Pinnacle PCTV capture AV desyncronisation

Paulj

Hi,
I've been having a problem with my Pinnacle PCTV tv tuner/capture card. It works fine for watching tv however when i want to capture anything of reasonable length (say >30 mins) the audio looses syncronisation with the video stream. I've tried a lot of things to try and fix this but i've never got it working right. I've tried the drivers that came with the card as well as the updated drivers from Pinnacle. Anything i record has the audio out of sync with the video.

The delay does not seem to be linear throughout the recording as i've tried editing it afterwards using Virtualdub but that might fix the delay in parts but screw it up in other parts.

I've tried various capture programs including the supplied software, virtualdub, vlc, Amcap and a few others. I've also tried various audio & video codecs at various rates. I also defragmented the harddrive. In virtual dub various options are provided for how to do the AV interleaving and other stuff to do with the AV syncronisation, but i've tried all these with no luck.

My machine is an Athlon 1900+, 256mb RAM with a fairly new Western Digital harddrive (7600 rpm).

I've also tried the BTWinCap drivers with is third party driver that seems to have solved the problem for lots of people online but unfortunatly the tuner chipset on my card does not seem to be supported in the version of the driver i tried.

Any help would be greatly appreciated,
Thanks in advance!

J-blk

Fragmentation would be the fairly obvious one but you tried defragmenting - you may want to use something like O & O Defrag instead of the bog standard Windows utility. Does a much better job and I've found it works very very well for a PC intended as a HTPC mostly.

Also check motherboard chipset drivers - sounds very trivial but it's amazing how often we overlook them. I was having random 5 second freezes every 45 minutes or so when watching/recording TV and it almost had me driven to madness. Then figured that I had not installed motherboard chipset drivers on that particular system at all - . That was it.

It also depends what quality you are recording in and if your system can cope. TV cards that use software encoding take up lots of CPU/memory. Try this:

Keep you TV application "windowed", rather than full screen and open the Windows Task Manager with CTRL + ALT + DEL. Go to the "Performance" tab so you can see CPU and memory usage. If it starts to spike around the 30 minute mark when your problem occurs, that's it.

It doesn't necessarily mean you need a new PC though. Try closing every useless background application when doing TV recordings. There's a little app out there called Startup Inspector that will allow you to create Windows startup profiles. You can then have a profile for TV recording only, where pretty much nothing useless loads up (so no antivirus, firewall, etc). That should free up some resources.

If resources are the problem after all and you can't do anything about it, you could change the TV card only. One that does hardware encoding on board will use very little system resources. The Hauppauge Win TV PVR are excellent in this manner - I have the PVR 250 myself.

Ste-

I was having this trouble a while ago,
The way I got a decent capture by killing most processes, using a program called iuvcr and capturing to .mkv then converting to .avi using virtual dub.

Not perfect but it is watchable and .mkv is a much better container than .avi.

Also not using the default drivers but the ones you have tried the wincap drivers work fine.

Paulj

cheers for the help, i'll try out your solutions and let ye know how i get on

Paulj

I think i figured out where the problem was. It seems that the problem was with my sound card, not my tv card. My old old sound card was a pci Hercules Gamesurround Muse XL. I also have onboard sound on the motherboard (Advance AC97) so i tried recording using that and iuVCR software. Worked perfectly with Audio Video interleaving set at the 'capture' setting and capturing to AVI (compressed using divx and mp3).

I then tried capturing using virtualdub. Worked fine when compressing to AVI with Microsoft mpeg 4 codec and Uncompressed PCM audio. I also had to turn OFF the resync mode in virtualdub's 'timing...' configuration.

However it went out of sync when using the above virtualdub settings but compressing sound using mp3 codec. But i'm not too worried about that. At least i can capture properly now.