SharpCap Forums

Hello and Happy New Year to all.
I have Sharpcap Pro Ver, 3.0.4070.0 on my laptop running Windows 10 Creators.
While using the capture made, pressing either Capture Stop or Pause rarely works and the captures continue.
In fact, I only got it to stop once after closing the app and restarting it.
I am using a ZWOasi185MC camera.
Thanks for any suggestions.

Fivelpolar

Hi,

do all the other buttons work while capturing (ie can you bring up the histogram, adjust controls, open menus, etc?). If nothing is responding then may be it is that your computer is so busy that it cannot respond. If it's just those two buttons then that is unlikely.

cheers,

Robin

Hi Robin, thanks for your reply.
Most other buttons work properly.
These are the only two that seem to do little, if nothing at all.

Fivelpolar

Hi,

ok, so it sounds like the program is still responding normally to button presses at least. Anyway, it's usually higher resolution cameras that require so much CPU that the program becomes unresponsive (and then usually on very slow computers only).

Please can you confirm exactly what happens when you press the 'Pause' button? Test the following:

* Open camera
* Press 'Start Capture' button, select 'unlimited' as the option
* Watch the bottom left corner of the screen - you should see frame counts like this
* While capture is running the 'Capturing : XXX frames' number should increase
* When you press pause the 'Capturing : XXX frames' number should stop increasing and the (XXX dropped) number should start increasing
* While paused the image on screen should continue to update - pausing only pauses the capture - ie stops the frames from being saved to file, it doesn't stop them from being captured or viewed.
* When you unpause the 'Capturing : XXX frames' number should start going up again.

If it works like this then everything is working as it should. If it deviates from this then please tell me exactly how.

thanks,

Robin

Hi again Robin. I finally had time to check out your suggestions.
The Pause works as you described, but Stop Capture does nothing.
In fact, if I press Pause, then restart the capture, it works, but if I try the Stop, it locks up the capture and the only way to get going is to re start capture from the beginning.
At least I am seeing some progress, thanks to your help.
Next, I will be trying the Polar Alignment tool.
It should work just fine.
Thanks again.

Fivelpolar

Hi,

Ok, good that is working correctly - let's try to get to the bottom of the stop capture problem now.

Do you see a notification show at the top of the screen when you press the stop capture button - like thise?
This may take a few seconds to appear if you are using a fast capture and SharpCap is still writing data to the hard disk. When the green bar appears you should still see the image updating and the 'Start Capture' button should be enabled again as well as the 'Stop Capture' button beingd disabled.

How does what you see differ from that?

cheers,

Robin

Robin, I just checked the Stop capture and it all follows your description.
So, again thank you for your help.

I look forward to all of Sharpcap Pro's features.

Fivelpolar

I have the same behavior with my QhY165C. With SharpCap 3.1, it worked fine. And even an earlier version of SharpCap 3.2 worked fine. But the last couple of versions behave the same as described above. Stop Capture briefly shows the green bar with "dont wait" and "cancel". The green bar disappears so fast, I cannot very often click the "dont wait" option. But even if I get lucky with the "Dont wait" button, it still keeps capturing. I set my USB Traffic to 30 but nothing changed.

One other difference for me is when I hit "Stop Capture" or "Pause", the count at the lower left corner reset to zero.

I am using your latest version 3.2.5892. The only way I can stop the capture is exit the program.

Hi,

given your description, I think you have inadvertently set up SharpCap to do a sequence of captures with a very short interval between each one. That means that when you hit stop it stops the current capture and then starts waiting to start the next capturing the sequence, but since the interval is so short that start almost straightaway. Check the start capture formed carefully the next time you run SharpCap and I'd suggest either turning off the sequence option or increasing the gap between capture so you get a chance to hit the cancel button.

Hope this helps, Robin

Hi Robin

Yes, exactly! I found that out last night when I was changing some of my settings. Once I unclicked the sequence button, it worked correctly. That was just unexpected behavior but makes sense in hindsight. Thank you!