Suggestions on first moves to fix dropped frames after FAQ

[sebasang]

Hi,

I have an Abit AA8XE 3rd Eye running at 3.4Ghz on a Windows XP MCE with a RAID 1 mirror array of 2 Maxtor 200Gb Hard Drives. The RAID is onboard Intel ICH6. The array has two partitions: system partition and a files/programs partition.

It's got 1Gb of RAM.

The video card is an Abit Radeon RX600 Pro HDTV which has VIVO on a PCIex bus. The soundcard is onboard Realtek ALC880.

When I capture normal video things are alright; but I have this PAL VHS film taken from a bumpy moving car that I'm trying to capture and it isn't working.

With HuffyYUV or MJPEG compression AVIs I can get it to work but not at the quality I want. It normally comes with vertical waves but I can correct that out: the colour is weak and resolution poor though.

But if I try to capture a fulL AVI or an MPEG-2 with a high bitrate I get about 7 seconds and then it starts to shed 40-60% of frames, getting worse with time until it misses just about everything. If I go with a low bitrate on the MPEG-2 it's just really jerky.

The hard drive is putting through about 30Mb/s which doesn't seem too bad.

Anyone got any thoughts what I should be doing to fix this - eg.

Hard Drive on IDE Bus without RAID?
Something with the partitions on the RAID drives?
External MPEG Encoder box/internal card
DV Cam with pass-thru
PVR card
New Sound Card
New Video capture card

Grateful for any tips.


Regards,


Seb

[Kunta Kinte]

Does the RAID have your system programs on it as well as your video? It shouldn't. Also, is it defragged? And lastly, are do you have every nonessential program not running? This includes the big taboo: No surfing the 'Net during capturing. Just my two cents.

[guns1inger]

I used to capture full-D1 PAL DV to 5400rpm IDE drives on a celeron 500 with 768mb ram, and never dropped a frame. If you have a firewire card and DV cam with pass-through give it a try first. I would leave the task manager open while capturing from the VIVO card, just to see if there is a CPU hog or intermittent spike, as a pure capture will be better than a DV capture if you can get it (although for a VHS source you probably wont see any difference)