Win 32 Grabber Support for vic

The original port of vic for Windows 95 and Windows NT was done by John Brezak. This version extends it's capabilities by adding video for windows compatible grabber support. For more information about vic look at the vic home page on the LBL web server.

Download

This work is still in progress. The latest version compiled by me was updated on 25th March 1998. If you get wierd colors on some display modes let me know. I had some color problems on 16 bit displays and had to compile color-hi.cc without some optimisations (there is a bug in the optimiser of VC++ 5). Kris Hasler has compiled a binary using Tcl/Tk 8.0 which also includes some UI mods and is available from his shrimp binaries web page. Modifications from earlier versions are described in the change log. You can pickup a copy of the current version of the binary from here. The zip file contains two executables.

vic.exe
This is the vic binary with the video for windows grabber support.
vc.exe
This is a helper program for configuring cards with braindead drivers! You can run this before running vic and select input port and video format settings. When setting the format make sure to select the image size that you intend to use when transmitting with vic. Select 320x240 for normal size transmission and 160x120 for small size. This should not be necessary if your grabber vendor has done a decent job with their driver.

Download vic.zip

Known problems

A large number of the problems listed here are caused by the very bad design by Microsoft of the video capture API.

Port selection not supported.
As far as I can tell there is absolutely no way of selecting an input port through the API. The only way around this is for the application to request the driver to popup a dialogue box for the user to select a port. As this seems a particularly bad idea which cannot be intergrated in a clean way in vic, I have supplied a helper application to perform this task before starting vic.
Detection of video standard not possible.
Again detection and selection of the video standard (PAL, SECAM or NTSC) is only possible through a driver supplied video source dialogue. What is worse is I have not found a way to get the video standard information through to vic. As a result I assume all sources are NTSC and use 640x480 as the base grabbing size.
Video format selection doesn't work on all drivers.
Surprisingly apart from the standard dialogue box technique there is also an API call for setting the captured frame format. The problem here is that it is not properly supported by many of the drivers I have come across. Some (like the QuickCam driver) completely ignore all requested settings but on return indicate that the call to set the frame format was successful. Others pay attention just to the format information and not the image size requested. As a result with some cards you may get your image sitting at the upper left corner of the window or alternatively only the upper left corner of the image filling your capture window.
Frame rate setting problems during capture.
All drivers I tried refuse to change the grabbing frame rate after initiating capture. As a result in the first versions of the vic port increasing the frame rate during capture had no effect. Reducing it did reduce the send rate but not the amount of time the CPU spent in grabbing frames. By stopping and restarting capture you could get the hardware to grab at a different rate.
I have since modified the way in which the main vic thread interacts with the driver thread. The driver now has to wait for vic to use up a frame before it fetches the next one. A sideffect of this is that you can request a very high frame rate from the driver and prevent it from using up CPU time by starving it from frame buffers. As a result frame rate setting now works but not very accurately due to performance issues. This technique was suggested by Jay Borseth.
No standard access to YUV formats.
The only standard frame formats that can be selected through the API all give RGB data with different number of bits per pixel. The only driver whose source code I have access to grabs data in YUV format and goes through a series of conversions to achieve the requested RGB format. I suspect this is the case with many grabber cards. Vic expects the data in YUV format so after acquiring it from the driver in RGB it has to be converted back to YUV. A large amount of processing goes to waste resulting in much lower frame rates than would otherwise be possible. Some drivers do provide direct access to YUV data but using a proprietary format. I intend to try and support some of these formats for individual cards and drivers in order to improve performance.

Tested hardware

Windows NT capture cards

Hardware tested by me at UCL:

Grayscale QuickCam by Connectix
The grayscale driver has now been released and can be obtained from the Connectix web site. There is also a beta driver for the Color QuickCam but I havn't had the time to test it.
I have tested the beta driver for the grayscale version of the QuickCam for Windows NT with some success. After playing around a bit I found out that it has similar problems to the 95 grayscale QuickCam driver. I couldn't however find out where it stores the format information to hack it (like I did with the 95 driver). As a solution I have made vic pop up the driver configuration menus when you start transmission so that the size of the image can be selected. This solution worked.
There also seems to be a problem with the intensity settings. The driver is unstable and unpredictable! It will on occasion crash the operating system! There is some information available for this driver in the FAQ that was distributed with the driver anouncement.
Nicholas Race and Richard J Taylor have also reported success with this driver.

Hardware tested by others:

Wincast/TV by Hauppauge
Reported working by Gary Stringer. Beta drivers are available for the card from their software update page and a registry patch (not sure if this is completely necessary).
Osprey 100p
Reported working by Peter Parnes.
Videum by Winnov
Thanks to a lot of very helpful feedback from Knut Manske this now works. Richard J Taylor also reported success.
Captivator PCI by VideoLogic
The card does NOT come with NT drivers but the drivers for Intel smart video recorder III work! The driver file tested with the card was SVR3_14.EXE. You also have to set the video source using vc.
Miro DC20 by miro
Richard Taylor and Eric Paulos have reported problems which they are trying to solve.

Windows 95 capture cards

Hardware tested by me at UCL:

Wincast/TV by Hauppauge
This is the best card I have tried so far. Apart from being very cheap it comes with a built in TV tuner. There are also FreeBSD and Linux drivers available on the net. There are several versions of this card which vary in price and capability. Theoreticly as they all use the bt848 chip they will all work.
PCTV by miroMEDIA
Similar properties to the card above as it uses the bt848 chip.
ComputerEyes/PCI by Digital Vision, Inc
Excellent card! Comes with drivers specific for Windows95.
Stinger by VideoLabs, Inc
Excellent card! Comes with drivers specific for Windows95.
Screen Machine II by FAST
This card also worked. The only problem I encountered was that after restarting capture a few times, the system crashes. Also reported working by Guido Wessendorf.
Video Galaxy GAMMA by Aztech
The driver of this card almost works. When requesting an image format, it accepts the number of bits per pixel and bitmap size for the frames but does not scale the image to fit the bitmap. To get around this you have to use the helper application to set the video format before starting capture.
Grayscale QuickCam by Connectix
Tests I made with the QuickCam driver showed that it completely ignores all information in the call for configuring the image format. To get around this problem I have made the vic binary directly modify the quickcam.ini file to select the required video format. In order for this hack to work you have to name the vic binary "vic.exe".
Color QuickCam by Connectix
Works very well! Originally reported by Julian J. Bunn.
Video Blaster RT300 by Creative Labs
Does not provide RGB bitmaps. Versions of vic after October 20 should support it if you have an installed converter for it's output format. Also reported working by Richard Taylor. Original problems reported by Bob Olson.

Hardware tested by others:

Captivator PCI by VideoLogic
Reported working by A.Flavell.
VideoCap C210 by Tekram
Reported working by Manu Gamboa & Javier Lasa.
Video Blaster SE100 by Creative Labs
Got it to transmit, but after exiting and trying again it failed. Reported by Dave Price.
Capture / Transmission seemed OK (in colour and B/W) however exiting VIC and restarted caused a series of error messages (complaining about things like unsupported capture format and bpp). Reported by J.C. Evans.
There is a new Windows 95 driver for this card available from Creative here.
Miro DC20 by miro
Jim Gemmell reported that it worked with an early version of the vic port if you first set the format to 640x480 RGB with the helper application. Since then Richard Taylor and Eric Paulos have reported problems which they are trying to solve.
SPEA Showtime Plus PCI by SPEA
Works on SPEA Showtime Plus PCI with onboard frame grabber. Reported by Bernd Boeker.
RUCOLA by NEC
I tried your vic with my camera RUCOLA, and it did work! It is a CCD camera just like the QuickCam. In Japan it is sold with CUSeeMe by Macnica. Reported by Koji Ando.
Intel ProShare Video System 200 by Intel
Reported to work by Hendrik Klompmaker, Kevin Coffman and Richard J Taylor.
Videum by Winnov
Knut Manske got it to work after setting the frame format to 320x240 16 bit RGB. Also reported working by Richard J Taylor.
Intel Smart Video Recorder PRO by Intel
Charles Beck reported it working.
Notebook TV by Nogatech
Les Chan reported it working with version 1.4 of the Nogatech win95 driver. This is a PCMCIA card.
IBM Smart Capture Card
Reported working by Jeff Smith on a Digital Ultra 2000. The card is only available in Japan (or in the States via T-Zone computers). IBM also sells a clip-on camera which connects directly to the card and doesn't need any external power. The drivers available via the page only have a readme in Japanese and there is a small catch to the install, but I could easily provide info (and a translation).

Key to symbols:

Card plugs into ISA bus.
Card plugs into PCI bus.: PCI cards offer much better performance to ISA cards (speed of PCI bus is much higher) and are in general a lot easier to install as PCI cards can share interrupts.
Card comes with Windows 95 drivers.: When the drivers are designed specificly for Windows 95 they are a lot easier to install and configure. Devices that do not have Windows 95 drivers do not intergrate properly into the system and do not show up in the Device Manager hardware list.

A collection of Windows 95 drivers for various types of hardware can be found here.

Card manufacturers who are having problems getting vic to work with their cards and are willing to donate a card for debugging purposes, please contact Isidor Kouvelas to make arrangements.

Feedback

I am very interested in finding out experiences other people have had with this port. In particular I would like to extend my list of data about grabber cards. The binary outputs debugging information which you can collect either running it through Visual C++ or using Matt Pietrek's loadprof utility which is included in the Microsoft Developers Network library CD. Please send comments to Isidor Kouvelas.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank John Brezak for providing me with his unfinished grabber code which considerably accelerated this release, Mark Handley for helping debug many bizarre looking images and Orion Hodson for helping out with the most difficult task of PC hardware configuration! This work has been supported by Hewlett Packard Labs Bristol who donated the PCs used for development and by the MERCI project (Telematics Applications Programme - 1007).

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