ME to XP = Dropped Frames

[Greyhair]

Here's the problem.

My computer is a 1 gig hz p3, Maxtor 5400 rpm 80 gig hdd hooked up to Promise ultra 100 controller. I use AVI_IO for captures and have been doing it for over a year. I was using an old Aureal Vortex sound card, but recently updated to a Turtle Beach.

I decided to change my OS from ME to XP Pro mainly so I could utilize NTFS. When I was using ME with the above setup, I captured using the Pinnacle PCTV Pro @ 720 x 480 with ZERO dropped frames......ever. Since updating to XP and the new sound card, I now drop 1/1000 frames. I updated all drivers, tried all the different Pinnacle drivers, removed the Ultra 100, changed bios settings, read the search subjects until my eyes bulge. No matter what I've done, the frame loss will only vary slightly but never go away.

First off, why is this happening, and second, at that frame loss will my video be materially affected? In other words, should I go back to ME to get rid of the frame loss or is it no big deal?

TIA
Mike

[Mirror_Image]

Are the frame drops just at the very beginning of your capture?

[Greyhair]

To be honest, the max time I've captured thus far was 17 mins. I'm encoding that now to get a look at the video. On the 17 mins., the drop rate was very consistently 1/1000.

[Mirror_Image]

have you done a ctrl-alt-del to bring up the XP task manager and check CPU utilization % (the "performance" tab)? I'd be interested to know what that % is, both at idle and while capturing.

[Greyhair]

I just installed IuVcr and did some caps in that. CPU usage hung around 50% and the drop rate was virtually identical to AVI_IO. Haven't looked at CPU usage in Task manager, will do that in an hour or so.

[Greyhair]

Just checked cpu usage during a cap. Ranged between 65% and 75%.

[Greyhair]

Update:

Just did a 2.5 hr capture. Catch this.......after 142 dropped frames (at right around 140,000 frames capped, or about 2/3 of the way through), the drops stopped completely. All the capped files were on the same disk.

Man, help me out here, this is getting to feel a bit like the Twlight Zone

[Mirror_Image]

How about that CPU usage at idle? Sitting here looking at this forum, mine runs about 1-5%, rising slightly to 10-12% when outlook2000 checks for mail. I'm wondering if you have some app running that makes the system bog down for an instant on a regular schedule.

[Barnabas]

It could be that your frame drops are due to HD fragmentation. I have also upgraded to XP from 98 and while I don't really notice that it drops frames any more than 98 did, defrag does not as fully defrag as it did with 98.

Some other things to consider are:

1: What is the cluster size on the drive/partition you are capturing to?
2: Did you format or convert your FAT32 partitions to NTFS?
3: If you converted, that's probably your trouble as the convert program sets your cluster size to 512 bytes. 4k works the best for video.
4: Even with a 4 k cluster size, NTFS is not as fast of FAT32 is.
5: I also have the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, and it should work better than your old card did.
6: You will probably not even notice 1 frame drop per 1000 frames.
7: Make sure you use YUY2/UYVY/YVYU over RGB24 if you can, as this is usually faster than RGB24 so it should drop less frames.

[Greyhair]

Mirror Image:

I didn't check the system idle processes. I'll do that. This computer is strictly for video though. The only applications running are what I'm using for capture. Processes *look* like they are only system processes. I'll check the idle processes. I'm assuming you mean while no programs are running?

Barnabas:

1. Cluster size is 4K
2. I converted to NTFS when I loaded xp. I formated the drive before loading xp (to remove ME)
3. While cluster size is 4K, Bytes per sector (8 sectors per cluster) are 512.
4. Might explain it indeed. Maybe I was on the edge before with the 5400 rpm hdd, and it's just enough of a difference to cause the drops?
5. I hope so.
6. Doing an full movie encode right now.....so far so good.
7. I'm using YUY2

Thanks both of you for the help so far!

[Barnabas]

Mike,

I still have one FAT32 partition (16kb cluster size) I can capture to, so I think I might try a capture to that partition and see how that compares to those to the NTFS partition as far as frame drops. You have a more powerful computer than I do, Athlon 750 mhz, Maxtor 60 Gig 5400 HD, ata 60 only. I capture at 480 x 480, but will try a test capture from Laserdisc today at 720 x 480 to both the NTFS and FAT32 drives and see what that shows.

What codec and settings are you using for your captures?
What are you capturing from? Tape, TV, etc.? What inputs?
The Turtle Beach Santa Cruz is a much more stable card for audio capturing. I saw my frame drops go down with it compared to my Creative Labs SB Live!

[Greg12]

Things I've noticed about XP captures.


1.) drop frames go down as you get closer and closer to the core of your drive. I drop less frames with 13 gigs free than with 3 gigs free.

2.) XP uses more ram than me, so you have less ram for capturing programs.

[pacoreguenga]

I think there is an easy solution to your dropped frames problem:

Check which chipset you have on your motherboard and install latest chipset support files for it. They can be downloaded from your motherboard's manufacturer web site.

If it's an Intel motherboard and you can't download from Intel's website, try Compaq. They have the support files for Intel chipsets.

I t happens to me everytime I reinstall Operating Systems. I have ME, 2000 and XP. ME is reinstalled from a Quickrestore CD, thus the patch is automatically applied. 2000 and XP require me to install manually everything. Why do I still have ME despite the superiority of 2000 and XP you may ask? Because I just love my (now discontinued) Iomega Buz video capture card and it only works under win95, win98, winME and Linux. I have drivers for NT and 2000 but they don't work at all. So I use ME just for that card. My other cards work well under 2000 and XP.

[Greyhair]

Thanks everyone for the feedback.

pacoreguenga: I downloaded the latest 810 drivers from Intel and loaded those. My video card performance improved , but it did nothing for the capture problem. For the record, I also verified I have the latest Promise drivers for the Ultra 100 ata controller. The ones I had were the latest.

Greg12: I thought that about HDD performance too. But, what I found was that the performance improved as the HDD filled up??? It was later in the cap that the drops stopped. As far as memory, I have 256 mb on this computer.

Barnabas: I'm using the exact same capture settings I was using with ME. I use AVI_IO (same frame drop problem occurs with IuVCR), Huffy Codec at the fastest setting, 720 x 480 resolution (although interestingly, I capped at all different resolutions including 352 x 240 and the frame dropped rate was identical), YUY2, composite connection from my VCR.

When I first set this computer up, it had a Creative Sound Blaster card that gave me nothing but trouble with frame drops and synch problems. That's when I bought the cheap Aureal card and the problems disappeared completely. I then went over a year and well over 500 captures without any problems until this OS change (and file system change, FAT32 to NTFS).

OH, and I didn't mention before about defrag. This computer has 2 80 gig HDD's. I partitioned one drive with a 2 gig partition for the OS and video software. The other partition and the other entire hdd are for nothing but video processing. I delete all files between captures and often format them.

Thanks for running your experiment. I'll be very curious to see what you get.

Thanks again all for the help!

[Barnabas]

Mike,

I ran some various tests to both the FAT32 and NTFS partitions and the results were actually a hair better with the NTFS partition.

Test 1:

I recorded 7 1/2 minutes to NTFS at 720 x 470 with huffy set to the fast setting. Captured a total of 13494 frames and only dropped 2 frames. The CPU was running in the 60-70 % range on both tests.

Test 2:

Same as above, but to the FAT32 partition. Only recorded 7.08 minutes due to the 4 gig file limit. Captured a total of 12833 frames and dropped 3 frames. Windows states that both drives need to be defraged.

I used VirtualDub for both of these tests, with preview turned off. Both tests were done from a Laserdisc, and were started at the same point so that both captures would be of the same exact material, as some stuff compresses better than others. The LD was "Airport", and had of good bit of movement, even some falling snow to compress. The capture card used for these tests is a CyberMail AV (brooktree chipset). My display card is an ATI All-In-Wonder 128, set to 16 bit color, and 800 x 600 res.

It seems strange to me that I can capture with a lower frame drop than you, as you have ata 100 to my ata 60, and a clear computer. This capture card is even sharing an IRQ with my ProVideo 231 hardware mpeg-1 encoding capture card. Perhaps you would want to try capturing in VirtualDub and see if that helps or not.

With this same computer, but back on Windows 98, I used to drop 1 frame per 3 minutes no matter what I did. After months of trial and error I discovered that my Award bios had a bug that ran my hard drives at ata 33, not ata 66. As soon as upgraded the bios, my constant frame drops ended.

[Greyhair]

Wow, thanks for the test information. Very interesting indeed. Still wonder what's up here and still checking. I'm waiting for an encode to finish so I can check idle processes. Think I'll also look to see if there's a bios update, although it's the same bios that allowed me to have zero drops with ME?

Any other suggestions from anyone?????

[Barnabas]

Mike,

Thinking about you dropping 1 frame per 1000 frames exactly, have you tried to clock the exact time it takes for it to drop a frame? Does it take exactly the same amount of time each time before it drops a frame? I would doubt it's your BIOS, since that's the same as on ME, but perhaps you have changed some settings in the BIOS?

Also make sure that plug and play did not get turned off in the BIOS somehow.

BTW, I have 256 MB of memory as well.

It sure seems like something is kicking in that's causing the frame drop. What is your source you are capturing from?

[Greyhair]

Ok, I'm sitting here watching the performance chart on the task manager at idle. Cpu usage is ranging between 0 and 6%, with the taskmgr process using the processor. When I switch to looking at just apps, the cpu usage drops to 0-1 or 2%. I let it run like that for 5 mins to see if something would spike........nada.

The timing of the drops is not "exact", but is in the same ballpark, right around 1-2 frames/minute on average. I wish it was more predictable, might help out. I capture from a vcr on a composite hook-up, same as it has been for over a year.

Plug and Play O/S in bios was disabled. I enabled it and tried to cap with the same result.

This is really weird. I can only attribute it, so far, to either using XP or the sound card. I KNOW the sound card is an improvement, but is it possible I now need to drop frames to keep sound in synch with a better sound card? I don't know, just shooting in the wind.......

Thanks everyone for help thus far. If anyone else has any suggestions, I'm open to it!

Mike

[Barnabas]

Mike,

First off, I don't think it's your sound card, but you can always try your old card if all else fails.

One thing however, you mention that you are capturing from a VCR. Are you actually capturing from a tape, or just using the VCR as a composite output to your card? If the source is from video tape, keep in mind that tapes are MUCH harder on sync than other sources are. A time base converter might help lower your drops a bit. I have been converting some of my tape collection to SVCD as of late, and I found out that some tapes will cause me to drop frames like mad when being captured, while others do not. Try a test capture from a live source like HBO and see if that helps.

[Greg12]

I just assumed you had NTFS file system.

if you have FAT32, like they siad, 4 gig limit.

[Greyhair]

Yes, I am capping from tape. But, the drop rate has been the same whether it's live or tape (I've tried a variety of both). And like everything else, this has been my method for over a year. That's the hell-of-it. It's been soooo consistent no matter what I do.

As I type, I'm capping a very clean tape of "The Searchers". It was taped off a digital cable broadcast. I have right now 26,000 frames capped and 27 drops. I/O buffers are showing no stress at all.

I can't put the old sound card back in as it is totally incompatibile with XP, which is why I bought a new sound card.

29,000 frames capped.....30 drops.......
33,000 frames capped.....34 drops.......

Thanks again for the help and suggestions. If there are any others, I'm still up to tweak.....

Mike

[Barnabas]

I am about out of suggestions here. You might try the following and see if it makes any difference.

1: If running off of a UPS unit, try it direct to the power plug.
2: Lower your screen size and colors
3: Capture with preview turned off.
4: Lower your capture size to say 480 x 480 and see if you drop less frames. If this helps, seems you have some sort of bottleneck.
5: Try using the PicVideo codec with a setting of 19. That will usually help you to drop less frames, and the quality is nearly as good as the Huffy codec. If you drop less frames at 19, my guess is that at 20, you will be back to the same drop rate.
6: Unplug any cordless phones near the unit.

Since you had Plug and Play turned off in your BIOS, you need to check to see that your capture card, sound card, and video card are not sharing any IRQ's.

[Greyhair]

Barnabas,

Trust me, I know what you mean about running out of ideas. Thanks for your patience and suggestions.

I don't use an APC and I capture with both overlay and preview off. The drop rate has been consistent regardless of capture resolution, I don't currently have PIC Video installed but might try that (although I really prefer Huffy). No cordless phone nearby.

My capture card shares an irq with my USB controller. XP won't let me change either one of them. There's nothing connected to the usb, so I uninstalled it. On reboot, XP put it right back in the same spot so I just disabled it. It didn't make any difference. My sound card shares an IRQ with "Intel 82801AA SMBus Controller", whatever that is. But again, XP won't let me change the setting. Can these be changed, and if so how do you do it in XP? Do I need to remove those cards and reinstall them with the Plug/Play bios enabled?

Still open to suggestions from anyone who has some ideas.

Thanks
Mike

[Barnabas]

OK,

Don't uninstall, just disable things, that way Windows won't reinstall on reboot. If you download showshifter, you will get the PicVideo codec.
In the "good ole days", we just set a jumper and put the IRQ where it needed to go, but since PnP, things are much harder than they should be. I did manage to get the IRQ's for my USB, sound card, Video card, capture cards etc., where they don't mess each other up. The USB and Sound card are each on their own IRQ's, while my CyberMail AV and ProVideo capture cards share an IRQ, but since they are never used at the same time, they don't cause any problems to each other. You can usually free up an IRQ by turning off ports, a floppy drive, anything you don't really need. You can force some IRQ settings in the BIOS most of the time, and moving cards from one place to another can change IRQ's but it's a bit of a roll of the dice. Some MAJOR problems can occur after trying to move IRQ's, so know what you are getting in to. You do need to keep PnP enabled in your BIOS, otherwise, things can get jammed on the same IRQ's.

[Greyhair]

Before I disable it, anyone know what "Intel 82801AA SMBus Controller" is?

[Barnabas]

I think you need that one, part of the chipset/MB combo I suspect. One other idea. Just to see if it makes any difference, try capturing to your OS partition.