Well now, you may have answered an unanswered question I have from VCDhelp.com from about 15 years ago :D

I trying to capture a stream from a satellite box and I couldn't figure out what the hell was wrong. You would have grey and then black, no middle ground, it looked horrendous. I must have spent months on it before giving up on capturing altogether. I wonder was that the issue? Is that what I would expect? No way I'm using it if it was that card. (I have no way of telling if this was the card I was using or not).

Oh, while on the topic of test patterns. I'm looking for a (roughly) 5 minute video to do my testing with. Have you any recommendations? I need something that youtube won't flag for copyright that has a nice mix of stuff in a short period of time.

EDIT: From watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6DgfoepawY
It looks like my problem was possibly related to this, but it was a million times worse than in this video.

Have you drivers handy for this card? Also have you tried it on a more modern operating system? (Before I have to build a Win XP machine!)

Win7 installs drivers automatically. Don't know about Win10. But they don't provide full functionality.

Regarding your satellite box capture, I think copy protection is more likely to blame than low bit-depth (posterization).

It wasn't some form of copy protection. It was something wrong with the setup that I could never find. Basically massive banding across the image. If you look at the YouTube example above, it was like that, but 10x worse.

msgohan you don't happen to know how to use the capture cards audio inputs in vdub do you?
I'm very happy with the picture I'm getting at present, but the audio from the PCs' audio line in is absolutely dreadful, so I wanted to use the capture cards line in.

I've switched to the option that allows me to capture audio from the capture card, and it shows 2 line inputs available in vdub, but neither are giving audio....

I couldn't get that to work either. But user metaleonid told me that the card audio quality is poor.

What would be the full Matrox MX02 setup for laptop via expresscard?

Here's a pretty decent discussion of the hardware required for the MX02.

This appears to be the full set-up for a laptop with Expresscard slot.

I haven't seen any thorough discussion of whether the MX02 provides any line TBC or frame TBC functionality itself or whether that would require additional upstream hardware, at least on difficult tapes.

BW37