I am a newbie to video capture, and I've been trying many things.
So this may not come as anything "new" to people who have traveled this path before.
There are good capture cards, and bad capture cards.
There are recommended capture cards, and capture cards to be avoided.
And there are AGP, PCI, PCIe, USB2, USB3, and Firewire capture cards and devices.
But one thing almost universal is that there are Uncompressed and Compressed capture cards and devices.
Uncompressed produce large files that take up a of disc space, but offer the best capture resolution and least chance for lip sync error.
Compressed produce much smaller files, with a loss of some kind and are more prone to lip sync error.
Compressed cards depend on hardware compression on the card, or software compression on the PC after the uncompressed stream is brought to the PC and before its written to disc.
VirtualDub does best with Uncompressed cards and devices because there are fewer variables to work out getting from the video capture to the disc file. And frankly that is what it was designed to work with.
VirtualDub much later received support from Avery Lee for one particular MPEG hardware compression capture system from Plextor called the M402U compression system. But it wasn't perfect.
Many types of capture software attempt to work with hardware compression systems both hardware and software, but they vary so much its mostly a headache to try to use anything other than the Third Party software that was bundled with the hardware capture video card.
I've been dabbling with the Microsoft DirectShow SDK and Microsoft Windows SDK that contained the GraphEdit prototyping tool for programmers. I made a discovery.
For many Third Party bundled software they do invoke "graphs" behind the scenes which you can review with some snooping tools.. but they do not always work.. because the "filters" they depend on mysteriously disappear when you try to recreate them in GraphEdit.
From 2010 to around 2011 there was speculation they were "locking" up these filters for licensing reasons.. or making them deliberately unavailable. It seems that was not the case.
Rather they were "not registering" them with the DirectShow library of available filters.
That's good and bad.
Good because adding and removing filters as part of your installation can make them appear and disappear from the library and cause other av programs to fail.. so it removes them from the troubleshooting equation.
Bad because other third party programs can not see these custom filters which can make that hardware work with that software.. GraphEdit included. And that includes while the original Bundled software is still installed.
As an example.. I found a card that contained the same capture chip used by the TIVO HD recorder. But could not get it to display the MPEG capture and could not save it to disc.. except with that Third Party software bundled with it which was somewhat "lacking" in stability or features. And VirtualDub would not work with it.
I noticed playback would work using the Windows Media Center MPEG2 decoders for audio and video, if specific MPEG2 capture profiles were used.. but could still not capture the mpeg stream.
Then I noticed the File Writer did not "exist" in the DirectShow library of available filters in GraphEdit.
Long story short.. I found the .ax filter files for the Third Party software were not "registered" with the operating system and only loaded by that software on demand and then unloaded.
By properly "registering" them with regsvr32 suddenly everything became available.
The video capture was rock solid and playback became available in other software using the original playback filters.
I think this is a "meme" that was repeated many times across many different capture products and their software.. there is nothing sinister about it.
But lots of hardware capture software was license key activated "for the application" and those activation servers no longer exist. By manually registering their filters however you should be able to begin reusing those hardware capture cards if its something you would like to do.
In particular a few very choice ones offered [both] Uncompressed or Compressed capture with all sort of advanced filter control panels never seen in other gear for things like Ultra-lock and Time base correction, auto level enable disable and softness/sharpness filters.
Again this could be old news.. or very late news since a lot of this gear is gone now.. but I thought it an interesting find that other people could benefit from.
If there is general interest I can elaborate on specific brands and models, or provide capture samples and screen shots of the control panels.
This information is not specific to XP, it also applies to Windows 7. Whether that extends to Vista, 8.1 or 10 I do not know since I have only tested it against XP and Windows 7.
The most likely scenario is this played out from Windows 2000 through 8.1 and all intervening versions, with some possibility for it being true for USB capture devices known to work under Windows 10.
