Diagnostic tools to test b4 capturing

[fiiido]

Hi all,
I am new to the world of video on PCs.

I have a AMD K6-2 (350mhz) on a TMC Tivg5+ motherboard. I have 196M RAM and using an ATI All-in-wonder pro 128 Video card. I also have a Western Digital 80G HDD, with a 20G partition set aside for video.

I tried my first capture from a Camcorder using the Line-in. After some tweaks I managed to view an .avi file. However, it was jerky. During capturing I notice half as many dropped frames as captured. I used Huffyuv and VirtualDub.

Q1. Are are there any tools that I can use to determine if my system will cope with capturing, i.e. looking at HDD write speeds, optimal RAM, MIN processor speed.

I will install the VIA 4in1 drivers and also a western Digital "patch" to allow the full ATA speed be recognised in BIOS.

Q2. Any other help anyone can provide?

Much thanks

[macleod]

There are a few things:

1. a 350 computer, unless you are capturing at a ver low res and bitrate, you are going to lose frames (352x240 I would expect would be the best you are going to get res size). Have you tried and mpeg capture? Have you tried to capture with the ATI software?
2. is the hard drive UDMA (and is it set correctly on your system). whats the rpm of the drive 5400 or 7200?

Others may disagree, but I think the 350 is probably the biggest thing with why you are losing frames. As far as the software and to answer some of your question, get a copy of IUVCR (there are others that do this) and when you are capturing there is a meter that shows processor power used, etc.

The only thing I can think of off the top of my head is to set up of your system (what O/S are you using). Turn off ALL non essential applications in your win setup

[jtor]

I thought VirtualDub had a utility like this...you might want to look into it.

Canopus has a free utility, check their website.

hope this helps.

[Nelson37]

Your system is old and slow, doubtful it will give good results but some things to try.

Get seperate drive for boot, I throw away old 3 gig drives, use this for boot and 80 gig by itself on second channel for capture. Re-partition for full 80 gig. Using a partition on boot drive does not help, it must be a second drive, on the second channel, by itself (or matched with an identical drive in master/slave). With a second drive, you can also try Vdub's "Raid" and cap video to one drive and audio to another. This should help you somewhat.

Doubtful your MB will support full ATA speed, add-on ATA controllers are $30-40, Drive Speed is very important to good capture.

Cap to AVI is drive intensive, Cap to Mpg is processor intensive but can avoid dropped frames. Your rig is minimal to do either, but you should be able to do 352x240 AVI with zero or minimal frame drops. Don't spend much money on this, however, save for a new box or at least Mainboard, Chip, and Ram.

[hardwork12]

I am new to this also so I am making many newbie mistakes. My first captures were very jerky also using virtualdub for capture. I have a 900mhz system. What I found was this:

The default FPS rate for virtualdub is 15FPS and mpeg capture NTSC standard needs to be 29.97FPS. If the capture is set to 15FPS guess what I was dropping almost exactly 50% of the frames.

I am not in front of my home computer where virtualdub is but I think if you look at the lower right corner of the window you will see numbers like

44/16/m 15fps XXXXX The first one is your sound capture settings the second number is the FPS (frames per second) that I was talking about and the third number is Kbits/second collection rate audio+video (I think)

Just click (maybe double click) on the 15FPS and select 29.97fps for you setting if that is not what you already had.

Just a possibility this one drove me nuts. Also I used Huffy 2.1.1 and PICvideo MJPEG compression for the record.

[fiiido]

I will try to answer some of your questions:

Macleod:
I am setting the res to 354x288 (PAL). I did try the MPG capturing in the ATI MMC but that also dropped frames and was jerky. Is there another Mpeg capture? I tried the one in V.dub but that was very droppy.
The HD is UDMA , it is the latest WD80 (7200).
I am running WinXP and when I check the ATA under device manager I have the Ultra DMA selected and the box says Using Ultra DMA Mode 1. I
tried installing the VIA4in1. not sure if it helped. how do I know?

jtor:
Yes, V.dub has a test under the setup. It shows a write of 13.9M/s and a read of 50M/s. Also it showed a ZERO drop frame rate in its test.

Nelson37:
I have a older 20G drive which i could use for the avi files, but it is running at 5400rpm. Will that reduce dropped frames as opposed to a 20G partition on the boot drive?

hardwork12:
I am running PAL so I changed the FPS to 25. the average rate shows 15.9 FPS during the capture.

----------------

Any additional help on the DMA as I don't think I have quite sussed that out. The motherboard says it can go to ATA66, and I wondered if there are other DMA modes?

[Nelson37]

OK, use the 20 GIG for boot and the 80 for capture. You want your fastest drive on 2nd channel by itself for best performance. This will require some re-arrangement but should be worth it.

There is ATA 33, 66, 100, and 133, at least. Make sure you have a UDMA cable - it has finer wires than standard - or UDMA 1 will be your max speed. Cable is $3 to $5, well worth it.

That 15.9 FPS is indicating a problem, should be at the 25 you set it for, but I am not familiar with PAL capturing.