246

81315
89081
96813
104530
112275
120022
127762
135563
143369
151160
158959
166728
167942
167943
167944
167945
167946
167947
167948
167950
167951
167952
167953
167954

174525

As you can see by the log,the first big frame drop comes after 52 minutes
of capturing,while the second one comes after 1 hour and 52 minutes.
And as said earlier,the picture freezes the short second when the frame drops.

I wonder if it is any windows process or something that cause this,
the disc is busy or something, I dont know and its probably hard to find out.






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  #12  
08-27-2005, 11:44 AM
Boulder Boulder is offline
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I think you should try asking at the VirtualDub forum as well, the author is quite active and there are some other folks there as well with lots of knowledge.
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  #13  
08-27-2005, 12:04 PM
the viking the viking is offline
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Yep,Ill do that.
Thanks a lot anyway!
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  #14  
08-27-2005, 01:03 PM
incredible incredible is offline
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The Cinergy 400 is a SAA7134 based card and in combination with the cinergy driver it outputs a capturewindow which fits exactly 704px. Means dont capture at 720!!!
352 at width is also ok.
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  #15  
08-27-2005, 01:12 PM
kwag kwag is offline
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I always captured 352x480. No need to go any higher with analog sources, in my opinion
But I guess it also depends on the capture card.
Even with my WinTV PVR-250, there's no sense in capturing any higher, because the TV/Satellite transmissions don't transmit 720x480.
Dish Network and DirectTV, for example, are 480x480. But the chroma is a lowsy 1/4 of that
References here: http://www.coolstf.com/mpeg/

-kwag
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  #16  
08-27-2005, 01:29 PM
Boulder Boulder is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kwag
I always captured 352x480. No need to go any higher with analog sources, in my opinion
But I guess it also depends on the capture card.
Even with my WinTV PVR-250, there's no sense in capturing any higher, because the TV/Satellite transmissions don't transmit 720x480.
Dish Network and DirectTV, for example, are 480x480. But the chroma is a lowsy 1/4 of that
References here: http://www.coolstf.com/mpeg/

-kwag
However, the card samples at a high resolution and then resizes to a lower one. Which means that you should capture at high resolution and then downsize if you wish to.

Regular TV transmissions have more detail when you capture at a high resolution, satellite might be an another thing though.

VHS should have a horizontal resolution of a bit over 352 pixels I think.
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  #17  
08-27-2005, 02:09 PM
kwag kwag is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Boulder
However, the card samples at a high resolution and then resizes to a lower one. Which means that you should capture at high resolution and then downsize if you wish to.
I'm not sure if that applies to the PVR-250, though.
Does it keep the same sampling at all selected capture resolutions
I think it does adjust the sampling, depending on the selected capture/encode resolution, but I'm not sure.
Quote:

Regular TV transmissions have more detail when you capture at a high resolution, satellite might be an another thing though.
True. TV is broadcasted at 640x480 in US.
Quote:

VHS should have a horizontal resolution of a bit over 352 pixels I think.
Yep. No sense in capturing more that 352x there

-kwag
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  #18  
08-28-2005, 02:25 AM
Boulder Boulder is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kwag
Quote:
Originally Posted by Boulder
However, the card samples at a high resolution and then resizes to a lower one. Which means that you should capture at high resolution and then downsize if you wish to.
I'm not sure if that applies to the PVR-250, though.
Does it keep the same sampling at all selected capture resolutions
I think it does adjust the sampling, depending on the selected capture/encode resolution, but I'm not sure.
From what I've seen with the PVR-250 I had, it samples at full resolution and then scales the image down. When I captured at 720x576 and downsized with BilinearResize to 352x576, the image was still sharper than when captured straight to that resolution. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the card used some stupid point resizing
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  #19  
08-28-2005, 02:32 AM
kwag kwag is offline
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Thanks for those points Boulder
Time for me to start looking at newer technology capture cards

-kwag
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  #20  
09-01-2005, 11:18 AM
the viking the viking is offline
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The Solution!

After days and nights searching the www for the strange "sudden"
frame drop issue,I came over a site where some firewire users
got problems with XP SP2,the solution was to roll back to SP 1 drivers.

So I uninstalled SP 2,started a Virtual VCR capture,no frame drops
before reaching 50 minutes of capture.At around 50 mins,VVCR dropped
14 frames at once.

So the only thing untried now was another OS.

So this morning I installed Win 2000 Pro. with SP 4 and all
updates.

And then the problem was solved,no more frame drops

I been capturing TV all day,at 320x240 uncompressed,704x576 PIC Video
at 19,720x576 huffYUV,and 352x576 PIC Video at 19.

And the results are the same all over,0 to 2 dropped frames for
2 hours capture,and that is acceptable.

So it looks like the combination XP/VirtualVCR and TerraTec Drivers
are bad,at least on my system.

Capturing with V Dub hasnt been tested yet.
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