At a loss for words (and frames)
My system cannot capture without dropping frames. I can't find the cause. I've been through two different ATI capture cards, but at the moment I'm using a Radeon ATI All-In-Wonder 9200. I've tried everything, from defragmenting my hard disks to buying a new sound card. I've followed digitalfaq's guide to Audio Sync/Dropped Frames, but to no avail.
My problem started when I switched to the ATI cards, but I'm not blaming the ATI card as I feel there is something wrong with my computer. My computer was (I guess) top-of-the-line back in 2003, with a 2.4 GHz processor and 512 MB ram. Now I'm thinking of getting a new computer.
Everytime I try to capture video - the CPU only gets up to 25% when capturing, but MMC reports a frame drop of about 20 every two seconds.
The real confusing part about this is that it drops frames even when I'm not capturing anything! (I hit record, and it reports dropped frames like mad.)
I have two separate hard drives, all 7200 RPM, 8 MB Cache. I ran all the tools - Spybot, Ad-Aware, WinPatrol - they all report a clean system (only to find a random IE malware or tracking cookies).
I have DMA enabled on my hard drives, I turned indexing off, no compression, both hard drives are NTFS formatted. I unplug from the internet, close all unnecessary programs (ITunesHelper.exe, AOL services, Firewall, etc.) and I still can't capture video without tons of frames being dropped.
I've tried different versions of the MMC from 8.07 to 9.x. I tried lowering my resolution to 16-bit, using the smallest video preview window available on MMC.
I once owned a Canopus ADVC-100 capture device, and never had the experience of dropped frames. I'd love to stick with ATI - I've always had a good experience with them, and when I owned a 400 MHz computer with AIW I never got a report of dropped frames. Weird? You're telling me...I'm doing something wrong, but I feel that I've tried everything. I wish it were as easy as the Canopus, but the video quality is so much better using the ATI AIW. The Canopus' video captures are very stale and gray looking compared to the AIW. But I was satisfied with how it performed and may buy the ADVC-100 again.
I'm baffled - my computer should be able to handle it, but maybe it's just old. Even though I've tried so many things there probably is something I overlooked or I could try again.