I use my PC for a PVR with powerVCR II and with the quality I record at I would get really bad jitter etc. By setting the priority of the task to "high" where most other operations are "normal" this prevented other tasks from messing up my TV recording. I can run any application I want (but of course they will run slow since priority is given to powerVCR) but the playback now is smooth no matter what I run on the PC.

What I did then is do the same for virtualDub and raised its priority to "high". Now even if I have screen savers running or other processes that might interfere with the capture the virtualdub has priority over them. I ran a capture from my 8mm that used to give me 1% dropped frames and now that is at 0.1% (my CPU was at times maxing out at 100%). The priority change does give priority to the hard drive and memory etc so maybe that is why this worked in my case since even when the CPU would hit 100% this was being caused by other tasks which now are at a lower priority. Obviously its better to not have any background tasks running but this helps ensure that no other tasks will affect the cature. The faster your CPU the less this would help.

If you want to try this all you need is to create a batch file to launch virtualdub (or any other program you want) and let that run it at "high" priority. This will work in winNT and win2k for sure but I do not have winXP so I could not test this for winXP but I would expect it will work there also.

If you want to give this a try here is one way to do it. Just run the batch file to launch virtualdub.

Create a batch file with notepad and the syntax is as follows:

path c:\;C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Desktop\Video Programs\VirtualDub-1_4_11;

Start /high virtualdub.exe

The BOLD is just your path for the folder you have the virtualdub.exe in.

ALTERNATE METHOD: Go to the task manager > click the processes tab at the top > right click on the task (virtualdub.exe) and use the "set Priority" menu item. This will set the priority until you close virtual dub. It will reset to normal when started again.

For those lucky enough to have a DUAL CPU system you can set the /high to /realtime and this will force all tasks even system tasks to a lower priority and still work just fine.


Just thought I would pass this on.