Images taking twice as long to capture in live stack and dark capture

[nigeld]

Tried 4.0 and that opened the camera but when I clicked live view it then came up with a screen saying there had been a hardware problem with the camera.

[nigeld]

hmm just tried nina with the ascom driver and that crashed out at the end of the exposure. I’ve got the latest ascom 6.6sp2 installed.
Using the sv305 camera via ascom seems to work fine though there is an unusual delay after the first frame. I couldn’t see how I would select a particular camera in sharpcap but when I went from nina after trying the sv305 sharpcap opened that camera which seemed to work fine.

For the sv705c Nina seems to work fine using the svbony driver and sharpcap works using the direct show driver and partially with the svbony driver. While both are happy using the various drivers for the sv305.

[admin]

Hi,

can you try the new version of 4.0 that I uploaded yesterday please? 4.0.9571. I had a new updated from SVBony that they claim will fix the issue, and that update has gone into 4.0.9571 (it will be in a new SharpCap 4.1 version next week).

cheers,

Robin

[nigeld]

Just tried the new 4.0 version and yes I can confirm that seems to work at least for capturing darks for a master dark and live stack.

regards

Nigel

[admin]

Hi Nigel,

thanks for checking - glad to hear it works OK now. SVBony tend to be pretty responsive at fixing things as long as we can give them a clear bug report that lets them replicate the problem.

cheers,

Robin

[nigeld]

Hi Robin

I’ve been having trouble with Metaguide and my svbony cameras and have been trying them out using the directshow drivers in sharpcap. Now the native drivers can hit around 200fps with raw8 and a small frame in sharpcap, while the directshow drivers struggle at 8fps and I don’t seem to be able to change the frame size or format.

If I change the settings using the native driver then when I disconnect and connect using the directshow driver then it acts as if the settings have been changed but still says rgb24 and displays a blank for resolution.

In Metaguide I used to be able to change the resolution (though I could be going a bit crazy trying things) but now I don’t appear to be able to.

My question is would the directshow driver have got updated with the fix that svbony provided you for the double exposure time problem do you know? Also you mentioned a 605c svbony camera do you know if that runs at a reasonable fps via directshow or within metaguide?

Sorry this isn’t really a sharpcap problem which seems to be working fine I’m just hoping you might be able to help.

[admin]

Hi,

the fix for double exposure will have only been a change to the SVBCameraSDK.dll file in the SharpCap install folder, so it won't affect Metaguide, since that application would have no reason to go looking in the SharpCap folder for a DLL. It might, just possibly, affect using the DirectShow driver in SharpCap - if the SVBony direct show driver also uses SVBCameraSDK.dll and has its own copy, if you open that camera in SharpCap via direct show then SharpCap's copy will get used because it is already loaded.

It could be that the directshow driver tries to start off using the current camera configuration, so if you have accessed the camera from SharpCap and changed resolution, etc, it may try to use those settings. Unplugging and replugging the camera, then connecting in Metaguide might be enough to put it back to defaults.

Directshow is quite limited in terms of available formats - you can have RGB24, RGB32 or MONO8 - no high bit depth modes are available. That's a limitation of the underlying DirectShow framework, not of Metaguide or SVBony.

I must admit that I have never actually got far with metaguide - I have tried a few times and always ended up being confused by how it works and given up!

cheers,

Robin