Where has the record button gone? (G400, w2k)

[warnas]

It's been over a year since I've had to re-install my PC (G400, W2K) and I've run into some problems. Since I haven't been following the Matrox news (well... the thing worked, didn't it? ;-)
Perhaps I can get some info here: reading the archives would take days. I got hopelessly lost in all that info.

- So, what gives with the final release of the W2K videotools? Suddenly, no more record button! (And it's gone on slightly older versions too. I thought I had vidtools 02.04.015 running before, WITH the option to record with pc-vcr. Now, when I install that same program (w2kvt204.exe) the record button is gone.

- What is this YUY2 anyway? (What can I say... I've been really busy and all I really want is to use my PC as a VCR)

- Whilst I'm at it: is there a way to record to div-x via that PC-vcr thingy? Virtualdub isn't exactly stable and AVI-IO isn't exactly free.

Regards,

Martijn Warnas

[Dr Mordrid]

PC-VCR is best used for TV viewing. Capturing is indeed best done using AVI_IO or VirtualDUB. I prefer AVI_IO myself.

YUY2 is the native analog capture mode of the Matrox cards. It is a variant of YUV, which is the native analog video format for all capture cards.

Using AVI_IO the best strategy is setting up the Format for YUY2 capture using the frame size of your choice then seting up the Compression to whatever codec on your system you want to capture with.

Setting a Compression of "none" would result in a YUY2 capture (20.1 mb/s).

If you have PICVideo or Morgan's software MJPeg installed you can use those to capture MJPeg much as you did with the Win9x drivers but at higher quality. With PICVideo's MJPeg a Quality setting of 19 would be equivalent to Matrox's codec. Playback works just fine from dualhead/DVDMAX as long as you use a standard Matrox capture rez (704 or 352 wide etc).

As far as capturing direct to DivX; sure, you can do that with AVI_IO or VirtualDUB. Just have the DivX codec installed to the system and select it as the Compression in the capture tool. Just make sure you have enough CPU horsepower to pull it off.

As for AVI_IO not being free....neither is PICVideo MJPeg but both are near essential tools if you're serious about analog capture using analog cards.

If VirtualDUB isn't stable for you then it's time to re-read the docs and/or check for OS install/DirectX problems. It's very stable here.

Dr. Mordrid