Vegas 4 WDM capture crash

Baluga wrote on 6/9/2003, 9:27 PM

Hi,

I have recently installed nvidia wdm drivers in order to use my Leadtek Geforce 4 Vivo as a capture card for VHS videos alongside my usual firewire which I use for DV capture. After I installed the drivers, as soon as I enter the capture screen in Vegas my computer completely freezes and has to be reset. I tried different versions of the wdm driver, including the latest one posted by Leadtek (1.27) but the result remains the same. The capture program by Leadtek works fine, but it can't capture from Firewire. So I need Vegas to work! I uninstalled the Leadtek program to see if it was a software conflict, but no difference. I also uninstalled and reinstalled Vegas. Any ideas as to what's going on?

I'm running XP Pro SP1, DirectX 9.0a and the following system drivers are installed:

Realtek Audio 3.44 (5.10.0.5210)
LAN Intel 6.2.21.0
Promise ATA133 2.00.1020.41
Intel Application Accelerator 2.3.2160
Intel INF 5.00.1012
Leadtek Winfast Nvidia 43.51
Leadtek Nvidia WDM Driver 1.27

Any ideas are appreciated, thanks!

Jenn

Comments

RBartlett wrote on 6/10/2003, 1:39 AM

Your LeadTek VIVO board might use a video capture chip made by Conexant. It will be labelled as Fusion878 or possibly Cx23881.
You should be OK capturing the WDM driver but probably only in resolutions such as 352x240, which would have to be the default of the driver.

Reason is that most NLE applications don't appreciate the limitations of these capture cards. They can capture beautiful D1 (720x480/720x576, 704x480/720x576, 768x480/768x576) full fps video. However whilst in this mode, they change their preview to half that rate - to preserve the PCI bus bandwidth to reasonable levels (really for slow/hi-latency storage peripherals and PCI graphics cards). Only capture programs like LeadTek's own and many of the TiVO/ReplayTV equivalent Windows apps seem to realise this and suitable scale the switchdown res back up for you as you record. I see that this single shortfall has generated much of the migration from Hi8/8mm formats to DV/firewire. Capture cards that don't have this limitation costing a lot more than you probably paid for your Gf4-combo card.

You might consider using the LeadTek (WMV or MPEG-2), or better, ShowShifter PICvideo MJPEG (Q=17, 720x480/576) codec (OpenDML2) AVI to capture. ShowShifter can feasibly deliver 4:2:2 with a higher bitrate than DV, although with interfaces limited to SVIDEO at best, cable quality and adjacent card interference can be a concern.

Most folk seem to go the analogue->DV converter route. (Canopus ADVC range).

Baluga wrote on 6/10/2003, 4:10 AM

Thanks for your response. The application from Leadtek (Win PVR) can, according to settings, capture in 720x576 using the PAL DVD profile. I haven't actually tried capturing anything using the Vivo yet, so I might use the Leadtek application to capture and then import the avi to Vegas for editing. So I gather this is not a problem caused by Vegas but rather by the system?

Thanks again for your reply.

Jenn

Udi wrote on 6/10/2003, 7:26 AM

I had a problem of system crash (XP-Pro) as soon as I pressed the capture key. This was a result of directX 9.0a that I installed, when I removed it, all works fine.

Hope it helps, Udi.

mikkie wrote on 6/10/2003, 8:14 AM

Some analog wdm capture software/drivers will crash the vegas capture applet... With an ATI product, you rename the mmc folder, so perhaps something like this might work for you.

If uninstall didn't cure the prob., then likely something was left behind. If you have the option to go to an earlier system restore, might use that. Wouldn't fool with trying to remove or backup to an earlier version of DX -> tricky proposition that in theory at least shouldn't effect anything (unless some driver is poorly written).

Might try looking at the actual install files for the nvidia stuff, looking to see if the install might have replaced default winxp pro sp1 files, &/or doing a search in the registry for the capture portion, possibly using individual file names.

Easiest way though might be to do a repair install -> proceed as if installing xp pro, skip the first few dialogs re: repair console, but choose the repair option when it's given, to repair the installed version of windows. If you go that route, and if you have the original (non sp1) version of the winxp pro CD, might save you some work if you try to create a slip-stream install CD (an install CD with sp1 merged in) - directions are on the web or at Microsoft.

Baluga wrote on 6/10/2003, 10:43 AM

Thanks to both for your input. Where exactly can I find the mmc folder? I did a search but couldn't find anything.

Jenn