Which OS Best for Capture

[woodwarh]

I am begining to setup a dedicated system (that I already have and don't use much) to transfer from VHS tapes to VCD. The system components are: Abit BE6-II motherboard, Celeron 1Gig overclocked to 1250Mhz (I know, Celeron "Ugh" but it's the best of my spare systems), 384Meg PC133 SDram, and three Western Digital Hard Drives 10, 45 and 45Gig 5400 RPM. The two 45Gig are on the ATA 100 channel. I do plan on swapping these out in favor of one Western Digital WD1200BB 7200 RPM drive in one or two weeks. The capture device I have is a Belkin Videobus II.

I am concerned about dropped frames during capture. In my initial tests under XP Professional I had about a one percent dropped frame rate (acceptable, to me) on a 45 minute capture. Unfortunately, I just had to play with it and seemed to have made it much worse.

I have access to legitimate copies of Windows 98, 2000 Professional and XP Professional. Which would be best to minimize the dropped frame rate? I suspect Windows 98 due to the least overhead. Has anybody tested various Windows operating systems to determine which OS produces the least dropped frames? Eventually, when I have time I'm going to test this myself.

[Betamax]

Abit BE6-II motherboard, Celeron 1Gig overclocked to 1250Mhz (I know, Celeron "Ugh" but it's the best of my spare systems), 384Meg PC133 SDram, and three Western Digital Hard Drives 10, 45 and 45Gig 5400 RPM. The two 45Gig are on the ATA 100 channel. I do plan on swapping these out in favor of one Western Digital WD1200BB 7200 RPM drive in one or two weeks. The capture device I have is a Belkin Videobus II.

Bad choice of configuration !

Best choice would be : NO OVERCLOCKING (the cpu does do a lot of work while capturing, you can fry an egg on it). Use an Intel P-III (minimum 800Mhz)or better, or an AMD Athlon (minimum 1Ghz) or better, 1 disk (at least 40gig) which realy is ATA100 and at least 7200rpm (not the same where your os is installed on it, and don't use it for anything else but youre capturing and other video work - and be sure it's always defragmented!) don't install this disk at the same IDE-controller on which the OS-disk is installed (so not at the primary IDE), at least 128mb ram (best 256 or more), best to use a vga-card that's 4xAGP and has at least 32Mb DDRAM on it.
Your OS could be best WindowsME, Windows2000 or WindowsXP (if using w2k or wXP, set the filesystem of the drive you're using for the capturing into NTFS). If WindowsME then set the fs into FAT32. FAT32 of WindowsME is nearly the same as with w2k, but it isn't with w98!

[ggtronic]

i use Ati AiW-radeon with athlon 1.2G and win98Se

no droping at all ( with original mmc7.1 )

[spiderman2k1]

I used to use 98SE and i have a ALL IN WONDER Radeon and the Dazzle 2 and have found that WINDOWS 2000 is much better

[doug1937@hotmail.com]

Capturing in an effort to make VCD discs? If you're compliant to the VCD standard of 352x240 @ 29.97 FPS, then you should find things easy on any modern computer. 2-3 years ago I was capturing VCD-compliant footage with ZERO dropped frames and my PC was a lowly 350MHz Pentium-II...using Virtualdub my CPU usage was about 25%. I now have a lowly 750MHz AMD T-Bird and my CPU usage is about 10%. If you have a 1GHz machine, even if it's a Celeron, you should never drop a frame. If you do, you probably need to make sure nothing, and I do mean NOTHING, else is running on your PC while you're capturing. Kill all resident processes that you can.

And I support the advice to stop overclocking...just to make your system more stable (instability might cause frame drops).

[doug1937@hotmail.com]

Oh yes...at the time I was using Win98. Now I use WinXP and have had no O/S-related troubles...

[Craig Tucker]

I have the following system
1ghz pIII
640MB ram
40GB 7200RPM dedicated capture drive
Win 98se
ATI all in wonder 128 pro 32mb
firewire card

If i do a DV capture at 720x576 25fps PAL I do not drop a single frame.

If i do an analogue capture using ATI MMC 6.3 I do not drop a single frame.

If i do an analogue capture using virtualdub i drop frames. Only a very small amount (about 1 frame every 2 to 3 minutes).

Does anybody know why this is, is it a glitch with virtualdub.

Craig

[doug1937@hotmail.com]

You don't say what format you're capturing into. With Virtualdub you capture into AVI, right? It's harder to avoid dropped frames with AVI format than it is with MPEG format.

[homerpez]

B.S...

Actually if you use Huffy and Virtualdub, you will drop much fewer frames (in fact you'll only be using half your CPU power). The only concern is hard drive space, which you will use a LOT of!

If you see frames dropped in V-Dub, it often has to do with the Sound Card timing issue, it will drop frames to re-synch the video with the audio stream. Not a fair comparison to ATI software, where a dropped frame = fatality (corrupt capture file).

Unless you're using the "leaked" 7.5 MMC... they fixed the fatality part if you do drop frames.

[Greg12]

if you are using windows me, follow these instructions


1.) Put up away messages on IM's

2.) Run, do not walk, to your car

3.) Drive as fast as is legally possible to a computer store.


4.) Buy a new O.S


Seriously, Windows Me is a giant piece of sh!t

[darkelf]

If you have the drivers, go with either Windows 2000 or Win XP. I have not used XP much, but I use 2000 most of the day and appreciate it's stability.

It's all about the drivers. Unless you have good drivers for your cap card under XP (will 2000 drivers work?) I would rec 2000. It also takes (ever so slightly) less resources than XP, which could make up for a dropped frame here or there.

[Craig Tucker]

You don't say what format you're capturing into. With Virtualdub you capture into AVI, right? It's harder to avoid dropped frames with AVI format than it is with MPEG format.

I am capturing using one of ATI's AVI codecs (cant remember which one I am at work at the moment, something like YUV 9) because for some reason Vdub wont allow me to capture using huffyuv

Craig