GraphRecorder help needed

[BitterBastard]

Hi, I've been trying to use carpeVideo's excellent GraphRecorder plugin, and have had decent success so far. I got a graph together in graphEdit that works to display video, but I can't get audio. All I get is pulsing static noise. Unsurprisingly, pvx2 can't get audio either (it does get the video successfully, however).

I'm using a Leadtek Winfast tv2000 Expert card, and I'm plugging the composite output from my set-top-box right into the back of the card. There is an audio out that goes from the card to the line-in on the soundcard (well, really into the integrated sound on the motherboard).

My simple, preview graph is attached. I haven't bothered attaching the recording graph because I figure the only difference is encoding and muxing the audio once I can make it work when rendering it.

The audio capture filter is Realtek HD Audio In.

Thanks for any help you can give me. Sorry for my green-ness at graphEdit.

[BitterBastard]

I should also note that the audio does come through when using the Winfast PVR software that ships with the card.

[carpeVideo]

Right click on the audio input filter and make sure its properties are set correctly. Do the same with the output pin.

Since you are using the computers audio mixer a few things can happen

1) if another program (or user) changes the mixer settings then the mixer will be using those settings. (it can be forced on the graph Recorder tab)
2) sound can be out of sync - their are often 2 direct sound devices for the same mixer (one may be under sound input and the other may be under directShow streaming devices or wdm devices) - one or the other may give you better results. (There are also filters that force delay for audio or video (ffdshow or ac3filter) that can help sync it up.

If the TV card has an audio in its preferable to use that since it will intrinsically be in sync and only GBVR or other TV programs will mess with its settings.

[BitterBastard]

Hey CV, thanks for the reply!

So I tried using my tv card, but I couldn't get it to render. Looking at MediDept's graph from last year in the original GraphRecorder thread (he has the same TV card as me), he had his audio hooked up from the tuner card all the way to the crossbar. At the crossbar, he had nothing hooked up to the audio out. It looked just like mine (except he was encoding and muxing to record to mpg, I'm just trying to get the preview working). Check out the graph I attached.

Things I tried:
Rendering the crossbar audio out pin (didn't do anything)
Trying all the audio input devices anywhere in my filter lists (different patterns of static, still just static)
Hooking the audio out from the crossbar to the audio in on the Realtek audio in (as expected, not allowed).


My problem is that the tuner card does not do audio on its own. The card is designed to hook up to the sound card via the external line-in on the sound card. This is what I'm trying to get via the graph, but it ain't workin'. Like I said though, it does work with the WinfastPVR, so I'm pretty confused. Any help? Is there any way I can figure out how the WinfastPVR is getting the audio? Or can anyone help me just figure out how to get the line-in audio properly? I'm so close, I get audio, but it sounds like the first .01 second just gets captured, followed by .5 sec of static, and then that whole thing just gets looped. Soooooo close! Thanks for any help.

[BitterBastard]

WAHOO!!!! Got it working! For anyone else who has the same problems, I apparently needed to take the audio and run it through a "DMO Capture Filter", specifically the Microsoft AEC filter. Now my audio works and life is grand....

Thanks for all the hard work CarpeVideo!

Here's my graph for all those interested:

[carpeVideo]

This is one of those that is very tough to debug remotely. The best I can say is keep playing with the properties on the mixer - you may simply want to open your mixer to the record side from windows to see what is really happening, make sure the input is not muted and has a high enough volume.

If its working on the winfast you should be able to get it to work. It looks like winfast specifically unmutes and captures the audio from the card so you need to make sure that you are doing the same. Since graphRecorder allows you to force this as well I would imagine you it would work.

CV

[BitterBastard]

So I put this aside for a while and now have come back to it. Despite my earlier claim, my sound still does not work. What I WAS successful in doing was getting sound to play on preview. I can watch LiveTV and I can preview in GraphEdit. What I can not do is record sound. When I run my graph in GraphEdit, the output .mpg has no sound, and when I try to record in GBPVR, the resulting mpg has no sound.

Any idea what could be causing the issue?

The audio path on my graph looks like this:

RealTek Audio Input -> Microsoft AEC -> LeadTek Audio Encoder -> LeadTek Muxer -> GBPVR Writer

[carpeVideo]

Unfortunately I can't help much further without the same setup on my PC.

If it renders you should be able to get it to record - its a matter of the correct muxes/encoders. I have good luck with the ATI avivo mux and encoders. You may want to try them.

CV

[BitterBastard]

OK, so I finally came back to this and fixed my problem, right before I went out and bought a Hauppage. My graph was the problem, so I thought I'd post and explain how I fixed it for the benefit of anyone else with similar symptoms.

The crux of the problem was that I was rendering the Preview output pin on the WDM Video Capture filter. When I set up my audio properly, so that it would go from my input filter to the encoder to the muxer, it would interfere with the audio that was also being played by the preview whenever I would run the graph in GraphEdit. Since I could hear this awful noise coming from the speakers, I assumed the audio was f'd, and I would never bother to check the output mpg. I falsely thought I had found a solution with the Microsoft AEC filter, but that was actually just killing one of the two interfering audio streams. So my preview would sound great but my mpg would have no audio.

All is fixed now; I removed the rendering of the Preview output pin and removed the Microsoft AEC filter. Now everything is spiffy and I can finally use this card! Thanks so much, Carpevideo, for writing this plugin that will let me actually use this thing! Honestly, since it only cost 40$, GBPVR + GraphRecorder makes it a steal for a PVR setup.

If anyone wants, I can try to post a pic of the final, working graph.