Maximum PC AVCHD RSS Feed

Sound Card Blues; OS Hassles

The Maximum PC Doctor — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 12:24:42 -0600

A-V-C-H-D H-E-L-P

I recently settled on the Panasonic AVCHD HDC-SD1 digicam, which received a 9 verdict in the November 2007 issue. I have now begun the daunting task of finding a software solution to edit, compress, and burn the film I shoot. As I see it, there are only two choices that support AVCHD and do what I need: Nero 8 Ultra and Pinnacle 11. But which should I pick? I want to edit the footage I shoot, keep it in high def to burn to an HD DVD disc, or compress it to a lower resolution/quality to play on a website. The more options, the better!

—Rob King

Actually, quite a few other applications also support AVCHD editing, including Corel Ulead VideoStudio 11 Plus, Sony Vegas Studio Platinum 8, and Cyberlink PowerDirector 6. Depending on the program, you may have to buy the full version of one of these apps in order to access the AVCHD support. Software companies typically pay a third party for the codec based on the number of units sold. With many of today’s video editors, you’re prompted to activate a codec only if you need it. This saves the company (and supposedly you) cash, as the software developer pays only for the codecs its customers use.

For the most part, the editing software’s functionality will be the same whether you’re working with DV, HDV, or AVCHD content. You should make your pick based on the feature set of the application. The Doctor has not used the latest version of Vegas, but he is partial to Pinnacle’s Studio 11, which is much improved from the previous version.

CONNECTING THE COSMOS

Being the power-hungry person I am, I decided to build a new machine based on your Dream Machine (September 2007). I’m having two small issues connecting the Asus Striker Extreme motherboard to the Cosmos case, and I’m curious how you guys resolved them. The first issue concerns the power LED coming from the case. It’s a two-pin female connector; the motherboard requires a three-pin connector. I looked online and was able to find a store that sells a three-pin female to two-pin male power LED adapter/connector. Other people have suggested cutting the existing cable. Help?

—Ray Mileo

We separated the wires on our two-pin female connector to make it fit in the three-pin space provided by Asus’s mobo Q Connector.

We didn’t use the Striker Extreme board; we used an EVGA 680i SLI board. The Striker Extreme makes connecting front-panel features to the mobo easy by providing Asus’s Q Connector, a small block of pins on a piece of plastic. You hook your front-panel connectors to this block and then plug it right into your motherboard. Should you need to pull the board out, all you have to do is pull the connector out as one single block.

To address the pin discrepancy with your power LED, you’ll need to remove one of the female connectors, so you can attach them independently to the mobo’s three-pin config. Use a small paper clip to pry out the plastic finger that holds in one of the female connectors. Next, plug each of the connectors independently into the Q Connector (as shown in the image) and then plug the connector into your motherboard.

HARDWARE OR SOFTWARE EAX?

Why is it that when I plug my Logitech Premium 350 USB headphones into my notebook and select Hardware and EAX for Battlefield 2, it actually sounds like EAX is working? Is this software emulation through Microsoft’s built-in USB headset drivers, or does the hardware USB soundcard actually decode EAX? And what chip is actually in these damn things? I’m about ready to rip them open to see what makes them tick.

Finally, is it possible to get hardware decode EAX 5.0 in a notebook?

—Mark Miller

You didn’t mention what operating system you’re running, but if it’s Windows Vista, there’s no hardware audio support, as Microsoft removed that feature from this “gaming” OS. What you’re getting is general audio that’s perhaps enhanced slightly by the headset’s drivers. It’s a good sound, but not a great sound. If you use analog headphones, an EAX 5.0 card does add some worthwhile nuances. For example, it will allow you to crank BF2 audio all the way to Ultra, which allows 128 simultaneous sounds. But, sadly, there are no EAX 5.0-capable audio solutions for notebooks right now. Even Creative’s X-Fi Xtreme Audio Notebook isn’t a true hardware X-Fi and is capped at EAX 4.0 support.

THIS SOUNDS GREA… BRZZZ

I built a nice gaming rig with an EVGA 680i motherboard and a Sound Blaster Fatality 1 XtremeGamer Professional Series soundcard. The card works great for a few hours, or sometimes a few days, then all of a sudden, for no reason at all, the sound stops working. The card and drivers still appear in the device manager. Nothing changes. Once the sound stops working, I have to physically take the card out and reinstall it, then reinstall the drivers. Have you heard of any problems with this soundcard?

—Slick

The good news is that there is a known issue with the nForce 680i SLI and Sound Blaster X-Fi card. Unfortunately, neither Creative nor Nvidia has a definite solution for it. Creative officials told the Doc that the company had to resort to buying back problem machines because they could not reproduce, and thus fix, the sound issues. Most of those cases, however, were characterized by crackling, static, and distortion.

Nevertheless, there are a few steps you can take to try to eliminate the issue. First, make sure you’re running the latest drivers from Creative’s website. Second, make sure you have the latest BIOS from EVGA installed. A BIOS was released some time ago that supposedly addresses some of the X-Fi/nForce issues. You might also want to try running the card in a different PCI slot.

Remember that you must power down the system and discharge any residual power in the PSU before removing a device from inside the machine. If you are pulling the card out while the motherboard still has power to it (even if the PC is powered down), there is a chance you could damage components.

VIDEOCARD SMASH SOUNDCARD

I just installed a new Radeon 2900 XT videocard. After I installed the driver and rebooted my computer, my X-Fi card stopped working. What happened, and how can I get my soundcard back?

—Jenny McCabe

Your soundcard hasn’t really stopped working, it’s just that your videocard has usurped its authority. Don’t worry, there’s an easy fix. But first, allow me to explain what happened: Videocards based on AMD’s Radeon 2000- and 3000-series GPUs have integrated audio capabilities, so they can output both digital video and digital audio over one cable using an HDMI adapter fitted to the card’s DVI output.

This is useful if your monitor is equipped with an HDMI port and speakers and you want to use them, or if you route your audio and video signals through an A/V receiver that has HDMI inputs and outputs. In your case, it sounds as though you’d prefer to use your X-Fi card and external speakers. If that’s so, all you need to do is open your Windows XP control panel and click Sounds, Speech, and Audio Devices. Next, click Sounds and Audio Devices, choose X-Fi from the Device drop-down menu, and click OK. If you’re using Vista, your control panel choices will be Hardware and Sound, Sound, and then Manage Audio Devices. Click the Playback tab, select X-Fi, and click the Set Default button. These steps should return control to your X-Fi card.

ONE AT A TIME

Help! I used to be able to select all the files in a folder using Windows Vista, but I can only select one file now. What’s up, Doc?

—Winston Fore

Well, Winston, the Doctor is sad to report that Vista treats its folder themes differently than XP does. According to Microsoft, an application has added a key to the Windows registry that prevents you from selecting multiples of anything in that particular folder—no keyboard shortcuts, no drawing of mouse boxes, nothing. This likely happens on folders within a particular theme, so the Doctor wouldn’t be surprised to hear that you’re having the same issue across, say, all of your picture folders.

There are two ways to fix this: First, go to your annoying folder and select the View tab in Folder Options. Next, click the Reset Folders button. That should fix your issue, but you’ll have to go back and spiffy up your folder settings to get back the look you just nuked.

Selecting a healthy folder and clicking “Apply to All” won’t necessarily fix problems across all your folders. Vista treats each folder type independently, unlike Windows XP.

If that doesn’t work, right-click the guilty folder and hit Properties. Then click the Customize tab and make a note of what type of folder Vista thinks it is. Go back to your desktop and make a new folder. Right-click it, hit Properties, and click the Customize tab again. Set this folder to be a different type than the annoying folder and click Apply. Then go back and set it as the same type as the annoying folder and hit OK. Now to overwrite the folder’s characteristics, click the Tools menu in Windows Explorer and select Folder Options. Click the View tab, and select Apply to Folders. That should fix your problem.

THERE'S AN APPLE IN MY PC!

I am running Windows XP. In the directory C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data, there are Apple and Apple Computer folders. In each of those folders is a folder called Installer Cache. That Installer Cache folder contains old install files of iTunes, QuickTime, and Apple Mobile Device Support. Can I delete these without any repercussions?

—Mario Lia

The Doctor advises you to nuke these folders with extreme prejudice. They’re leftover files from the many updates of your Apple software and are wholly unnecessary for your daily software operations. And if, by chance, you ever encounter an issue with files missing from Installer Cache, just go back and reinstall iTunes. Potential problem solved.

The Doctor can’t stand it; he knows you planned it. He’s gonna set it straight, this techy hate. He can’t stand doctoring when he’s in here, because your computer deal ain’t so crystal clear. So while you sit back and wonder why, you should be e-mailing questions to this Doctor guy: doctor@maximumpc.com

Panasonic HDC-SX5

Charlie White — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:59:24 -0600

Here’s the most versatile camcorder of the bunch, letting you record 28 minutes of its best-quality video per 3-inch DVD. If you don’t feel like dealing with discs, you can cram 80 minutes of HD footage on an 8GB SDHC flash memory card instead. If you do record to a DVD, you can pop that disc into a compatible Blu-ray player (our Sony BDP S-300 played the disc perfectly) or play the disc back directly from the camera. But the DVD format has its drawbacks—it’s slow to read when you turn on the camera, taking seven seconds from a cold start. And once you’re done shooting, unless you’re using DVD-RAM, you’ll need to finalize the disk before you can read any of the files on the computer or play them back, which takes about five minutes for each minute of footage shot.

We like the three-second preroll function that records the previous three seconds before you push the record button when you’re using an SDHC flash memory card. In bright light, this sucker cranked out images with astonishing clarity, splashing well-saturated colors all over the screen with nary a motion artifact. However, some high-contrast shots proved a challenge for the SX5, blowing out the whites while keeping the darkest objects in the frame hidden in obscurity. In medium-intensity lighting, such as indoors on a cloudy day, some mottling was visible in darker areas. These weaknesses aside, the overall quality of the SX5’s video was outstanding.

Sony Handycam HDR-SR7 Hard Drive Recorder

Charlie White — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:59:24 -0600

This Handycam felt rock solid and provided the best optical image stabilization. Its stop/start button is in the perfect place, but the zoom control is positioned right where your middle finger rests—bad idea. We like the “easy” mode, which, with the push of a button, takes care of exposure and focus for most situations.

A touch screen, as opposed to the joystick all the other cams sport, makes navigation tedious and can leave your screen a greasy mess.

The SR7’s stop button seemed to be on a half-second delay, resulting in swish pans at the end of a few shots—an annoyance we got used to after a while. Another annoyance is the cam’s use of a hard-to-find mini HDMI connector instead of the full-size HDMI port found on the other camcorders.

Getting past that, the camcorder’s performance with our video test shots was strong, with brightly lit situations displaying lifelike color and tack-sharp resolution. It did well with low and medium room light, too, and showed us the best contrast ratio of this roundup. Points of candlelight in our low-light test revealed a warm glow, rather than the noticeable streaking we encountered with the Panasonic and JVC camcorders. Except for a few slight motion artifacts that seem common to AVCHD, we liked its video quality a lot.

Panasonic HDC-SD1

Charlie White — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 22:59:59 -0600

The HDC-SD1 was the smallest and lightest camcorder we tested, and the easiest one to use. It offers few buttons to confuse you and no viewfinder, but wait a minute—that’s a frickin’ 3-inch viewscreen, which seems huge compared to the others’ 2.7-inchers. And it’s bright enough to show you its crispy video even on the sunniest of days. The zoom lever gives you just the right amount of speed right when you need it, and the navigational joystick is right there under your thumb. Its optical image stabilization holds those shots rock-solid unless you zoom all the way to 12x.

Less is more with that selector dial in the back and a start/stop button smartly placed in its center.

The most kick-ass characteristic of this cam is its awesome resolution, the sharpest of all the cameras we tested. But its low-light performance was a bit grainy, and its room-lit video revealed a few subtle noisy spots—nothing bad enough to fret over, however. In bright light, its autofocus impressed us with its sprightly response. Its colors were nicely saturated with auto white balance, but the camera seemed to set the video slightly on the blue side. Colors appeared more realistic when we did a manual white balance by digging into the menus.

And to think, 40 minutes of crisp, clean video fits onto that tiny 4GB SDHC flash memory card at the camera’s highest quality setting. The best news of all is the rock-bottom street price—we’ve seen this bauble selling for just north of $800. Remarkable.

Using Nero 7 to Burn HD

Katherine Stevenson — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 13:20:59 -0500

Nero is known for releasing multiple incremental updates to its software in between releases of full-fledged versions, and a newly added feature to Nero 7 (a free upgrade to owners of the suite via Nero’s website), should be of particular interest to HD video camera owners.

With the update, you can use Nero Vision 4—one of the suite’s video apps—to burn high-definition content to a standard DVD. This is welcome alternative if you want to author high-def home movies that don’t require the full 25GB of expensive Blu-ray media. I say Blu-ray media because the DVD you create with Vision is only playable in a Blu-ray player, including Sony’s PS3. Still, it’s a nifty trick.

The secret lies in AVCHD (Advanced Video Codec High Definition), which uses an MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) video codec, and which when combined with audio in an MPEG-4 Transport Stream can be played without modification in a Blu-ray player. I experimented by burning a 4GB MPEG-2 HDV file to a DVD, and the results were impressive. The 17 minute high-definition video played from the disc without any glitches in both a stand-alone Blu-ray drive and a PS3, as promised. And the quality looked just as good as with the original.

HD DVD loyalists aren’t necessarily out in the cold. Corel’s new media-creation suite will offer a similar feature for those folks. And Pinnacle and Ulead are also joining the HD-to-DVD party. So everyone wins.