5/08/2021

Video capture with I-O DATA GV-MDVD2 and GV-MDVD3 on Win7 x64

 The

I-O DATA GV-MDVD

Is a product line of video capture boxes from Japan , they aren't often seen outside of Japan because they use the NTSC-J variant of the NTSC color signaling standard which has a wider sampling range than in North America with the Pedestal Set-up. 

They are "capture" boxes, and so are not detected as Broadcast Tuner capable devices and Windows does not support their use with the Windows Media Center products.

They produce a rather unique MPEG-2 stream which contains both audio and video in their output pin, which can be directed to a file, or decoded and displayed within programs that understand the MPEG-2 stream. VLC is the most often used. VLC is also capable of saving the output to files in various formats.


The GV-MDVD2 has no 64 bit windows device driver, however it does work with the later GV-MDVD3 64 bit device driver. In fact it is detected as a GV-MDVD3 device. The hardware MPEG-2 encoder chip is the CX2316-12 and the video decoder chip used to process incoming video signals is reported to be the PHILIPS SAA7115HL. It is my guess the difference between the GV-MDVD2 and 3 is only with the driver disc provided and the Windows versions marketed towards. They appear to be the same hardware with different labeling.

One difficulty is routine access to the hardware switch within the device called a video switching Crossbar. This can be accessed either using the 32 bit version of GraphEdit with a GRAPH.GRF file. Or with the widely available "Crossbar Thingy" application. Either of these will load the Windows DirectShow component installed along with the device driver which allows a dialog window that allows selecting the Input source, to switch from Composite to S-Video.

Fair warning, the GRAPH.GRF file must be "opened" or "dropped" on an x86 (32 bit version) of GraphEdit or it will fail to open. Some components are not compatible with the 64 bit only version of the GraphEdit program, but work just fine with the 32 bit version of GraphEdit running on Windows 7 x64 bit natively.. and "not" in Windows XP mode.

I have not tested, but its suspected versions of MyDVD, Intervideo WinDVR and ULEAD capture products will "probably" work, since those cater more towards the MPEG-2 streams.

Windows Movie Maker, being for Raw YUV 422 or UVC products does not work with the GV-MDVD products.

The GV-MDVD (1) product is not like the GV-MDVD2 or GB-MDVD3 products, being from an earlier time it is based on the popular WisGO007 pre-compression hardware chip.. which produced a YUV output or a soft compression GO stream which could be software compression "finished" into MPEG1/2/4 versions. This sounds more versatile, but it is not by today's conventions.. because it relies on many software libraries that are only available on the Windows XP platform and were not brought forward. The Monsoon Snappysoft software from Luminate is known to work with it on the Windows XP 32 bit platform only.

I-O Data seems to have had a very long import line into the Japanese market with the GV-MDVD product line which seems to have favored importing the YUAN video capture products.. but details are scarce.