miroVIDEO DC10 README for Version 1.11 02/18/1997 This text contains important information for the miroVIDEO DC10 user. If you encounter any problems when working with the miroVIDEO DC10, please read the manual and this text. Attention, very important changes: The playback error on Pentium Pro systems with Natoma chipset should be fixed with this driver version. In case you are using a system with the Natoma chipset please insert the following lines in your win.ini: [miroDC30] Natoma=1 Since this driver version the video overlay during playback of AVI files, which are captured with miroVIDEO DC10, on the Windows desktop will be supported. Further there is a complete deinstallation of the miroVIDEO DC10 drivers and software incl. the registry entries available. New are "miroVIDEO DC10 informations", an additional help file and the "miroAVI converter", a tool which converts AVI files captured with the miroVIDEO DC20 into miroVIDEO DC30 format. After the installation of the miroVIDEO DC10 all the software mentioned above is available in the miroVIDEO DC10 software group. Further informations, tips and help you can get out of the miroVIDEO DC10 informations now. On the miroVIDEO DC10 CD-ROM V.1.11 there is a program called UNINST.EXE, located in the subdirectory "UNINST", which should be started before the installation of the new miroVIDEO DC10 drivers.This program removes all miroVIDEO DC10 drivers and registry entries. All costomers who don't have the CD ROM V.1.11 can download the UNINSTAL.EXE, a selfextracting program from the miroweb page. This is a selfextracting file which extratcs the included files in a subdirectory C:\UNINST on your local hard disk. (see additional Pt. 1.0.1.1 miroVIDEO DC10 driver update) Contrary to the description of fast decompress for playback made in the miroVIDEO DC10 manual, this fast decompress function is not implemented in this software release. This means that in the DC10 CTRL program, the "Window (accelerated)" option is not yet available. Contents 1.0 Installation miroVIDEO DC10 1.0.1 Before you start the installation 1.0.1.1 Driver update for miroVIDEO DC10 1.0.2 Configurationtest miroVIDEO DC10 1.1 Installation of the miroVIDEO DC10 with Windows 95 Service Release 2 1.2 Direct Video and miroVIDEO DC10 1.3 Installation of miroVIDEO DC10 and S3 graphics boards with 868, 968 1.4 Video overlay 1.4.1 Video overlay support for the following miro graphics boards 1.4.2 Video Overlay support in general 1.5 Changing the resolution during capturing with active video overlay 1.6 Video overlay and playback 1.6.1 Video overlay during playback with miro graphics boards 1.6.2 Video overlay during playback in general 1.7 Interrupt Sharing 1.8 System.ini entries after the installation 1.9 Capturing and playback AVI sequences 1.10 Jerks during playback 2.0 miroVIDEO DC10 & Ulead Media Studio 2.1 Known bugs 3.0 miroDigital Video MJPG Player 4.0 Changes to last driver versions 5.0 miro services 1.0 Installation miroVIDEO DC10 1.0.1 Before you start the installation Before you start the installation of the miroVIDEO DC10, make sure that an already installed video device, for instance miroVIDEO DC1, miroVIDEO DC20 or competitor models should, be removed. !!! Attention: Driver errors may occur !!! Either more than one capture board has been installed in your computer, or you remove a capture board from your computer but not from the Control Panel. For more information, please read the "Hardware installation" section in your User's Guide. If you removed a miro capture board from your computer and have problems with the capture driver, start the [CD drive]:\tools\miraser.exe program. This is required to ensure that miroVIDEO DC10 can be installed correctly in your system. This program searches the Registry for miroVIDEO DC1, miroVIDEO DC10, miroVIDEO DC20, and miroVIDEO DC30 entries and removes some entries, if necessary. To ensure that your miroVIDEO DC10 board can be installed correctly in your computer, restart the computer now! 1.0.2 Configuration test miroVIDEO DC10 After a successful installation of the miroVIDEO DC10 sofware the configu- ration test will start automatically. If you get an error message during this test, please shut down Windows 95 and restart your system. Then, start the program "Configuration miroVIDEO DC10" located in the miroVIDEO DC10 folder and click the "Test" button. The configuration test will run once again. 1.1 Installation of the miroVIDEO DC10 with Windows 95 Service Release 2 Recommendation: Before you install the miroVIDEO DC10 hardware in your system, please first start the setup programm out of the setup directory of the delivered miroVIDEO DC10 CD-ROM. Known bugs: The playback of MJPG compressed AVI files out of the Explorer only appears in a window. A video output to TV is not possible. Please use the MediaPlayer for playback your AVI files to TV. 1.2 Direct Video and miroVIDEO DC10 If you have installed "Direct Video" on your computer and you like to playback an AVI movie with the Media Player to TV, you have to start DC10CTRL before starting the Media Player, otherwise you only get a preview and no output to video or TV. 1.3 Installation of miroVIDEO DC10 and S3 graphics boards with 868, 968 If you have installed a graphics board with S3 chip 868, or 968, please make sure that this graphics board really uses a 64MB memory area. You can check this in the Device Manager of Windows 95. Computers with older AWARD BIOS report only a 32MB memory area back to the Device Manager. As soon as you like to install another device which memory area is located directly behind the memory area of the graphics board the system can hang up, because the memory areas overlap. Solutions: - Update of the AWARD BIOS - Change the memeory area of your graphics board in the Devive Manager 1.4 Video overlay 1.4.1 Video overlay support for the following miro graphics boards miroMEDIA View miroMEDIA 3D miroVIDEO 22SD miroCRYSTAL 3D miroCRYSTAL VR 2000/4000 The video overlay functionality for the graphics boards mentioned above will be implemented in the latest Windows 95 driver versions for this boards. These Windows 95 drivers support the Video Overlay Surface function. With this function a video overlay was only possible during capturing. Since diver version V.1.11 it is possible to get a video overlay windows during playback AVI files on the Windows desktop on condition that the graphics board will be supported with a Direct Draw driver, which supports the overlay surface function. This means if you alreday get a video overlay during the capture, you will get a video overlay during playback too. 1.4.2 Video Overlay support in general In general, state-of-the-art PCI graphics adapters with S3 Trio 64V+ or S3 Virge graphic processors are able to support a PCI overlay. Some manufacturers don't support this function in their Windows 95 drivers. You can easily check if your graphics board supports this function by opening the "VIDEO DC10 Configuration" program and click the "Test" button. If you notice any disturbances in the overlay window during capturing, change the overlay scaling in VidCap32 in the "Options" menu and and switch "Video Display" into the next smaller level. In doubt, select the "Small resolution" option for the overlay scaling. This should fix the disturbances in the video overlay windows. Since diver version V.1.11 it is possible to get a video overlay windows during playback AVI files on the Windows desktop on condition that the graphics board will be supported with a Direct Draw driver, which supports the overlay surface function. This means if you alreday get a video overlay during the capture, you will get a video overlay during playback too. 1.5 Changing the resolution during capturing with active video overlay Avoid changing the resolution during capturing AVI files with activated video overlay. The video overlay can be enabled in VidCap32 or in the Media Studio capture program. 1.6 Video overlay and playback 1.6.1 Video overlay during playback with miro graphics boards With the miroVIDEO 20TD live, the miroMEDIA TV and the miroMEDIA 3D boards, a video overlay during playback AVI files can be realized on the computer monitor. Therefore you have to connect the composite input of miroVIDEO 20TD live, or the composite input (S-VHS -> composite adapter) of the miroMEDIA TV with the composite output of the miroVIDEO DC10. After this please start the miroTV application. You can connect the miroMEDIA 3D board via an S-VHS cable to the S-VHS output of the miroVIDEO DC10. Then start the miroTELEVISION application. Since diver version V.1.11 it is possible to get a video overlay windows during playback AVI files on the Windows desktop on condition that the graphics board will be supported with a Direct Draw driver, which supports the overlay surface function. This means if you alreday get a video overlay during the capture, you will get a video overlay during playback too. Hint: If you loop through the a video signal to the miroVIDEO DC10, please watch that the S-VHS output of the miroVIDEO DC10 only has a S-VHS signal if a S-VHS source is connected to the input of the miroVIDEO DC10 !!! You can't convert a composite signal into a S-VHS signal with the miroVIDEO DC10. 1.6.2 Video overlay during playback in general If you installed a graphics board in your computer, which can also display a video overlay, connect the video input of the graphics board(Composite or S-VHS) to the miroVIDEO DC10 composite output and start the Video Overlay application of the manufacturer of your graphics board. Since diver version V.1.11 it is possible to get a video overlay window during playback AVI files on the Windows desktop on condition that the graphics board will be supported with a Direct Draw driver, which supports the overlay surface function. This means, if you already get a video overlay during the capture, you will get a video overlay during playback too. 1.7 Interrupt Sharing This miroVIDEO DC10 version supports PCI interrupt sharing. This function is necessary if the motherboard allocates a single interrupt to all PCI slots. In this case, all PCI devices have to share one interrupt which means that every driver has to check if the current interrupt comes from its device. If this is not the case, the driver must not handle this interrupt and has to pass it to the next PCI device. If only one of the devices involved (or its driver) fails to do so, the system will not function properly. Because the devices which are mostly used for recording and playing back video are SCSI hard disks and SCSI controllers, we test the behaviour of SCSI controllers. Under Windows95, we tested miroVIDEO DC10 together with Adaptec SCSI controllers and the Adaptec driver software EZ-SCSI 4.0. This combination works without any problems. 1.8 System.ini entry after the installation After successful installation of the miroVIDEO DC10 you should find the follo- wing entry in the system.ini in the section "drivers" and "mci": [drivers] VIDC.MJPG=DC30CDC.DRV [mci] AVIVideo1=miroAVI.drv 1.9 Capturing and playback of AVI sequences If you like to capture and playback AVI files with audio, you need a sound device in your system. In case you already have installed a sound device in your system you can capture and playback audio data too. The miroVIDEO DC10 is only a video device because it has no audio chip. 1.10 Jerks during playback We redesigned our miroVIDEO DC10 driver for video playback. Now every frame will be marked with an internal time code. Because the captured frames will be buffered, there are no problems to digitize more frames than your hard disk can write but during playback problems may occur. As yet, frames will be dropped if the hard disk cannot achieve the selected data rate. Now with the internal time code, every frame has to be played back up to a defined point in time. In case the hard disk cannot achieve the selected data rate, you get jerks because some frames will be dropped for keeping the selected datarate. Solution: - if you have plenty of RAM memory in your system, you can disable the virtual memory of your Windows 95. - insert the following lines in your system.ini below the section [vcache]: MinFileCache=4096 MaxFileCache=4096 Both values should be equal and about 25% of the main memory. i.e for a system with 16MB you should use a value of 4MB (4096KB). - otherwise you should reduce your selected data rate during capturing. Hints: 1. During playing back AVI movies using the Media Player or Media Studio at a high resolution, with two fields and a high data rate, few frames are jerky and jittering during the startup of the playback. First, the frames will be loaded into an internal cache memory, before they can be played back with the Media Player. For playing back an AVI movie to a VCR we recommend to insert a short trailer of about a few seconds before the movie starts, or to use the miroAVI Cache with the "synchronized start" option enabled. 2.AVI files, captured with Vidcap32 or another capture program mostly have a worse interleave factor between the video and audio blocks, ths means that first a number of video blocks and then the audio blocks are located in the file. This could cause jerks during playback. This worse interleave factor you can change with Ulead Media Studio by calculating the AVI file once again with the "Create Videofile" function. The resoluton and data rate should be kept, but in the output options make sure that the setting for "Audio Blocks" is set to "1 Frame". 2.0 miroVIDEO DC10 & Ulead Media Studio 2.1 Known bugs If you like to resample an AVI movie in Ulead media Studio, please check that the horizontal image size has an even number of pixels, otherwise you get a color mismatch on the TV output, or in the video overlay. This bug is not visible in the preview. 3.0 miroAVI Cache Common: miroAVI Cache is a MCI based driver which can be used by the Media Player of Windows 95. miroAVI Cache makes it possible to playback AVI-movies in MJPG- format. These files could be created i.e. with a miroVIDEO DC10, miroVIDEO DC20 and the miroVIDEO DC30. To ensure a non-jerky playback even at high data rates, the video and audio data are buffered in the memory (cached). When the hard disk interrupts its operation (i.e. during swapping), the video clip will be temporarily taken from the memory. If necessary, you can adjust the cache size using miroVIDEO DC30 Control. Installation: During the installation of the miroVIDEO DC10 the miroAVI Cache will be copied automatically into the Windows\System subdirectory. To use the miroAVI Cache, select "miroAVI Cache (MJPG)" in the device menu of the Media Player instead of "Video for Windows". Then a file selection window appears. Please make sure that you set the video output options either to composite video or to S-video in the miroVIDEO DC10 control. At the time, miroAVI Cache does not support the video output in a window. Settings: With the miroVIDEO DC10 Control the size of the cache for video and audio data can be changed. Therefore please start miroVIDEO DC10 Control and click the "AVI Cache" button. Now you can set the desired cache size in the field "Video Buffer" in frames between 6 and 128. The changes of the buffer number take effect the next time the AVI is loaded. If the driver has to increase the buffer number, the number will be reset as soon as a new AVI file will be loaded or the Media Player will be closed. This is only the case, if the user has not changed the buffer number in the meantime. By clicking the default button the value can be set to default, which will be sufficient for most of the applications. Please remember that a large cache size needs a high amount of memory and especially on systems with low memory the system performance will go down. A hint at the bottom of miroVIDEO DC10 Control specifies the approximate required cache size for a data rate of 3MB per second. 4.0 Changes to the last driver versions Version 1.03 -supporting SECAM,PAL-N and PAL-M output -supporting an alpha version of the miroAVI.drv -GPF fixed, if no miroVIDEO DC10 is installed and DC30CTRL will be started -The application VIDEO CRAFT works with the miroVIDEO DC10 now -general changes to make sure the playback of AVI files Version 1.05 -miroAVI Cache implemented -miroVIDEO Expert will be delivered too -miroVIDEO DC10 adaptions -fixed: 20ms difference between audio and video during capturing with only one single field -Correction of the automatic pixelratio adaption to get an video output of most of the formats which are not in an 4:3 format. -fixed: flickering videooutput, using graphics boards which are not PCI conform -new VidCap32 which saves the audio settings will be delivered now Version 1.11 -Video overlay during playback of AVI files only with graphics boards, which supports the "Overlay Surface" function in Direct Draw. -Automatic scaling of the video overlay if overlay window will be drawn to one border of the Windows 95 desktop -miroAVI Cache expanded to 32 bit and playback behavior essential improved -miroAVI Cache can be selected as primary driver in the miroVIDEO DC10 Control -miroAVI Cache can be used for playback in Media Studio now -miroVIDEO DC30 Installation program video standards PAL/NTSC/SECAM selectable -miro logo can be displayed during capture and playback. Default is off -complete deinstallation of all drivers and registry entries -miroAVI converter will be added during installation -Help database "miroVIDEO DC30 informations" will be added during installation -fixed: error during playback of AVI files on Pentium Pro systems Natoma chipset -fixed: hangups on machines with VIA chipset -fixed: GPF during Installation of Games (Hellbender) -fixed: during a new installation the external mixer for recording will be added 5.0 miro services For new miroVIDEO DC10 drivers or driver updates please look at the following services: miroMAILBOX: +49 531 2113-112 Internet: ftp.miro.com http://www.miro.com CompuServe: GO MIRO