Hi, I'm having some difficulty with audio lip-sync when transferring clips captured from Freeview digital onto PC hard disk, and from there to DVD.

The process I'm using is:
- Freeview DV3 USB "Freeview" terrestrial digital receiver via it's own supplied software, giving a compressed JPG file on the hard disk.

- TMPGEnc DVD Author 1.6 - insert .JPG files directly into project and make DVD VIDEO_TS folder

- Test this using Cyberlink PowerDVD. Will be watched on domestic Toshiba SD220 DVD.

I've found that the .JPG seems perfectly lipsynced, when reviewed using DVD Author's basic "cut edit" facility. After cooking the VIDEO_TS folder however, the video is several seconds ahead of the audio (it's really bad!)

TMPGENC does a great job of encoding video captured from digicam using Panasonic codecs with good lipsync. So I wonder what the problem is - any ideas?

Kind regards
Steve Tuck

First of all, the files are MPEG2 (motion images), not JPEG (still images).

The quality of the end product depends on how well the Freeview capture card renders the received transport stream down to a program stream. If it doesn't remove all the extraneous synchronisation data and match the audio and video packets properly, then a home DVD playeror recorder which is expecting a DVD-Video will probably not be able to get the synchronisation right. There is another problem with transport streams, in that the group-of-pictures (GOP) length can be up to 40, whereas the DVD-Video standard is 15.

A good application which removes the glitches from TS streams and re-establishes the GOP interval is VideoRedo. There's a month's free trial, and you should use the 'Quickstream Fix' option from the front menu. Failing that there's the much more complicated freeware app; Project X.

Thanks very much, I will try the software you suggest.

I tried opening the .mpg file under VirtualDubMod (which is what I used to edit down camcorder footage). It gave the following errors:

[!] MPEG: Anachronistic or discontinuous timestamp found in audio stream 0 at
byte position 668620068, from 113431403 to 113517803. This may indicate an
improper join.

[!] MPEG: Anachronistic or discontinuous timestamp found in audio stream 0 at
byte position 669470526, from 113621483 to 113690603. This may indicate an
improper join.

[!] MPEG: Anachronistic or discontinuous timestamp found in audio stream 0 at
byte position 1436033024, from 248630123 to 248958443. This may indicate
an improper join.

[!] MPEG: Anachronistic or discontinuous timestamp found in video stream 0 at
byte position 1436033225, from 248678422 to 249023858. This may indicate
an improper join.


So I guess that the .mpg capture process has defects from somewhere, whether signal, hardware or software.

VirtualDubMod playback of the source MPEG has a slight lipsync error.

TMPGEnc 3.0 playback of the source MPEG (which has a compensation feature) - compensation set to -250ms at the start of the file, -100ms near the end, looks about right.

This is a pain, now I suspect that the capture process is poor, maybe because of antenna glitches in terrestrial freeview, but why does it give such bad errors?

Anyone know if there is better share/freeware capture software out there that works with the Freecom DVB-T USB?

If the Freecom device is BDA (Broadcast Driver Architecture) compatible, then I can thoroughly recommend DVB Viewer as a capture application. It produces exceptionally clean MPEG2 files that need no processing for authoring to DVD. It also makes good use of the Freeview EPG to schedule the recordings.

Thanks, I've tried it, comes up as "hardware not recognized" during install.

I tried searching for Freecom DVB on the forum, suprisingly few entries.

This is the device I'm using:

http://www.freecom.com/ecproduct_det...sCatID=1146532

It's connected to a proper wideband rooftop antenna via an amp - gives 100% signal quality on both this & my Humax PVR. But I do get occasional clicks/resyncs (on both devices). Maybe that's the source of errors in the .mpg?

Are capture defects just a fact of life with terrestrial?

OK... the USB Stick. You know, I think there are some Yakumo drivers for that thing which are BDA compatible (the Freecom ones aren't). I'll get back to you a bit later if I can find them.

I think in this case what you are seeing/hearing in the MPEG2 after capture is due to bad processing by the software. I have a Hauppauge DVB-T card which receives very well indeed but the software was really dire and produced similarly bad mpgs; hence my eventual change to DVB Viewer.

Bear in mind there are other factors that can influence the Freeview signal before it gets to your aerial, and introduce noticeable glitches. Unsuppressed engines are notorious for doing this, and if you have some chavs roaring past on their mopeds it can break up the signal completely. There's nothing that the hardware or software can do to correct this.

Hi, thank you for all your help so far, much appreciated.

Some quick Googling found a review of the stick:

http://www.dvhardware.net/modules.ph...wcontent&id=82

There was a post mentioning Kaffeine player (under Linux) is compatible with the hardware. As I don't particularly want to change OS just to record TV, it would be great if you do find the drivers - thanks!

PS I mentioned this site, in case someone else has the same issue..

OK here we are: there's thread which describes where to get the drivers from, how to install them, and solve some initial teething problems:

http://forums.gbpvr.com/showthread.php?t=9044&page=2

Some of the problems were related to users not having MPEG2 decoders (referred to as a 'muxer') installed.

Have a go and see how you get on - that seems like a comprehensive thread for all the problems that are likely to come up.

Hi, here's how it's going. I'm learning about this stuff as we go through, thanks!

- I got some Yakumo drivers as suggested, however I got these by going down through their site, I think the versions have changed. They would not load in immediately, but in the meantime:

- I found that Freecom have got updated BDA drivers on their site:

http://www.freecom.com/ecsupportdeta...erface=1136105

So- I've removed the old WDM drivers, installed the BDA drivers (so far so good).

Unfortunately the capture s/w you suggested still can't "see" the drivers, it gets part way through installing then gives up due to wrong H/W.

The GBPVR software looks interesting through. I have got it to see the BDA drivers and the USB stick ... just trying it now.