audio sync problem with Philips SAA7134 TV card

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop,microsoft.public.windows.mediacenter (More info?)

Hello,

I just bought a Terratec Cinergy 600 TV card (based on the Philips
SAA7134 chip), essentially because of the supposed better performance
with SECAM signal.

I found the picture quality excellent, and I was surprised of the
improvement over the the previous BT878 boards I have seen.

However, I have big troubles with the capture performance. I bought
the card to in the purpose of recycling an unused PC as a PVR, and it
seems much more tricky than expected...

Essentially, the problem is the well known "out of sync" between audio
and video. It happens quite quickly, after a few minutes of capture,
regardless of the resolution. I use Intervideo WinPVR 3, which is
bundled in the package.
- I tried at low resolution (352x288), no improvement
- I tried without preview, no improvement
- I tried with an alternative software (Cinergy TV) and other codecs
(Huffyuv, MJPEG), it was worse as the video became choppy because of
dropped frames...

The host PC is based on an Athlon 2400XP, 512 Mb of SDRAM, ATI Radeon
9200SE, dedicated video drive (Seagate 160 Gb 7200 RPM HDD, UDMA
enabled, formatted NTFS with 64K clusters), running Windows 2000 SP4.
Note that CPU usage during recording with Win PVR is reported as
50-75%, never higher.

After doing some research on the web and usenet, my understanding is
that :

1) software realtime video encoding is very vulnerable to out of sync
issues. Even with a powerful CPU the problem may still exist, as the
sound and the video devices do not share the same timer, whereas on a
hardware MPEG encoder both the sound and video are encoded on by the
same device.

2) the SAA7134 seems is more problematic in this respect with common
software such as winpvr.

What I'm wondering is does it exist a good solution (software & driver
combination) working with SAA7134 cards allowing perfect audio-video
sync, either under Windows or Linux.

Or should I simply forget this card and return it? As I'm impressed by
the picture quality (very important to me), I would prefer avoiding
this solution.
Otherwise, which card with an hardware encoder would you recommend
(tuner performance and picture quality are the essential factors in my
use).

Thanks for your comments and advices


Pierre