Gerry_uk said:
Thanks Paul,
It's hard to explain, but I'm not happy with my current "toy" TV card
which is "Compro Videomate". There's some kind of lag in the fast motion
action scenes, this did not occur on my old ATI analogue card and it
also does not occur if I connect my Sony external box via an S-Video
lead. It seems I can get a better recording with the external box, plus
the A/D overhead than I'm getting via the "pure" digital route. I also
don't know if these toy cards have on board DSP or if they try to use
the CPU? I'm also not happy with the software and drivers they give you,
strictly home user focus.
That's just it, they're toys! Actually there's a few on there I have not
seen before, so I'll read up on the specs.
Lag, sounds like a lack of horsepower during decompression.
Maybe the Compro does that in software. Looking at the
Compro site, many of their products appear to just
pass the digital stream to the processor.
Try the following. Record a broadcast where you expect
a lot of action in the scenes. Don't enable any preview
function. Then, when you have a sample recording in place,
find an alternate playback software and CODEC, to convert
the recorded digital stream, into screen output. (If the
Compro software has a "DVD" option, for example, maybe you
can pass their "DVD" recording, to a better DVD player
software.) It could be that a different CODEC will do the
playback more efficiently. If the playback quality is better,
then you can blame the Compro software package.
You should expect real-time lag when software converts an
MPEG stream, into a bitmap output. But good software should
have some means of keeping synchronization between the audio
output and the video output. In the past, I have read about
playback tools, where lip sync is gradually lost the longer
the player runs. So there have been some dismal efforts at
player software in the past.
Does your processor meet the stated minimum hardware requirement
for the Compro product ?
Paul
