The VideoLAN Forums

Hey,

I don't know who you are, but you seem to be the one that always answers everyone's questions.

I posted yesterday about the TV tuner on an AMD 450 w/ 98SE that gave me the "blue screen of death", i.e. FATAL EXCEPTION AT ..., and you suggested updating all drivers, etc. I have DirectX 9.0C, the most recent TV card driver and when VLC starts up and gets ready to stream my TV, I get the "blue screen of death" and everything crashes and I need to reboot. I DO NOT check the SHOW LOCALLY box, and the same thing. HELP!

Thanks.

You may just be stuck, not enough processing power to do the streaming. The lowest power machine I've used to do transcoding is an 800 MHz PIII.

Does the card view locally OK in VLC, right on the machine? (not trying to stream, just doing a regular File -- Open Capture Device) If it does, then VLC is "hooking" to the card OK.

If you can do a local view, but streaming is broken, you might try streaming at a really low rate, perhaps just try streaming to file. Open Settings -- Preferences, select the Advanced Options checkbox, then go to Modules -- sout stream -- stream_out_transcode. Try making "Video frame rate" 5 (a very low number, but this is just a test).

Next do an Open Capture Device, select Stream Output. Select File and type in c:\test\myfile.asf. elect the ASF Encapsulation method. Under Transcoding select Video codec DIV3 and Audio codec mp3. DOn't select any of the network things -- just see if you can stream to file.

Start the streaming. If VLC doesn't crash, let it run say 20 seconds, then press the Stop button. Take a look and see if c:\temp\myfile.asf is there -- if it is, you should have something playable by both VLC and WMP.

(Classic debugging -- trying to see if you can stream anything at all, even very low rate to file)

...amazingly, when I started using VLC, I followed this process, and I found I could transcode and stream at 128kbps (terrible picture!) but nothing better. Turned out to be a Network Card driver problem. Just goes to show - take nothing for granted where computers (and video) are concerned!!

Cheers, 7&Y