Micomsoft SC-500N1 RGB Capture Card

[BuckoA51]

The Xbox One has video capture built in though, same as the PS4.

[Fudoh]

I know, but the usability will be limited. And I won't trust the encoding quality before I see it. Also you won't get your internal recordings into your PC, so it was a wise move by MS to announce compatibility with existing capture hardware. Sony on the other hand will likely be HDPC-encrypting all the way and without a component HD output people will be really screwed this time around.

[BuckoA51]

I tend to agree but I doubt if most people will care about those caveats.

[lettuce]

Plus they can only capture for a minute of so, so you wont be doing any gameplay videos with the xbone or PS4's built in capture features

[hitz]

Switching to Power Saver after using the card doesn't fix the CPU usage for me anymore. It goes back to normal for a couple of seconds after switching to it and jumps back to 99%. Sure hope a fix is in a new driver someday!

[Thrill]

I find if you reset to default power options it works again.

I actually figured out the "bug" is not actually a bug from what I read on Micomsoft's Q&A section. They actually intended to disable the C1E state so that the preview window is never "laggy" from having an underclocked CPU. They even suggest to use the high performance power option of Windows 7.

[hitz]

I find if you reset to default power options it works again.

I actually figured out the "bug" is not actually a bug from what I read on Micomsoft's Q&A section. They actually intended to disable the C1E state so that the preview window is never "laggy" from having an underclocked CPU. They even suggest to use the high performance power option of Windows 7.

Setting all the power plans back to their default options totally worked. Thanks man!

[lettuce]

Yeah but that kind of defeat the point doesnt it, as if you disable C1E then the clock speed will always be at it max and never underclock to save energy and heat? SO it will be the same as the 'bug' in having the clock speed always at max

[Thrill]

Yeah but that kind of defeat the point doesnt it, as if you disable C1E then the clock speed will always be at it max and never underclock to save energy and heat? SO it will be the same as the 'bug' in having the clock speed always at max

I guess this hurts overclockers the most who use big voltages but for me it is no problem. With the extra wattage my heat only goes up 2-3c per core (still all under 40c).

[dieKatze88]

Yeah but that kind of defeat the point doesnt it, as if you disable C1E then the clock speed will always be at it max and never underclock to save energy and heat? SO it will be the same as the 'bug' in having the clock speed always at max

I guess this hurts overclockers the most who use big voltages but for me it is no problem. With the extra wattage my heat only goes up 2-3c per core (still all under 40c).

Running the processor full tilt all the time is still a power suck and a heat generation that doesn't need to happen. It doesn't bother me either - I have a heatsink the size of a small car. That doesn't mean I want to waste the electricity running my chip at 4ghz when 1600mhz will do everything I need it to do and more. I don't mind that the driver turns the sleep states of the CPU off while I'm capturing, what I REALLY mind is that it does not turn them back on when it is done.

[Thrill]

what I REALLY mind is that it does not turn them back on when it is done.

My card turns it back on when done. Like I said to hitz, restore power settings and see if it works for you.

[lettuce]

what I REALLY mind is that it does not turn them back on when it is done.

My card turns it back on when done. Like I said to hitz, restore power settings and see if it works for you.

Yeah but we shouldn't have to do that though!!!....i know it doesn't take long to do but you don't always remember to do it and as said above it waste energy and cause more heat in the system that isnt need. So in this sense it is a bug in the driver as it kicks in full power state as soon as you load the program that uses the capture device (even when your not actually capturing anything) and then doesn't always shut off full power state when you have finished and closed the program down. So this really does need to be addressed and fixed

[dieKatze88]

what I REALLY mind is that it does not turn them back on when it is done.

My card turns it back on when done. Like I said to hitz, restore power settings and see if it works for you.

Yeah but we shouldn't have to do that though!!!....i know it doesn't take long to do but you don't always remember to do it and as said above it waste energy and cause more heat in the system that isnt need. So in this sense it is a bug in the driver as it kicks in full power state as soon as you load the program that uses the capture device (even when your not actually capturing anything) and then doesn't always shut off full power state when you have finished and closed the program down. So this really does need to be addressed and fixed

Not to mention that I'm on a laptop too, the ECHDCAP by startech is this card in ExpressCard format with only an HDMI capture port. My cooling restraints are much tighter than on my desktop. I have NEVER seen the card turn off full power state when I close down the program (OBS, Vdub or StreamCatcher.) The idea of turning off idle states is a good one, but they should leave it up to the user if they aren't going to make it automatic.

[BuckoA51]

So has anyone tried the latest drivers from Micomsoft with Videokeeper 2? I have. Bizarrely, 240p capture seems to be broken! Tried Videokeeper and Amarec and this is the result in both of them:-



Not so big a deal for me because I can capture directly from the Mini or the XRGB3 but still, odd.

[Thrill]

I am actually having some issues with SCART RGB capture. I got my Sync Strike to use with SNES today. I'm using the SC-512.

With no options ticked in the drivers I get stuff like this: http://i.imgur.com/WVcIqjD.jpg

The solution was to click "Auto resolution scaling" in the driver which gave a clean picture without even having to enable scan line doubling in Amarec. The problem is that the capture quality is just pretty poor compared to the S-Video capture quality. I guess poor is a wrong word. I just expected SCART RGB to blow S-Video out of the water but it does not.

S-Video: http://i.imgur.com/yLzg4hL.png
RGB: http://i.imgur.com/4xGW8zR.png

Is there any settings I am missing here to improve quality because if not I may as well stick to S-Video.

[BuckoA51]

RGB picture definitely looks sharper to me, compare the heart containers for instance, in S-video it looks like there's pixels missing.

[alamone]

New driver released Oct 8.

Says it fixes the 100% cpu usage bug.
Also adds a bunch of CUDA encoding options.

http://micomsoft.co.jp/sc-512n1_download.htm

[Sixfortyfive]

^ Applies to both of their PCI-e cards and the XCAPTURE-1.

http://micomsoft.co.jp/videokeeper2_news.htm

Might give it a try later today.

[Thrill]

Six, maybe the XCAPTURE can now properly capture interlaced sources? (added those options the SC-500 and SC-512 had or something).

I can confirm the 100% CPU issue is NOT fixed (atleast for Windows 7).

The driver doesn't even say it is fixed. He just notes he saw the problem of 98-100% CPU but even that is wrong since the C1E load is always 100. They still don't know about the problem.

[Sixfortyfive]

Indeed, most of these options are new for the XCAPTURE-1.



Trying to figure out what "Single Resolution Output" does at the moment.
Capture from interlaced sources still seems to be limited to 30fps but those deinterlace options at the top are new.
Frame Rate Adjustment lets me capture at a lower frame rate than the default (max 60fps for progressive sources, max 30fps for interlaced). On that note, the default capture values are now 60.00 fps and 30.00 fps instead of 59.97 and 29.94.
Auto Resolution Scaling is straightforward enough; after disabling it, I just get a "No Signal" error now if I pick a different capture resolution than what the source is outputting.

[lettuce]

Great news that that have fixed the 100% cpu usage bug...or though it has taken them over a year to sort it

EDIT: Appears to be no drivers for the XCAPTURE-1 atm

[Fudoh]

Capture from interlaced sources still seems to be limited to 30fps but those deinterlace options at the top are new.

but if you capture 480i with weaving than 30fps are actually correct. Two fields are just saved as one frame. And if 240p from composite sources are still seen as 480i, then you can simply apply a line offset correction in VirtualDub or AVISynth to restore 240p from the weaved 480i stream.

http://pms.hazard-city.de/240p_Package.zip

[Sixfortyfive]

EDIT: Appears to be no drivers for the XCAPTURE-1 atm

http://micomsoft.co.jp/xcapture-1_download.htm

It's the first of the 4 download links at the bottom.

Capture from interlaced sources still seems to be limited to 30fps but those deinterlace options at the top are new.

but if you capture 480i with weaving than 30fps are actually correct. Two fields are just saved as one frame. And if 240p from composite sources are still seen as 480i, then you can simply apply a line offset correction in VirtualDub or AVISynth to restore 240p from the weaved 480i stream.

http://pms.hazard-city.de/240p_Package.zip

Thanks. I'll try to give it another go later tonight and see if these new options work as they should.

[lettuce]

EDIT: Appears to be no drivers for the XCAPTURE-1 atm

http://micomsoft.co.jp/xcapture-1_download.htm

It's the first of the 4 download links at the bottom.

Thanks!!

[blizzz]

I can confirm the 100% CPU issue is NOT fixed (atleast for Windows 7).

Same for me. :/

Edit: Can also confirm that it still gets stuck in 100% sometimes after closing the program.

[blizzz]

I just noticed that the card loses signal for 1-2 frames on the intro of Pocky & Rocky. This is reproducible with my Super Famicom + PAL GCN cable, but doesn't happen with my modded PAL SNES. I didn't notice it on any other games so far (but I haven't tried many).

Setup is as always, Console > SyncStrike > SC-500N1. I assume that it's a sync issue. Could this be solved with a different cable?

Here's a video of it: Link (h264 avi)

Edit: Looking at the pinouts, it seems that the difference between a PAL GCN cable and an NTSC SNES cable is mostly a 220µF cap in the composite video line.

Edit2: Seems to be a problem with the 1CHIP console. When I switch it with my other NTSC console (same cables, power etc.) everything is fine.

[hitz]

Those newer drivers seemed to fix the cpu usage on my computer but HDMI in had really weird artifacts with it installed, so I dropped back to the drivers with the cpu bug and it looks fine.

[Smashbro29]

I heard this card puts your CPU usage to 100%, has it been fixed?

Does it have the screen tearing issue the X-Capture 1 has as documented here: http://www.sixfortyfive.com/streaming/xcapture1.html

[blizzz]

I heard this card puts your CPU usage to 100%, has it been fixed?

Let me answer this with a short story. I've put the card into my gaming rig around a month ago, because that's the only PC with a free PCIe slot at the moment. Installed the newest drivers and told Skype not to activate the card so that it doesn't trigger the CPU bug. Now I've upgraded my old GPU to a R9-280X Toxic which is a huge overclocked card with a triple cooler. Around the same time Skype updated, which I didn't pay much attention to, because I only keep it for some old contacts. I also removed the Micomsoft card because I don't really use it.

Now the gaming PC was annoyingly loud. But surely that must be the new beastly GPU? Well, to cut it short: a few days later I realized that my CPU was at 60°C in idle, which even with the stock cooler is not normal. Reset the power plan and 2 seconds later the PC was barely audible against the normal city noise. I guess that the Skype update activated the Micomsoft card shortly, which triggered the CPU bug and put my PC into constant C0 state.

Screw this card. If you want to use it you really need a PC that's dedicated to capturing or else you'll end up annoyed. And if you use a proper CPU cooler you won't even notice that it is burning away useless power.

[Smashbro29]

I heard this card puts your CPU usage to 100%, has it been fixed?

Let me answer this with a short story. I've put the card into my gaming rig around a month ago, because that's the only PC with a free PCIe slot at the moment. Installed the newest drivers and told Skype not to activate the card so that it doesn't trigger the CPU bug. Now I've upgraded my old GPU to a R9-280X Toxic which is a huge overclocked card with a triple cooler. Around the same time Skype updated, which I didn't pay much attention to, because I only keep it for some old contacts. I also removed the Micomsoft card because I don't really use it.

Now the gaming PC was annoyingly loud. But surely that must be the new beastly GPU? Well, to cut it short: a few days later I realized that my CPU was at 60°C in idle, which even with the stock cooler is not normal. Reset the power plan and 2 seconds later the PC was barely audible against the normal city noise. I guess that the Skype update activated the Micomsoft card shortly, which triggered the CPU bug and put my PC into constant C0 state.

Screw this card. If you want to use it you really need a PC that's dedicated to capturing or else you'll end up annoyed. And if you use a proper CPU cooler you won't even notice that it is burning away useless power.

So definitely the USB version then?