LifeView WDM Video Capture - Composite Choice Never Works

[kempvet]

there are a couple of TV capture cards that use the LifeView WDM Video Capture Driver. Other third party software such as Action Cam capture the composite or SV input with no problem but the VLC will never work. Is this a general problem with VLC that other people have found. In other words not even the direct show will work, can capture the TV input for streaming but no way will the composite or the SV work even though I have clicked and unclicked every possible option in the device set up. Other capture cards such as Grand Tech composite work with VLC capturing the composite input but anything with the LifeView WDM Video Capture Driver will never work!

[Guest]

I have a Pinnacle PCTV/RAVE (with bt848 chip) with Pinnacle WDM video driver on Windows 2000. I can't use S-video input because Videolan (version 0.7.1-0.7.2-0.8.test2) always switch on tv-video. I have tried to set input by vidcap and virtualdub but it was useless. Somebody can help me?

[kempvet]

Apparently there is nothing that can be done about this problem - the developer has said that he has no time to fix this problem - maybe there should be a rider before the VLC is downloaded and tried by people that this is a problem and therefore people will not waste their time thinking that they have configured the VLC wrong.

[markfm]

You might want to try the newer 0.8 test releases. No guarantee that it will do anything for you, but there was a post-0.7.2 change that made it work better with at least some input devices under Windows. Unfortunately, I doubt this will help you, due to the nature of your problem.

More to the point, you might want to talk to whoever supplies your video input card drivers. VLC is not changing S-video vs. composite, or anything else. It hooks to whatever applet the driver supplier provides. In other words, look carefully and you should notice that what you see looks just like the vendor's standalone control applet -- that's because that's what it is. If the driver software resets parameters, that is not VLC -- VLC neither knows nor cares about the front-end (analog side) of the card.

I use a pretty capable framegrabber, multiple audio and video inputs, a bunch of selections for input format, etc. No problems at all with VLC, not because VLC is awesome (it is), but simply because the vendor-supplied driver does what it should -- only changes the things the user asks to change. If I select composite input, then on another area of the control applet select that I'm using NTSC-M, the driver software doesn't arbitrarily change the input to S-video.

[kempvet]

have already done this and more, the problem appears to be that when the VLC was first developed the developer used a webcam where there was no need to select the source as there was only one. Therefore the pop up boxes of the device properties is not a problem. The problem comes with TV cards and the selection of a source. When they write the drivers for these TV cards they assume that the device properties will be changed from the TV card GUI. The VLC calls the property device boxes in an unfortunate order where the TV tuner appears last, clicking the S Video does not stop the tuner box popping up and the VLC defaulting to the TV tuner. The only way you will get anything to display on VLC with a tuner card is usually what you have already been watching on TV. There are one of 2 things that need be done. The VLC GUI needs to have the decive properties (format, source etc) as options in the video button OR that the TV card driver needs to be rewritten so that it can also be called in the way that the VLC calls for device properties and when the source box selection appears the selection of S video or composite stops the TV tuner box appearing as it should if the TV card driver was written in this way (but it does not have to be written like this as it works well and can be changed with the TV card GUI as it was meant to). In other words the VLC developer has other things to do and the TV card driver works well for the TV card so why should they bother doing anything to help VLC. There appears to be no way around this problem at the moment.

[markfm]

Thanks for the coherent, well written, reply. At least for me it is now clear -- a concise statement can be really helpful.

[oyabun]

After using VLC (latest nightly build on WinXP and ATI AIW 9800 Pro) for the past two days, I am very satisfied with it's quality and (relative) ease of use. As (almost?) everyone else I have stumbled upon the S-video/Tuner/Composite selection problem. Since I want to use VLC to stream from an external sattelite receiver via WiFi, I will have to use the RF-out of the receiver to connect it to my transmitter PC. Of course I would prefer using the scart2svideo option, but that's impossible ATM.

I was wondering, since Virtualdub can so easily switch video inputs (works for me) and it is GNU-licenced, wouldn't it be possible to just use the code from there? Wouldn't that quickly fix it?

[kempvet]

I don't think that the problem is that it can't be done, I think that the problem is the developers of the VLC have not had enough input from users to know how big the TV card capture driver and composite is becoming. The irony is that although the VLC is a great product, having a great product is no good for people that can not use it. I run a veterinary clinic and I am looking for a way to stream live video of critcal care dogs over the LAN and also to the net to the owners of those pets. Webcams have limited use for me and propper quality network cameras are better. TV capture cards are a cost effective way of capturing these cameras through the composite input. Problem is that VLC is useless for this purpose. I have tried 20 software trial programs for this purpose and the VLC is the only one that has the problem detailed in these posts.

[markfm]

You might want to try the latest nightly build. I'm pretty sure a change was made yesterday, do not know if it will do what you need, but believe it was specifically done to help with input selection.

[oyabun]

I was using the latest nightly built, I even rechecked to make sure.
To clarify what is happening, I'm willing to send pictures of the menus that appear to markfm (since I cannot attach them here). THe problem still remains that after you select 2.S-Video for the input, then another wndow pops up asking you to select the tuning frequency. If you press cancel, it just uses the default UHF frequency, in tuner mode of course.

[markfm]

Do you need an option to skip the tuner window, or do you need the tuner window brought forward, so it happens earlier?

(A little checkbox at the dshow input window, to "Skip tuner", would just jump past that last window entirely, if youu think that would do what you need.)

I've generated a libdshow plugin with a checkbox for the TV tuner page. If you leave it cleared, it should skip the tuner setup. Someone want to try it? (it's a 177 KB dll)

[Guest]

Sure, just send it to my e-mail and tell me how to use it. I hope it works. Thanks.

[oyabun]

I forgot to log in, I was the guest. Do you want me to pm my e-mail? It is in personal data.

[markfm]

PM me with your address, then you just drop the file into your plugins -- you should be using a recent 0.8 test version to use this new plugin.

[Quovodis]

I have posted a fix to the directshow plug-in, which no longer forces the TV tuner as the capture source. It works fine with my ATI all-in-wonder, I'd be interested to know if it works for other cards.
When I originally work on this plug-in, I was only interrested in getting the TV tuner to work

now, the plug-in will take the last used capture source as input by default, which may also be changed through the crossbar property pages when 'Advanced device properties' is checked.

PS: the crossbar properties pages are a bit buggy, make sure you always click 'Apply', even thought the default setting is what you require

BTW: the fix should be available for any build post 0.8.0-test2, probably the released one.

[tb]

for those who still haver problems to capture the composit imput of the tv card try to use an older version of vlc player (vlc-0.7.1), in these older version it is not possible to configure the imput, therefore if you select the correct imput before starting vlc it should work (in my case it did)

ciao

[markfm]

There's been an improvement to the processing, already in the nightly builds, and a switch to let you explicitly choose/skip the tuner page is being worked. (a few people have tried it)

[Quovodis]

some clarification,

the plugin used to explicitly force the source input to the TV tuner; hence I don't really believe that the disabling the TV tuner properties page would have any effect (unless the capture card does not have any crossbars).

with my latest fix, the code tries to figure out if a capture source is already selected (from a previous invocation of VLC, or any other capture tool) and defaults to that (if no defaults can be found, it will then default to the tuner card)

the TV tuner card property pages will now be shown before the crossbar pages, hence someone should still be able to revert any wrong doing that could be triggered by the TV tuner pages.

with this fix, one should not need the use the 'advanced setting' option any more (well, this is what I'm hoping for )

I'm planning on moving all those property pages to menu items within the video window pop-up menu eventually (and obsoleting the 'advanced settings' option), but this will be after 0.8.0 is released.

[oyabun]

I, among others tried markfm's fix. Everything works ok now regardless of having the tuner window show itself or not. What have been fixed iare the crossbar selection windows for audio and video. Now you can select the right inputs - outputs and everythng stays selected. Even if you choose a channel from the tv-tuner dialog, you can later choose eg composite input and the input will seitch to that.

[markfm]

It may well be a prior change that did the real fix, it just hadn't been picked up by people yet.

My little skip-the-tuner switch wa applied on top of: dshow.cpp 8921 2004-10-05

All I did was add a switch to explicitly allow skipping past the tuner part of ShowDeviceProperties:
IAMTVTuner *p_TV;
var_Get( p_this, "dshow-tuner", &val );
if( val.i_int )

The little change hasn't been committed to subversion. Gibalou has it, to see if it makes sense. Doesn't matter to me -- I don't have a tuner card

[Quovodis]

It may well be a prior change that did the real fix, it just hadn't been picked up by people yet.

My little skip-the-tuner switch wa applied on top of: dshow.cpp 8921 2004-10-05

All I did was add a switch to explicitly allow skipping past the tuner part of ShowDeviceProperties:
IAMTVTuner *p_TV;
var_Get( p_this, "dshow-tuner", &val );
if( val.i_int )

The little change hasn't been committed to subversion. Gibalou has it, to see if it makes sense. Doesn't matter to me -- I don't have a tuner card

my fix was applied as 8921

I admit that showing the TV tuner properties page for people who don't want to see it could be annoying, hence your little patch could come in handy.

However, I would rather see those property pages as proper menu items, hence you only need to configure what you are interrested in

[oyabun]

However, I would rather see those property pages as proper menu items, hence you only need to configure what you are interrested in

...and you don't have to configure it every time you press play.

[markfm]

There's a new update to dshow tuner, how it is handled. It should show up in the next nightly build, if people want to try it.

[oyabun]

Hi, I tried the build and I didn't notice any usability differnces.
The selected resolution and channel are still not remembered.
What exactly got changed?

[markfm]

There are separate selection options for Device properties and Tuner. If they work OK, this is a step towards making tuner changeable on the fly.