Posted: November 16 2005 at 2:58pm | IP Logged

I am supporting an internal customer who has just begun using a Dell Workstaton running XP SP2 with an Osprey 500-DV card.  I have updated to patch and upgrade 5 of the Viewcast driver software.  My customer wants to use VidCap for both DV and VCR capture. The settings are pretty much the default except capture the screen at 1/2, capturing to an avi file and modifying the source to DV or S-Video/unbalanced audio depending on the source.

Customer reports that an hour and a half capture of DV input failed.  File that was saved was reported corrupted.  Reported the vidcapture window was "pink" prior to beginning the capture.

Customer then tried to capture using VCR and got an error message before the capture even began saying there wasn't enough file space even though there's something on the order of 70GB free on the particular drive. 

I asked the customer to try capturing shorter length clips after running some disk defragging and such. Then try redoing the capture.

Background--two weeks ago I tried using vidcap just to capture VCR source. It wouldn't capture anything at all (error about frame rate, compression settings or something like that) until I switched from using the Osprey breakout box and used the Osprey cable interface.  Two days ago, the customer said that they had tried to use the DV source and it wouldn't work--gave the old error message.  I uninstalled and reinstalled everything, incl. uninstalling the Sony software they had installed on their own in case that software conflicted with Osprey's.  Couldn't get anything to work until I shut the system down, reseated the card, and reconnected all the leads to the card.  I didn't check the DV capture but the VCR capture was working when I left.

Any ideas what might be screwing things up? should I do a Windows uninstall and a manual check of the inf and dll files before reinstalling? what's the pink screen mean for DV capture--can't be good, I'm thinking.

Thanks.

Posted: November 16 2005 at 4:44pm | IP Logged

Use Windows Media Encoder version 9 (latest available from www.microsoft.com/windowsmedia).

VidCap writes AVI type 1 files with uncompressed raw video data. This type of file is limited to 4GB in size, and so will allow only for a few seconds of capture. The tool is not intended for production use, but for reference, testing, and diagnostics.