Marvel G400-tv questions

[iparout]

Hi there all,

I'm new to this forum and I was directed here by a good fellow in VCDHELP. I'm willing to make my first steps into NLE. After one week of searching for the right capture card I figured out that Marvel G400 was the best solution for me. I still have a "few" questions though and I'd really appreciate it if you would answer them.

1) I would be grateful if someone in here could please point out any drawbacks that this card may have.

2) How about the 2 GB file-limit and the Macrovision copyright protection ? Can they be bypassed ?

3) I know that in Win2000 many of the card's capabilities have been disabled. Is there any way to re-enable TV capturing and MJPEG real-time encoding in Win2000 ?

4) Will the card have the same disabilities in Win XP as well ?

5) Does Marvel G400 support third party software for capturin ?(e.g. VirtualDub, Premier e.t.c)

I'm planning on putting some old VHS to SVCDs and also capture from my TV and then software-encode in SVCD or DVD.

6) Is this card suitable for me or should I prefer G450-eTV ?

7) Is there any head-to-head comparison for Marvel G400 and G450-eTV so as to help me pick the most suitable for my needs ?

I've got a SCSI 20 GB HDD, a 10 GB EIDE HDD (winME installed here), P III 450 MHz O/C to 506 MHz and Viper V770 (which I'm going to sell If I buy the G400) and Win ME, planning to upgrade to Win2000 or XP.

8) I'm also planning to buy a 60 or 80 GB Hard disk, UDMA 100, 7200 RPM dedicated to capturing. Is this a good choice ?

Thx in advance for any help.

P.S. : I was told to ask someone named "DOCTOR" but any help from ithers would be highly appreciated.

Thx again.

[Ghydda]

Hi iparout


1) No real good support under Win2k, you might want to look at G450 Marvel instead. Plus the 3D section is geting rather old now, so performance is not good in newer games.

2) the 2 gig file limit can be circumvented with capture programs such as AVI_IO. It's fairly cheap, around US$25 if I remember correctly. The macrovision can be bypassed when using Win9x.

3) There supposely is, however not everybody can make the MJPEG bit it work flawless. It is being done by using parts of different driver releases. However basic capture with VirtualDub or AVI_IO is working.

4) Yup!

5) Yup!

6) In your case I would definitly go for the G450-eTV instead. It has direct to MPEG2 capture capability. It should be possible to capture directly to a usable MPEG2 ready for mastering to SVCD.

7) Not that I know of.

8) More disk space is always a good choice. In any case, you don't have to worry about the performance of a new drive. They are all fast enough for everything but raw captures in full resolution.

The person in question is Dr Mordrid, and he is possibly the most wise and experienced person in these matters in this part of the galaxy.


Ghydda

[iparout]

I'm not at all interested in 3D performance. All I wanted to buy Marvel G400 for was for the hardware MJPEG encoding. However, as I can understand, this feature is disabled in Win2000 and will be disabled in all further windows releases.

9) As far as I can understand the G450-eTV and G400 are absolutely the same under Win2000, am I right ? (I'm not at all interested in the real-time MPEG-2 capturing of G450)

10) If I get it right, in order to exploit the G400 to its full extent, you must stop upgrading your O/S for ever and stick to WinMe or -better- Win9x.

11) Is there any other way to bypass macrovision protection ? Sticking to Win9x isn't really an option...

12) Is the TV capture disabled in G450 under win2000 or is it only disabled in the G400 ?

13) Can you *capture* TV programms (in MJPEG or raw AVI) with G400 in Win2000 ? (sorry for asking again but I didn't quite understand if TV capturing can be possible in Win2000 or not)

BTW, if anyone else is willing to give me his own input on the questions in my first post, I'll really appreciate it. THE MORE THE BETTER...

Thx in advance

[Ghydda]

9) G450-eTV and G400 Marvel is two VERY different cards. First of all the G400 has a hardware MJPEG codec chip (from Zoran) to do the heavy data-crunching. The G450 does NOT, I repeat does NOT have any hardware to do the compression. It is done by software alone.

10) Correct.

11) I will decline this one. Anybody else got some info here?

12) The G450 is fully supported under Windows 2000. Every feature works (MPEG2 and AVI capture).
Marvel G400 has YUY2 and RGB capabilities under 3rd party capture apps (such as VirtualDub or AVI_IO)
Marvel G200 and RRG have RGB capabilities under 3rd party capture apps
PC-VCR is ONLY a tv viewer on all G-series mjpg cards (the capture program from Matrox)

13) Yes, see 12)


I hope this clears up some things for you. Question: You seem to prefer a hardware codec to a software codec for capture. Why is this?


Ghydda

[Sciascia]

As for buying the G400, it is kind of a love-hate relationship. When you do what the card is intended to do then it works quite well. This includes using it with Win98SE. It excels at HW MJPEG capture in this OS and it is very reliable. As for Win2000, I am in the middle of reinstalling it right now. I tried the Win2k hack to enable MJPEG capture and it seemed to be working very well. There are a few things I have to work out with editing, but it looked and performed as good if not better than Win98SE.

I had to reinstall because I "think" that I screwed up by setting the swap disc to D: and setting C: for 0 bytes. As soon as I rebooted....Boom!! no boot and some weird error about my NTOS32 being hosed. I looked and it is there.

As for G400 vs. G450

G400 will do HW MJPEG compression and with the YUY2 hack it does SW compression as well. It works very well with 3rd party capture SW. It will not do MPEG2 capturing though. It is a fairly stable card that is a little bit dated though in the 3D dept. There are going to be no more drivers for future OS's so read up on the nightmares others are having vs. the success stories.

G450 does all SW compression so CPU power is more important. I believe that the requirement is a 933 MHz (maybe misaken). MPEG2 until recently was not very good for editing. As a matter of fact Matrox does not tout the editing for the G450, but rather the web posting aspect. I haven't seen anything from the G450, but 99% of the web stuff looks like crap. Of course if you could capture in SVCD spec (which I highly doubt) then the G450 would eliminate some steps to the process and if the quality is good enough then it would eliminate some losses are contributed by additional signal processing.

I have read on some other forums that someone is able to capture in SVCD compliant MPEG2 with the new ATI radeon AIW (I think). If it is as good as he says it is then that may be an option. Don't get me wrong I am a firm supporter of Matrox, but the lack of working drivers is a little old. I am "married" to this card and everything that I buy for my system is depedent on what is compatible with it. I have some really neat new USB stuff that doesn't work as well in Win98SE as it does in WinME and Win2000. WinME is nice, but it has a memory leak and overhead that just isn't good for an NLE OS. As for dual booting, I am sure that it is going to be what I have to do, but I am avoiding it like the plague. I shouldn't have to restart my computer every 2 hours just to do something else.

I will update you on my Win2k experience and let you know if it is a viable option for the G400. Just don't rush into anything since it is going to be a fairly good sized investment and will determine a lot of your system upgradability in the future.

Sciascia

[iparout]

Thx a lot Sciascia and Ghydda for your replies. I'm waiting for your next input Sciascia regarding the Win2000 matter, cause as you said, buying that card will affect my system future upgradability... Thx again.

@Ghydda : As an answer to your question I'll give you 3 words : PIII 450 MHz

[Sciascia]

Quick update on Win2k status. It seems that either one of my HD crashed or I have a power or cable problem. It is one of my ultra 100 drives for the RAID0 array. This would explain why I couldn't boot into Win2k. If it was trying to find it during startup for the pagefile it may have caused problems. I reinstalled successfully and will finish installing all drivers and SW tonight or tomorrow. If this drive is bad I'm going to be a litle more than upset since I have all of my DL files and drivers, mp3's, movies, email and stuff on there. I do have backups of stuff, but not everything. We're talking about more than a few gigs of crap possibly gone. Oh well, just as long as the drive can be fixed I'll live.

[Ghydda]

Ahh, I see. You properly is on the right track when looking into a hardware codec then. To bad it's a solution with a lot of limitations if you plan to use Win2k.

The road you are looking into is paved with obstacles. Considder things carfully, so you know what to expect.


Ghydda

[Sciascia]

I don't think that it is physically possible to be happier than I am at this moment in time, without witnessing a childbirth. I went to the store and bought the same exact HD for $125. A little cheaper than I thought. I then proceeded to be a hardhead (after opening the box of course) and try to salvage my data. After using the UltraATA management and running some diagnostics on the old drive, it came up fine. I read that it might be a bad reserve sector or something so I deleted the array (after making sure that my data would stay in tact) and defined a new one. Viola!! it came up with all of my data intact!!! I am now ready to proceed with finishing the install of my drivers and then start making some long overdue backups.

11G is a lot of crap to lose over something stupid like a corrupted file. Now I just need to decide what to do with my new HD. I already have a FT66 and 2 13G drives that I am trying to unload.

[Sciascia]

Here is the latest if anyone is interested. I have got Win2k installed, all of my devices working...finally the scanner was a real bugger. It had some old SCSI ISA card that was not plug'n play. I figured out where to hijack some drivers for it, but the memory address was wrong and there was no way to change it. It had no conflicts, but it was dog slow. I through my old Adaptec Zip100 ISA SCSI card in there and it works like a champ. I had to use another program to install TWAIN drivers for it. A program called ArtScan Pro. I highly recommend this one. If you scanner is not recognized or does not support Win2k then chances are it may work for you. It's very nice.

Anyway to the point. I have MJPEG capturing in Win2k without incident. Nice long caps in avi_io and no drops. I haven't messed with the SW compression yet, but I do have the YUY2 hack in there and it seems to work. I'll play a little more this week. So far Win2k is going a lot smoother now that I have the right drivers (especially the Marvel G400). I really like it.