Radeon 9000 A.I.W. PAL capture problem

[culttvguy]

Hi,hopefuly someone can help me with this becasue the support at ATI seems to be pretty crap.

My problem is that when capturing PAL video,it cuts off the bottom half of the picture,and the top half is expanded vertically to fit the screen,so people would look taller,but it would only capture from the waist up.! This happens with still image capture also in PAL format.

Imagine the bottom half of the screen missing,and then the remainder expanded to fill the empty space.

When recording or snapping stills in NTSC video,the picture is fine
I cannot find any other settings to change,except the drop-down Broadcast Standard box in TV Player Setup,which I set to whatever signal is being fed in.
In any format,the picture is normal when just viewing on my monitor(ie,not actually recording),its just that it does this wierd thing when recording video/stills in PAL format.

I'm capturing through normal RCA cables,and the problem occurs with any source,VHS,DVD etc.

I was thinking that maybe this card does not support PAL video,but there is the option to select it in the TV Player Set up.Is this only for viewing,or is it supposed to be for recording too ? When I set it to NTSC,and feed in an NTSC signal,it records as NTSC.When I change it to PAL I,and feed a PAL I signal,it does the weird thing as described above.

It will kind of pi55 me off if I cant record PAL signals,as I want to archive PAL VHS tapes onto DVD with my PC,this was part of the reason I opted for this card.

I went through the ATI online troubleshooting thing,but couldnt find what i wanted so i emailed them and i got an automated response telling me to look where i had already looked,but that was why i was emailing them !

Any ideas?
Thanks
Andrew

[Xayd]

The difference in PAL and NTSC (besides the framerate) is about 90 pixels.

There's also an option in the ATI software for the record resolution, besides the input resolution. My initial thought on your problem is that it's not properly changing the capture resolution when you change the input resolution.

For PAL, full screen, the resolution should be 720 x 576, make sure that's the resolution that you're recording at in your record options.

[culttvguy]

I couldnt find anywhere that said it specifically changes the settings for recording,but when i go to TV Player Setup,I can change the Broadcast Standard and the recording quality.When I have it set to PAL -I ,the video size in DVD recording quality shows as 720 x 576,PAL(625)

If i change it to NTSC i can see the picture change on-screen,so I know t changes it,but maybe it is for viewing only,and dosent work for recording.

Oh,and the same wierd thing happens in SECAM too,NTSC is the only one that works properly.

I cant find anything to change the actual RECORD signal.

Andrew

[Xayd]

When you go into the input options, there's a recording option of "low, medium, high, best quality". Click on set custom, and specify a new list of settings for PAL.

See if that works. The recording options unless I'm mistaken are separate from the input values, and it will always use the default recording options unless you tell it otherwise.

Don't forget the framerate too, PAL is 25 FPS not 30.

[culttvguy]

OK I tried that,but I coudnt find anywhere to change the frame rate

Andrew

[Xayd]

When you click on the custom button it should start a wizard, it'll have a box to change the framerate at some point in the steps you go through to create a new recording profile.

[culttvguy]

Yeah the wizard does come up when i press 'edit' on the custom setting.I'll go through the steps i did,and tell me if it is ok.

1.Enter a name for this preset(pretty basic)
The bit under it that says select the capture type you want to configure,is greyed out,so i cant change that.

2.Click Next.Then it has a drop-down box called 'profile' .Now I'm not too sure what to select.Just for example,I wanted to make video for 56k modem.So I go down and select 'Video for web servers (56k)'

3.The next page says it allows me to configure video and audio capture properties.So if I want to capture PAL,I select from the 2 options in the Drop-down box.One has a list of NTSC formats,and the other has PAL and secam formats(along with NTSC 4.33 for some reason!)So I select the one with the PAL options in it.

4.The screensize does not show 720 x 576 in the box on the right,it only goes up to 704 x 576,so I select that one.

5.Framerate I change to 25.00 fps

6 Audio i guess doesnt really matter,so i leave it on 44.100khz 16 bit stereo.

7.Click finish,then it should work right?

8.I tried it and it worked,although obviously the picture is pretty crap,but the ratio was all ok.

Now comes the bit when i want to record in a higher quality mode.When i go to edit a higher quality setting,it asks me to specify frame sequence settings in the MPEG otput stream.What the F*** is all that about.?I aint got a clue about any of that ! Its all I P BB P I etc etc !Number of P frames,and B frames in Subgroup . HUH ?? I frames only ,default . Bitstream settings etc etc

Anyway,it seems that I can do anything to these settings that lets me record properly in PAL,like in the 56k setting,where i could change the broadcast standard and the framerate settings.

Any of the formats with MPEG gives me the stupid half screen problem.

I can record pretty good quality in Windows Media format on the Local Use setting,although its not as good as MPEG2 would be(if i could get it to work properly) !!

Oh and finally i just got an email from ATI,saying that I can trecord PAL if it is an NTSC card.So I guess seeing as though i bought the thing in the US,it must be an NTSC card.But then that conflicts with the fact that today i was able to record PAL in .wmv format

Andrew

[Xayd]

The frames option you can leave alone, as for what it does video is a sequence of frames. Some are actual frames and some "predict" where motion is going and therefore don't have to be as big, that's how compression works. The default are fine, in short.

704 x 576 is valid, so it should work.

What the problem might be is the player that you're using not being able to play PAL mpegs. The only one that will play them properly afaik is a dvd player such as PowerDVD. PAL MPEG2 files do NOT play properly in Windows Media Player from my experiences.

Try playing in DVD software and see if the videos look ok.

Another thing you might consider is capturing to AVI and then encoding the videos to MPEG with another encoder afterwards (TMPGEnc could do this).

[culttvguy]

Yeah,becasue NTSC MPEGS work ok,as do NTSV AVI's
.The players i use ar either Windows Media Player,and the ATI File player

The same problem happens with PAL AVI files too.

,I'll check it out.I'm too tired to do anything now,I'll give it a go tomorrow,and I'll edit this post with my results,if any !!!!

[glc]

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[culttvguy]

Quote removed !!