TECHY : does anyone know about tv tuner/capture cards?

[Ocean Moves]

I've got a Pentium 4, 3.0Gz with 2 Gig RAM,
and AGPx8 board with a ATI radeon 9600 256 MB Video card,
and a winfast pvr dv2000 tv tuner/capture card.
the gigabyte motherboard has built in audio97.

I can record from the tv to windows media video (WMV)
format without problems.

However if I use MPEG to record, the resulting
video file has audio that very rapidly goes out of sync
with the video stream. I've tried ALL the setting
for making the audio/video the primary stream etc,
but the problem still occurs.

I went to see a computer specialist and explained
the problem, and he immediately said that the
problem was the speed of my processor.
He said I would need a card with on board MPEG
encoder (at cost of about 160 quid), rather than
the cheaper card I have.

I really dont get how this can be the case. I bought
this card a year ago, and am i expected to believe
that it has been sold as a device to encode to
mpeg, when even a 3 Gz Pentium 4 chip is not
powerful enough to do the job ?

What kind of chip would I need

[mh]

Sounds like a load of balls to me. People were doing this kinda thing years and years ago. Plus it works with Windows Media, which I've always found to be more processor intensive, if anything. That guy is just trying to sell you a card you don't need.

I'd say you should go looking for new drivers for all of your hardware before taking any further steps.

[katamishi]

your problem is not the processor or the capture card.Your problem is the sound card.
First you need to capture the video and audio on a separate hard drive.
That drive should be master, should be ata 100/133 or sata, but for anything larger you would need scsi av drive.
Limitation of the file system should also be on your mind, make sure indexing on the drive is off, and make sure it is ntfs, coz fat 32 has 4 gb limit for a file.
Ok , now that you ensured you have all this, make sure you buy a separate sound card, any creative would do (15 to 40 $), or in your case anything would do instead integrated.
Disable your integrated in bios, install a new one, and there you have it all done.
Do a defragmentation and scan disk before capturing, that could help, or make an empry partition on a second drive just for that.
Mpeg encoder could also help, buying it sparate, for 15 \ 20 $, but when they integrate in a tuner it costs as what you said.
If you dont have it, software will process your stream, and a glitch could happen.
Make sure you turn everything off, like antivirus, firewalls, file sharing programs, and the whole tray programs, also a screensaver, before you start caputring.

[Ocean Moves]

I appreciate your comments, but why would WMV work fine
with an integrated audio, but not MPEG?

is it possible to buy a separate MPEG coder PCIcard cheaply, that will do the of capturing tv tuner signal?

I can see my CPU is running about 30% during MPEG capture,
so shop assistant was probably talking rubbish.

[mh]

Oh aye. I'd still say drivers first, it'll only cost you a download. If that doesn't do it, try the other suggestions.

[Ocean Moves]

I've just bought a new 320 GB PATA disk for $147 Australian (60 quid)
which I needed anyway.

Am going to buy a Creative sound card today for $69 in the hope
of fixing the problem.....I hope you're right...

[Dan]

Does the video start out in sync then start to drift? If so then it means you're getting dropped frames. Either the processor can't cope or the source video is poor quality.

If it's consistently out of sync for the entire video then the audio just needs shifting.

If it's the processor then make sure you have no other software running. Close everything that's not necessary to capturing. Don't touch your pc while capturing, just opening a window and browsing files is enough to screw things up. When capturing make the video window as small as possible or turn it off if you have the option.

If the video is poor quality then the only solution is (if I'm remembering the details correctly) to route the picture through something digital like a digicam or digital video to give a clean signal, then it'll capture without dropped frames.

Dropped frames are a nuisance. It wouldn't be so bad if it dropped audio as well. At least the damn thing would stay in sync that way.



My processor is a Celeron 2.53 GHz and I've got a cheap hauppauge tv card (cost 20 or 30 quid). Using it's own capture software I can capture in mpg or avi(divx). I can capture things up to about 10 minutes long. (Anything longer and it always goes out of sync.) Sometimes the sound drifts out of sync at the first attempt, sometimes it takes 2 or 3 attempts to get it right.

I can only use the default settings. When I attempt to capture at a higher screen size it results in weird things like the video playing at the wrong speed.

You can capture with virtualdub but I've not had any luck with that either, so I stick with the software that came with it.



One thing bothers me about dropped frames. When capturing with virtualdub it keeps count of the dropped frames so you know how many you had. If it can count the dropped frames it logically follows that it can detect when they happen. If it can detect when they happen, then instead of dropping a frame why the heck doesn't it simply repeat the previous frame. It's so simple I can't understand why the people who write the capturing software haven't thought of it.

[eotunun]

I´m surprised to hear there are such problems with capturing TV programms..
I didn´t have a TV set for two years, so I got a Pinnacle PC TV Rage (Is the full name of the thingy, I believe..) and when I found out how to capture a programme (the button to do so, that is..) I just started to do so. That was on a 800MHz Duron with 128 MB Ram, no-name board and the cheapest soundblaster available running on windows 98... The Audio out of the tuner card was connected to the microphone in of the soundcard A 40 Minute Video would be about 10 GB in size (If I remember rightly) and was easily converted by Nero into mpeg.. Skip WMV! Okay, the quality of the video was grotty. But then-up to 50 Minutes on one CD. I captured a number of interesting documentary programms with it. Burning would take about 1 1/2 hours for the conversion into mpeg (I can´t tell what obscure the software that came with the card used to store the files in).
Until the Mainboard showed first traces of failure there were no problems. Unlike my new bin which is a minimum size package for a maximum number of hardware problems, as it seems.

[mugabe]

Why would you want to record to mpeg?

Anyway, before buying new hardware, try capturing with VirtualDubVCR. Does wonders for sync.

[Dan]

How do I get virtualdub to "see" the capture card?
When I choose the capture option I get a screen of grey static.
Video - source only has one option (my video card), and that's already selected.

[mugabe]

1. Launch VirtualDubVCR and enter capture mode.
2. Launch the other capture program you had and set the right source for video input.
3. You should now be able to get VirtualDubVCR to "see" your video input.

Or I am at loss.

[Ocean Moves]

I've now installed a creative audigy value sound card.

Using the winfast capture software, I have a choice
of encoding to raw avi, mpeg, divx, wmv etc.

Previously, only WMV has worked without sync errors, although
the results are pretty basic.

Trying now, ALL of these formats still result in loss of audio sync.
With WMV, the picture freezes momentarily every 30 seconds while
recording. Presumably some kind of PCI buffer issue. (PCI buffer issues
with creative PCI cards are alluded to in the VirtualDUBVCR
online FAQ). So, general failure there.

I've managed to get Nero visionexpress 3 to capture my tuner card.
The signal is poor compared to that with the winfast software.
Can't see how to do anything about that.

I seem to be able to get Nero to do a pretty lousy mpeg encode
without sync problems (nero actually tells you there are no dropped
frames). One other capture option is raw AVI, which resulted
in hundreds of lost frames from the start.
The last available option in nero was their very own
mpeg 4 H.263 codec format, which I happen to have installed.
It told me I had no dropped frames, I then discovered the
resulting video file *did* have audio sync problems anyway.
So....failure number two.

I've now just started playing with VirtualDUBVCR.
Got a picture capture working fine, good quality,
only the audio is completely broken up and very poor quality.
Anyone had this? anyone know what the cause might be?

In general, I'm pretty bloody unimpressed with these
cheap capture cards. I mean, they proclaim all sorts
of coding capabilities, but few of them deliver.
I keep being told I'd need to spend 200 pounds on
a capture card with onboard encoding.

[Ocean Moves]

UPDATE:

Decided to buy an AVerMedia DVB-T HD/digital/Analogue
PCI capture card for A$130 (55 quid).

result: stunning results with free to air digital tv (DVB-T).
Standard DTV looks great, HD broadcasts (of which
there are 4-5 channels here in Australia) look stunning
on my 19" 1280x1024 samsung PC LCD display.

Capture is pixel perfect. and audio & video have
perfect sync. Awesome !