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.

Hi,

I'm wondering if it could be a power supply problem. If the PS is under powered for you r system or just cheap it could be fluctuating.

Also, perhaps a heat buildup could be the problem. Some Intel systems slow down the CPU if they begin to over heat (ie., Speed Step Technology).

I have a computer spec not too dissimilar from yours and the AIW 9200 card and I very rarely drop any frames. Only if I am douing something like Photoshop at the same time and then I don't drop too much. Granted right now I'm using 1gb of RAM and have several HDs, but when I first started it was two drives and 512mb. My system is AMD with NVidea chipset (ASUS motherboard) and a 500watt Mad Dog (not the best but decent) power supply.

Don't know if any of this helps. Maybe post the settings you are using for the card.

--dES

Hmmm, I'm curious about the PSU being the culprit and how it can effect video capture/system performance.

According to AIDA32, my voltage is fluctuating and temps are running high -

Temperatures
Motherboard 29 °C (84 °F)
CPU 41 °C (106 °F)

Cooling Fans
CPU 2482 RPM
Chassis 1372 RPM

Voltage Values
CPU Core 1.47 and 1.49 V
+1.8 V 1.76 V
+3.3 V 3.22 V
+5 V 4.92 and 4.95 V
+12 V 11.67 V
+5 V Standby 4.99 and 4.97 V
VBAT Battery 3.15 V

How are your hard drives connected? If secondary HD is on same cable with Primary, most of the benefit to using a 2nd HD is lost.

On your dropped frames "while not capturing anything", if you hit the record button, you are capturing, period. If no source is present, then you are capturing blank screens, but you ARE capturing. Dropped frames in this situation is completely normal.

Changing display size does nothing but a very slight reduction in CPU load.

Two simple tests.

1. test for throughput issues by reducing resolution and bitrate, start with a dramatic step like 352x240 and a much lower bitrate. You did not state either the bitrate or capture codec, these are critically important. If you are trying uncompressed AVI, try Huffy. The goal is to dramatically reduce the file size and gradually work back upward.

2. Completely disconnect the audio and disable audio capture in MMC. This will test if it is a timing issue between your audio card and capture card.

Both of these conditions are quite common. On the audio, many will tell you that onboard audio is bad, this is simply not true. 3 or 4 different onboard audio and 3 to 4 different PCI audio cards tell me it is not on-board or PCI that is the problem, just the particular interaction between a specific audio card and a specific capture card. Some caused dropped frames, some did not, some drop one frame at the beginning and no more, some do not. This variation occurred for both on-board and PCI, one PCI card that dropped massive frames performed perfectly with a new motherboard. The old board's onboard audio worked fine while the new board's did not. It's the combination you're dealing with, not necessarily the individual pieces.

Sounds like you are using ATI's software to cap with? Have you tried using different capture software?

ATI MMC, used VirtualDub at one point, it didn't report any dropped frames but it would always "insert frames". Not clear on what that means, though. The video looked alright, I think it jumped a couple of times, though...

Try checking the hard drive sustained data rate before anything else. If for whatever reason you can't write to the drive fast enough, nothing else will hekp. The easiest wa to check is to use Nero if you have it installed. Open up Nero Burning Rom (not Express or Smartstart or any of the other crap that comes with it), go to File, Preferences, Cache and click on the test all drive speeds button. This will let you know what your drives sustained data rate is. With the sort of drives you have I would expect to see anything between 30 and 50 MB/s. Anything less and you have a serious problem.

This is EXACTLY why when I first got into video recording in late 2000 I gave up on ATI cards. I think that software based capture cards are a losing proposition. Believe it or not, your problem could be that your CPU simply isn't fast enough.

Canopus does hardware encoding. So does Hauppage. So does my old treasured Dazzle DVC-II (no longer made) which for a while was one of the very best PCI based capture cards. A card with a hardware chip for encoding the video takes all the pressure off having to have a state of the art system. Can you capture at SVCD resolutions and bit rates without dropping frames? If yes, try this test. Try to capture video at DVD resolutions (720.x480) and set it up to capture all I frames. If this works and you don't drop frames, your CPU is too underpowered for your card. All I frames isn't apparently valid for DVDs, but my old 1 GHz CPU PC could capture 720x480 without dropping frames only if I did an all I frames capture under my old ATI All-in-Wonder. If I did normal GOP captures, I couldn't do 720x480 with the card. At the time, my 1 GHz CPU was state of the art and I realized that if I was going to have to wait another year or two for a CPU to come out fast enough for my stupid ATI card to do 720x480 properly, maybe I should look into getting a card that did hardware encoding.

I would encourage you to consider ending your love affair with ATI. I have lost track over the years with how many guys I have seen beat their heads against a brick wall because a stupid ATI card dropped frames, gave them horrible audio sync problems, etc. and although they would throw buckets of money at buying new, bigger, faster hard disks, memory and faster CPUs, somehow the idea of just buying a Hauppage card for a lot less money than they spent to upgrade was "crazy talk". Far far better to spend $500 or more upgrading the PC so the ATI card would do what it was supposed to do than to spend less than half of that on a new card.

The PCI based Hauppauge PVR-250 is a fine video card available at a very good price right now. I have a serious question for you. Do you just want to capture excellent quality video or is it more important to you that your ATI card work as you expect? If you just want the excellent video, buy the Hauppauge and forget about ATI. If you are yet another "married to ATI" guy, good luck. I suggest a motherboard and CPU upgrade.

But of course the downside is that the hardware based Hauppauge cards are mpeg capture only. I use a ATI All in Wonder Radeon 7500 to capture 720 x 576 as avi using the Huffyuv codec (and used to capture 720 x 576 avi using the picvideo MJPEG codec using an ATI All In Wonder Rage in a machine with a 600 MHz processor). I NEVER capture directly to mpeg, I want quality that I can edit.

Don't blame the card, it is quite capable of doing what you are trying to do, there is a problem elsewhere that is causing the computer to drop frames. It may be hard drive transfer rate, some background programs running that are slowing things down, it might be that curse of everything, Norton, bit it isn't the card.

Your processor is plenty fast enough for either MPG capture or AVI, CPU is largely out of the picture for AVI cap, that is almost exclusively Hard Drive.

Transfer rate tests are really worthless unless the transfer test is sustained for several minutes, which they usually are not. Capping an Uncompressed or Huffy file is a larger, longer, sustained data transfer than anything else you will ever do on a PC, and a minor, split second interuption will result in dropped frames.

Still do not know what type of file you are capturing, the VDub attempts indicate it is AVI. If so, the issues are HD throughput and sound card clock synchronization. The tests I detailed previously will nail down the issue, depending on your results there are simple, straightforward ways to solve the problem.

Hauppage and dedicated processors can be good; however, in the time that Hauppage has upgraded their processor ONE TIME, I have gone thru a 1.0, 1.2, 1.4, 1.7, 2.2, and finally a 2.4 Ghz processor, these upgrades improving video, games, all apps used on the PC. Plus the ATI is more versatile, AVI, MPG1, MPG2, even XVID now feasable. At some point, a CPU assisted capture will in fact beat a dedicated processor capture, with the faster CPU also being useful in other tasks.

Try WinDV.

I used a 1.8Ghz Intel for years with my ATI card. It was fine. I now have a 2.8Ghz Intel, and it's still fine, same card.

Your temperatures are fine.

ATI MMC is excellent software, there is nothing wrong with it. It is the best option.

Your audio card is the first culprit. What card is it?

Here's a long shot but I had the same problem with an AWI 9600 dropping frames like crazy. Turned out that when my system would come out of hibernate a few times it would drop the harddrives down to PIO mode, it's a bug with some systems, check out http://support.microsoft.com/kb/817472/ for more info.

Anyway it supossed to be fixed in XP SP2 but it may not hurt to try the work around to see if thats your problem. Basicly you just turn off suspend or hibernate, uninstall the IDE driver and reboot letting Windows reinstall the driver for the IDE channels. Then check that the drives are set to DMA.

I've had several AIW cards and the only time I've had any problems with execssive dropping of frames was the above situation.