A good video capture tool for more advanced users. (Matrox Marvel G400 TV)

Member Name: muffles

Product:	Matrox Marvel G400 TV
Date:	13/08/01 (1655 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Hardware MJPEG compression

Disadvantages: Poor driver support

The Matrox Marvel G400-TV is designed as an 'all-in-one' graphics and video solution, similar to the ATI All-In-Wonder series. It's a single AGP board providing 2D, 3D, MPEG decoding (for DVDs etc.), as well as TV viewing/recording and video capture. The one distinct advantage the Matrox has over the ATI, however, is that it provides hardware-based MJPEG video compression.

The input video quality is superior to that provided by other similar cards such as the All-In-Wonder series by ATI. It is visibly sharper and cleaner, which of course is important for video editing.

The Matrox Marvel G400-TV features an onboard Zoran MJPEG codec chip, which allows realtime compression and decompression of MJPEG-compressed AVIs with no CPU overhead. The quality of the compression provided by this chip is in excess of software codecs by the likes of PICvideo etc. At the Matrox drivers' maximum quality settings it will take up approx. 6Gb per hour of video.

Unfortunately, the drivers only allow for hardware accelleration in DirectShow decoding. Standard Video For Windows decoding, which is used by many video editing utilities such as VirtualDub, is not supported, meaning your CPU time will be taken up by decoding frames rather than video processing. Some programs such as Adobe Premiere do support DirectShow decoding, however. Decoding in VFW will take up 50% CPU on a 1.4GHz Athlon, but on a P3-600 the CPU is not fast enough to decode in realtime.

Another problem with the MJPEG compression is that the field order is inverted, meaning that fields are not placed in the right order. A simple 'field swap' filter will correct this, however. Also, when decoding the MJPEG via AVIsynth, an AVI scripting tool, dropped frames are not displayed correctly. You'll need to handle the dropped frames manually.

Driver support is pretty standard for thjis class of card. There is no Windows 2000 or Linux support for video capturin
g - display drivers only. This is a major issue that Matrox have said they will NOT be correcting in a future release. It is possible to add MJPEG decoding support via an unofficial method in Windows 2000, but capturing should be performed in Windows 98 only.

Overall, the quality of the MJPEG compression is excellent. There are no visible artifacts during motion. The hardware compression means you can set it to maximum quality with no CPU overhead.

As for 2D and 3D, the quality is fine, not exceptional but perfectly usable for your main PC. 3D acceleration is not cutting edge but it will play all of the current games at a decent frame rate in normal resolution.

TV output is very good. It works in both WIn98 and Windows 2000, can convert frame rates to PAL or NTSC etc.

This card is a good upgrade for users of lower end capture cards who require more features without breaking the bank.

Summary: