So what am I doing wrong?

[Richard_G]

So what am I doing wrong? I’ve just captured over two hours of PAL video in 720 x 576 mpeg-2 with a bitrate of 6000kbs from a terrestrial digital decoder connected to the S-Video input of my ATI AIW Radeon 7500. I used the Capture module of Ulead MediaStudio Pro 6.5 to do the capture and it reported 0 dropped frames.

While this capture was taking place, the machine was connected to the net on a USB broadband modem, my Firewall and virus scanning software were both running and, as my machine is configured as an Internet Sharing Gateway, my teenage daughter was using her pc (connected to mine on a 100Mbs NIC) to download mp3 files while chatting to at least 6 of her friends at the same time on MSN. In between my screen saver kicking in, I was reading and replying to emails and having the odd game of Spider Solitaire.

I must be doing something disastrously wrong. Everyone else seems to drop frames even after disabling half the pc and leaving it in a quiet, darkened room. I can’t manage to drop a single one no matter how much I abuse it! I mean, it’s not as if the pc is anything special. Windows XP Pro with SP1, XP2200 processor, 512Mb DDR2700 RAM, cheapo KT400 chipset motherboard, the ATI card and a pair of IBM hard drives (neither of which has been defragged in months).

Or is it just that I’ve been playing with computers for long enough to know how to set them up properly? After all, when I first got into digital video, I was capturing at 640 x 480 on a machine that boasted a K6-2 300 processor and 128Mb of RAM. Capturing wasn’t the problem, it was the rendering that took days!!!

[andkiich]

So what exactly are you trying to accomplish with this post?

If you want accolades and praise, you'll get none from me. I have a disdane for people who brag about their exploits. If you're ego needs stroked, then please, by all means try and get some edification, but you'll get none from me.

Instead of the ego trip, why not use some of this wonderful knowledge about how great you are on setting up machines for helping others out, who are obviously not as skilled as you.

[FOO]

Just tell us whether you actually did anything
special at all or is it that the hardware and software
you have just works. There aren't a whole lot of
adjustments possible.

[Richard_G]

So what exactly are you trying to accomplish with this post?

If you want accolades and praise, you'll get none from me.

I certainly don't want praise. What I'm saying is that all these people that are constantly whining that this hardware is crap, these drivers are crap, this operating system sucks, my machine isn't powerful enough, I haven't got enough memory, etc, are obviously blaming the wrong thing. If everything is set up correctly, it will just work. The same goes for having to disable everything in order to capture video. It simply shouldn't be necessary unless you need to do this to compensate for some other weakness that isn't noticeable until you ask the pc to do something that makes it work a bit harder.

As for using my experience to help others, I've tried. But most times any advice I've given is then countered by numerous others that seem to know better.

The people that advocate using this app to capture, this one to edit, another one to author, a further one to encode and finally, yet another to burn are simply asking for trouble. I use Ulead Mediastudio Pro 6.5 and Ulead DVD Workshop. I have no connection with Ulead (other than having spent money with them to buy the software) and everything does exactly what it should do.

All I'm saying, is that it can be done. You don't need a high spec machine with Gigabytes of memory, a 3GHz processor and a RAID array that is set up solely to work with video. On a pc with a processor faster than 1GHz and 256Mb of RAM, anything more than no dropped frames is not acceptable and is a sign that something isn't right.

[ebenton]

So I guess those warnings that are displayed in some DVD burning applications that say to not run other applications while burning a disk are there because the authors of the software are incompetent as well?

[Richard_G]

So I guess those warnings that are displayed in some DVD burning applications that say to not run other applications while burning a disk are there because the authors of the software are incompetent as well?

Not at all. They just have to assume that a lot of the people that will be using the software are. It's no different to McDonalds having to print a warning that coffee is very hot on their cups. They have to cater for the lowest common denominator.

[FOO]

I have to say I've been baffled by this for a while. I can capture
at high rates as well, but I have to be careful. I have the 8500
If I capture using MMC and the PicVideo MJPEG at #18, The processor
load hovers around 20%. I capture to D instead of the OS drive.
The CPU is AMD running at 1600 Mhz
If I do almost anything at all, I get dropped frames.
even resizing the display causes it.

I'll try the Ulead stuff Maybe they buffer deeper.

BTW why don't you use the ATI software ?

[Richard_G]

BTW why don't you use the ATI software ?

Until I went over to DV, I used the Picvideo Mjpeg codec too. I captured as avi using the Ulead software with the quality setting at 18 or 19. Now, anything that is going to be editted, I capture as DV via Firewire (a full tapes worth at a time). The stuff I'm capturing to mpeg is anything that is not going to require any editting (other than maybe trimming the ends off) that I can simply burn to DVD (-R or -RW). In effect, I'm using it as a VCR but without the loss of quality.

I found the ATI MMC to be nothing like as stable and, as you say, could easily be upset (I have MMC 7.7 and corresponding drivers loaded). The Ulead app gives far more control too.

I have two hard drives, both UDMA 133 running in DMA mode 5, with the boot and OS drive as Master on Primary channel and a 120Gb 7200 rpm IBM as slave which I capture to.

I'll admit that when I first started this video lark, I suffered like many others seem to do, but most of that was down to the very low spec of pc that was around at the time. I suppose that as I had to cope with a capture rate of around 8Mbs when the average IDE hard drive was only just capable of about 10Mbs sustained data rate made me think about the setup. My point is that these days, unless your machine has something fundamentally wrong with it, it should be capable of doing whatever you ask of it.