VHS capture USB not seen by VirtualDub?
 

Hello Again All,

I've had some ongoing issues with a large VHS capture project I keep having to put down and come back to. The problems vary, depending upon the device used to capture, as described below. I'm at my wit's end with this so, if anyone could help shed some light on it, I'd really appreciate it.

Scenario 1 - Pinnacle 710-USB capture device with Virtual Dub. Instructions posted by Lord Smurf both here and elsewhere (drivers installed, reboot done, Crossbar settings applied and so on) have been followed to the letter. Also, when checking the video decoder properties box, I *do* see a 1 (next to signal detected). V-Dub does recognize the device and reports that it's connected but, whenever I try to start a capture, I get the error message "Unable to start video capture." I've also tried this with a few different versions of V-Dub and see no difference, regardless of version.

Scenario 2 - Crappy USB capture device, also used with Virtual Dub. This was a loaner from a friend and I've no idea who makes it, but it looks like one of your run-of-the-mill El Cheap-o USB sticks with the three composite + one S-Video set of cables coming out the other end. V-Dub does recognize it as Microsoft WDM Image Capture (Win32) (VFW) and it works, but drops frames like mad. I suspect the situation here is simply lousy hardware.

OS is Windows 10, though I've tried this on other Windows versions and have gotten the same results.

Thanks for any insight anyone might be able to provide.

Tutorial probably says to use Windows XP, so that could be where you're going wrong?

Are you pressing play then pressing f6 to start capture once the video is playing? Make sure you are not pressing f6 at the same time or before you press play.

@Gary34: I do Remember reading about that somewhere and I’m pretty sure I was doing it right but will double check to make sure. The equipment I’m using is at work, so I’ll have to wait until Monday for this but will report back if there’s any success. Thank you.

@aramkolt: Definitely haven’t been using XP, but I could try that in a virtual machine. Thank you.

I use windows 10 with my pinnacle 710.

Yeah, I’m aware that others have used Win10 also; my gut tells me it’s not the operating system here. Just so weird that V-Dub immediately recognizes the Pinnacle device but throws that error every time. This has been a months long struggle and I am almost positive I remember reading that the order in which you start things is important, so I’m pretty sure I’ve tried the correct sequence before and still had this problem but I’ll try again on Monday.

Funny, I used to use the analog to digital camcorder pass-through feature on an old Sony PC-109 camcorder for this and it worked flawlessly for years. Unfortunately, that 10/4 is now having issues - probably due to old age. Headaches, man….

I've seen "Unable to start video capture" with multiple cards. With the Pinnacles, it tends to be wrong driver or corrupt install. Do it again, preferably with a manual install of the drivers.

Win10 issues are somewhat random, and unknown why those exists, but the commonality is almost always an Nvidia card. Those card drivers octopus themselves into the system, and it's not always in a good way. In some cases, with Nvidia, you need to instruct the OS to use the AMD/Intel iGPU (onboard).

This may not be "the" answer here, but it may get you on a repair path.

You cannot capture in a VM, bare metal required for capture.

Fresh OS installs tend to be needed for capture, not a stale install that's been abused by installers/uninstallers that leave behind messes.

Thanks. As far as I know, all the machines I’ve been trying have Nvidia cards, so maybe that’s a good place to start looking. I have multiple machines available, so I’ll try another one or maybe try swapping a card out and see where that gets me. Thanks again.