miroVideo DC20
One of the first to appear in a new crop of affordable video capture capture cards,
the DC20 uses ZORAN M-JPEG codecs which remain compatible with recent cards.
Which means that the card, although somewhat dated, is still able to perform useful work.
I was never quite happy with the drivers that came with the card, however, and could never
achieve the promised data rates under Windows 9x, in spite of advancements in drive and bus
technologies which should have increased throughput. Subsequent testing under NT showed
that throughput was more acceptable, leading to the conclusion that the Win9x drivers were
the bottleneck rather than the drives themselves. Sometime after the introduction of the DC20,
in a clouded exchange of ownership, miro products started appearing under the Pinnacle name,
and driver development on the DC20 stopped dead in it's tracks. Contacting Pinnacle directly
has resulted in absolutely no acknowledgment at all. Not a word, nada.
Not content to accept things as they were, I began a search on the German FTP sites in search
of a better set of Win9x drivers for the DC20. I located set of beta drivers that held promise, and
after massaging them locally, they work great, and are in English. I am offering them to anyone
who owns a DC20 and would like to improve it's performance. I offer no warranty and make no
claims as to fitness for any particular application, but I use them and love 'em. I have even used
them successfully with Adobe Premiere 5x. They are 32 bit and have a cache implemented that
should help with AV sync problems, and a NTSC color bar pattern that appears when the codec
is opened for use. All things considered, a lot slicker that the drivers you got stuck with. Need I
even point out that you will get NO SUPPORT from Pinnacle for these drivers, but you probably
wouldn't have gotten any support anyway. Which is a pretty sorry return for your $800 US.
If, after trying them, you are not satisfied, simply reinstall your old drivers. There is another
fix which I implemented in the new driver set. The drivers supplied by miro include a patched
version of VidCap which crashes frequently with a GPF and additionally refuses to remember
the default capture file properly. This has been fixed with my 'unofficial' driver release. For my
needs, these have transformed the DC20 into a totally new product, and are what should have
been included in the box. The graphs below demonstrate throughput differences on my system.
If
you would like to try the Video Doctor's DC20 Driver Set, click on the link
under the graphs.
Custom
v1.15 Win9x Driver Display
Custom
v1.15 Win9x Driver Control Menus
v1.05
Win9x Driver Data Rates
Custom v1.15 Win9x Driver Data Rates