AVStream quality not great compared to RageTheater
AVStream quality not great compared to RageTheater
Hello all,
I'm new to the forum and I have a little experience with GraphEdit. Something that has been a problem for me for quite a while is that .grf files can't be ported from one system to another (to my knowledge). Is there some way to create generalized graphs using the "friendly name" for the capture filters or can you modify the GUIDs/CLSIDs in the registry?
I have been in many situations where I would like to send a graph file to someone else or create a graph on a single system and copy the .grf to other systems with the same hardware. How can I accomplish this? Is there a guide that I have missed somewhere on this forum that explains capture drivers and .grf files in depth?
I would love to be able to write a software tool that could either automatically create a graph for certain capture devices, or modify a graph for use on other systems. Unfortunately, I don't have a great understanding of the way capture works in the Windows registry.
I have read through most of this thread and I've already learned a great deal. Thanks in advance to everyone for their help with this question!
Scott
If anyone has any knowledge they'd like to share regarding the above questions, I would really like to hear from you.
I have a different question regarding capture using the ATI T200 AVStream capture driver. I have a great deal of experience working with the All-In-Wonder cards and found that video capture quality changed drastically when ATI changed their capture driver to AVStream. For example, when using an AIW 9600XT, Catalyst 4.7 (RageTheater capture driver) gave great quality capture with no interlacing straight out of the Capture/Preview pin. If you upgrade to Catalyst 5 or higher, the AVStream capture driver is used and you get interlaced video.
In addition to the interlacing problem, I have found that over time, the audio and video streams get out of sync. This gets worse over time. I did a lot of testing with the X800 XL and it didn't seem to matter whether I used a deinterlace filter for better quality or simply went straight from the capture pin to the renderer. I also tried both VMR9 and the regular video renderer.
Cards that support hardware MPEG-2 encoding do not seem to have these types of issues. I suppose this is because encoding and then decoding from MPEG will time stamp the two streams so that they stay in sync. (Maybe those of you more familiar with this can elaborate or correct me if I'm way off in this assumption.) I have found that the easiest way to find out if a capture card has hardware MPEG support is to look for a WDM Streaming Multiplexer device in the filters list. None of the ATI AIW cards seem to support hardware MPEG so you can't connect the PCM/YUY outputs on the capture filter to anything.
I found the AIW cards pre Catalyst 4.7 to be really great capture cards but I have had so many problems with them since then, I have stopped using them completely. The TV Wonder Elite (or any 550 Pro OEM card) and 650 both support hardware MPEG, as do the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR series of cards so I have been sticking to these lately.
I dealt with ATI's Professional Services team regarding the A/V sync problem for a while and they confirmed that it was an issue. I asked them how they were able to overcome it in the ATI TV software but they were never able to give me an answer (ATI's different groups are like entirely different companies within the main company and they couldn't get access to the driver team). After a while I just gave up as I could tell that it wasn't a priority for them.
Has anyone else run into these issues, and if so, how have you solved them? Thanks again.
Scott