Massive frame drops with commercial VHS tapes

[kipi]

Hi,
I am trying to transfer my VHS tapes to AVI.
I am having problems with capturing commercial tapes that I have bought.
My own recordings are captured perfectly (mostly) without frame drops, but the commercial tapes causes frame drops between 30-40%!
Can this have something to do with macrovision protection?

If I capture video without audio for commercial tapes then I can also capture them without frame drops. I thought first it might be a synch problem with my old AWE-64 ISA card, so I replaced it with a newer PCI audio card, but I still have the same problem. Is there any easy way to synchronize separately captured audio and video?

I have a separate Hardware Profile for video capture with only the necessary processes running and unnecessary hardware deactivated.
Here is my configuration:

Windows 98 SE
DirectX 8.1
Bt8xx WDM drivers
256 MB RAM
20 GB UATA-66 Capture disk (Clean, not defragmented)
466 MHz Intel Celeron CPU
Abit BP6 Motherboard
Zoltrix Nightingale Pro 6 Audio
Pinnacle Studio PCTV capture card (No Pinnacle drivers installed)

No IRQ-conflicts.
I have tried capturing with both Huffyuv and MJPEG PicVideo codes.
I experience no major differences with these codecs. The sound has been captured in 44 100 Hz 16 bit stereo.
I have tried both avi_io and virtual dub. Virtualdub seems very slow about 30% slower than avi_io.

Any clues?

[SLK001]

Your tapes aren't good enough quality to capture. Do a search on this site for TIME BASE CORRECTORS or TBC to better understand your problems.

[Valnar]

My guess is your processor is not fast enough to compensate for the noise on the VHS tapes.

If you're getting into video type "stuff" anyway, it may be time for an upgrade. If you need to convert to MPEG in the future, that 466Mhz will kill you.

Robert

[piepkoekoek]

Hi there,

Had to do some drastic things to get rid of frame drops, but first my config.

CeleronII 566 @ 935 Mhz (O'clocked...)
ASUS CUSL Mobo
256 MB RAM
SB Live Value
Pinnacle PCTV Rave
HD: 2.5GB, 9GB, 60GB

Have used different kinds of soft (AVI_IO/VirtualDub/etc...) and allways had frame drops in Win98SE.

But now my "framedrop-days" are over!
1) Install WinXP
2) Install drivers (I'm using Pinnacle V5.01 driver CD)
3) Install your fave codecs...
4) Make your capture drive NTFS (no 4 GB file limit!)
5) Use freeware VirtualVcr program for capture.
(www.digtv.ws)
No more frame drops!!!

Tested it at default processor speed (566Mhz) and Huffy at 352*576 res.
Again, no frame drops! (even with second and third generation VHS-tapes)

Hope this helps. (even if it seems quite radical...it helped me)

Cheers,

Manuel.

[D_Knife]

All of these suggestions are good - but try this before spending money on new hardware or radical system changes
you said you can capture video without problems if you don't cap sound
This means it's not a macrovision problem as macrovision is built into the video stream only.

Download this customised version of VirtualDub
http://www-user.rhrk.uni-kl.de/~dittrich/sync/

It includes a special audio syncroniser that might help you in this case.
If nothing else the program is FREE and you have nothing to lose
according to the instructions it's a rebuilt VirtualDub EXE , copy it into your VirtualDub folder and run. Ther are instructions on how to activate the audio sync.

If this doesn't work then go with SLK001 's suggestion of the Timebase corrector

[kipi]

Thanks guys for all your suggestions!
I have tried the audio sync version of virtualdub, but it did not help.
Also the CPU utilization is (according to virtualdub) between 0-40% so it does not make sense that I would have to upgrade the CPU.
The tape is a brand new VHS tape so I cannot belive that the video signal is bad, unless there is a macrovision protection or something similar...
My own recordings (that are captured without frame drops) are of much worse quality than the tape that I bought.

I guess that I have to capture the sound and the video separately then...