🚀 go-pugleaf

In <1992Aug10.230340.11246@ryn.mro4.dec.com> chungh@armory.enet.dec.com (Henry Chung) writes:


>I just got my Vblaster and have been playing with it for several days.
>The quality is Ok, a lot of room for improvement. (I guess I can't 
>complain too much for $345).  It does support JPEG. (It was added at 
>the last minute.  The info was not in the manual, but it's in the
>readme file. )  The Vblaster has 4 Video input connectors and 2 audio
>connectors. 

Does it have also Y/C (S-VHS) inputs ?


There are 2  25pin connectors for connecting the Vblaster to 
>the video card and to the monitor.  The software fully supports windows 3.0
>and windows 3.1.  Creative Lab only recommends 640x480 resolution, but
>it does provide limited support for 800x600 for certain Video cards.
>(I am using 800x600 with my Diamond Speedstar Plus with on problem.

Great, I have the same, so it should work in 800x600 also for me.

What horizontal scaning frequency did you use in 800x600 ?
Do you get 70 Hz image frequency ? (at 800x600)


>One thing that really bothers me is that it does not work with
>system with more than 15M of memory. (I had 16 M  memeory on my system,
>to make Vblaster happy, I had to take out some of the SIMMs.  Since my
>motherboard supports only 4M or 16M total memory with 4M simms, I only
>have 4M memory installed.)

This sounds not too "fresh" ! :-(



The software is pretty good.  You
>can change the windows size up to the size of your monitor.  You can
>freeze/digitalize video images and save them in several different formats.
>The image quality is not as sharp as I expected.  Some noticable noise
>especially near the edges of the window.  

What about the digitizing of full frames or only fields ? (interlace
fields grabed or only one field ?)

Do you see motion artifacts, when an object is moving in the video
source ? (this corespondens to grabbing the 2 interlaced fields and
scanconverting them to the 31-35 khz horizontal scaning frequency)

Hope to hear some more test reports, cause the video blaster seems to
be the cheapest live video window overlay board for the PC right now.

Best regards Stefan Hartmann.
email to: leo@zelator.in-berlin.de

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*  Stefan Hartmann       This is how to contact me:         *
*  EMAIL: leo@zelator.in-berlin.de                          *
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In article <AUY53ZQ@zelator.in-berlin.de>, leo@zelator.in-berlin.de (Stefan Hartmann) writes:
|> In <1992Aug10.230340.11246@ryn.mro4.dec.com> chungh@armory.enet.dec.com (Henry Chung) writes:
|> 

|> >system with more than 15M of memory. (I had 16 M  memeory on my system,
|> >to make Vblaster happy, I had to take out some of the SIMMs.  Since my
|> >motherboard supports only 4M or 16M total memory with 4M simms, I only
|> >have 4M memory installed.)
|> 
|> This sounds not too "fresh" ! :-(
|> 

Some mothercards is capable to 'hide' parts of the memory on the mothercard 
(not on the bus (on expansion cards)) so the user can have 16 Mbyte on the
mothercard, but only 15 Mbytes are used.

This problems is true for some other cards also. Older cards as Itex can 
also use a 64K chunk under the 1Mb DOS-limit. 


|> Hope to hear some more test reports, cause the video blaster seems to
|> be the cheapest live video window overlay board for the PC right now.
|>
If I can get the develop package for the Videoblaster, it shouldn't be
any problems to port or write software for grabbing pictures.
 

chungh@armory.enet.dec.com (Henry Chung) writes:

>I just got my Vblaster and have been playing with it for several days.

 [ good descrition of V-blaster deleted << it seems to support JPEG well >> ]

>  Creative Lab only recommends 640x480 resolution, but
>it does provide limited support for 800x600 for certain Video cards.
>(I am using 800x600 with my Diamond Speedstar Plus with on problem.

 I could only get it to work at 640x480 on my Diamond Speedstar.  At 800x600
 all I got was a pink screen.  A Paradise OEM card worked fine at 800x600.
 I wanted to try it on an ATI 8514 clone, but as someone already mentioned most
 8514 cards don't have the VGA feature connector.

>One thing that really bothers me is that it does not work with
>system with more than 15M of memory. (I had 16 M  memeory on my system,

 Yea! this is a real bumber.  Anybody with a 16 or 32 Meg machine is SOL
 Since the V-Blaster's 1 MB frame buffer is mapped into a user defined area
 in the 8-15 MB memory space.

 Another potential problem I noted with V-blaster was it's lack of a 
 S-VGA input.

 The fact that V-Blaster uses the VGA feature connector might be a problem if
 you have another card (ie. a VGA to NTSC Genlock card) that uses the
 feature connector.

>The image quality is not as sharp as I expected.  Some noticable noise
>especially near the edges of the window. 

 Most video frame grabers don't seem to capture the image as clearly as it
 appears on the TV screen.  Even a $2000 (US) Targa board seems to come up
 short in this regard. 

 The Video Blaster and the software that comes with it seem to be targeted
 at those users who need to create a PC based multi-media presentation us.

 video sources.   At about $400 US it's hard to beat for this application. >with
 
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