Hi,
Its been some time since I was here (2005 or so) trying to sort out my Dazzle DVC90 and Studio 9.4 issues. There were plenty of folks having heartache back then.... Hope that has changed since then...
SO I decided to try and use my Dazzle and Studio the other day after not having used it for quite a while.... MUCH to my chagrin, they (it) crashed often and was totally unstable..... 8-(
I began to try and remember what types of things I, and others had posted here back then to resolve the issues....
1) MAJOR item for USB2 Capture back then... MUST USE an NEC (chipset) based USB2 adapter. The VIA based adapters (also on many motherboards) weren't able to keep up with the data flow under capture conditions. People had all sorts of Choppy and Dropped Frames and other junk during capture efforts. Maybe the newer USB2 motherboard chips are better able to handle capture tasks.... I STILL use an NEC base USB2 adapter for my Dazzle DVC90.
2) Seems to be a major conflict with my Hauppauge 878 (chipset) PCI TV Tuner card. I had to remove it and uninstall it completely from my system. I AM able to use a different PCI TV tuner card labelled "Norwood" (old CompUSA store label) which uses a Conexant based solution for its hardware. Go figger.... Once I removed the Hauppauge card, the major Studio crashes and instability Vanished.
However, once I got the studio generally stable, I began to experience regular BSOD crashes with a 0x7E stop error in file EMSTREAM.SYS. There are several other threads from people also seeing this crash posted in this forum. I will offer my solution here albeit a bit of a cross post from what I added to the other recent thread abotu the EMSTREAM.SYS BSOD crash....
3) EMSTREAM.SYS is part of the DVC90 (and others I presume) Video driver.... During my research to correct this error, I found a thread from another support forum (using another USB2 capture type of device) that referenced using this file as part of their driver. The point of THAT particular thread was to adapt the driver for THAT USB2 device to work under windows vista as a vista driver had nto been released at the time THAT thread was posted. The poster's resolution was to create a manually configured driver for vista based on their XP driver. The link is here: http://www.azcendant.com/VistaUSB2821Install.htm
What I did was to use that method and information to tweak the Dazzle DVC90 (in my case) Video driver by commenting out the line in the INF file that installed/copied. Then you have to re-do the driver for the DVC video device from within Device Manager. For me, I also went ahead and deleted all occurances of the file EMSTREAM.SYS that I found on my system; not to worry because the original file is stored in the DVC Video CAB file, in case you ever might need it. The section of the .INF file looks like this:
[CAP.CopySYS]
emDevice.sys
;emStream.sys
emScan.sys
emFilter.sys
I am not sure exactly WHAT EMSTREAM.SYS does, but I have seen no ill effects from the driver mod I am showing. Apparently the people from the site I saw link above also came to that conclusion. Maybe it used to be needed back several years ago before XP SP3 or whatever. But for now I have not had any problems. Capture works great once again.
I am currently evaluating Studio 12 using the trial and it seems pretty nice now that I can actually use it.
Hope this helps somebody.... I know I was beginning to get stressed (must have no life I guess)....
SD