new card - losing frames

[jeremypps]

hi everybody.
I have this new sapphire radeon 9000 vivo, which seems to work fine.
no capturing under w98, but under wxp it seemed everything would be ok, 720x576 mjpeg capturing without problems.
now I have these 4/5 tapes from a friend of mine, I have to capture them, so what I do is virtualdub 352x576, vertical reduction (but same results with 352x288 no vertical reduction), 25fps, audio pcm uncompressed (whatever khz, no matter), divx @ about 700-1000kbps.
well, for some of these tapes system begins to lose frames, at certain points in a dramatic way; other tapes are fine.
disk is primary slave ata100 defragmented; cpu works at 30%.
same results even if I uncheck "capture audio".
tapes seem normal quality, no macrovision, basically home shooting.
could please someone give me any hint?
thanks a lot to everybody.

[kitty]

Some cards do not like VHS in that is not clean - some people use a time base corrector between the tape player & the card to clean up the video signal but that can be expensive.

Also try capturing the audio with mild compression (one of the Microsoft codecs for example) - uncompressed audio will be quite large.

[hwoodwar]

I can think of two possible things that "might" help other than basic capture machine tune-up items such as most of the steps listed in:

http://www.vcdhelp.com/forum/userguides/81808.php


1. Make sure you are using the Sapphire drivers, not the ATI drivers. The Sapphire cards "powered by ATI" use different firmware.

2. In another post someone recommended changing the buffer settings in VirtualDub to decrease the number of dropped frames. What they recommended was (under Capture Settings):

Video Buffer Limit 200
Audio Buffer Limit 10
Audio Buffer Size 4000

I suggest you write down the original settings in case you want to go back to them. Unfortunately, I just wrote down the numbers, I don't have the URL to the post.

[jeremypps]

I have to thank you all for your kind replies.
it's a strange situation, tonight I've captured 8 hours from an LP recorded tape with AFC and NFC finals (you guys in the states have the best game in the world ...), just 800 frames dropped (captured more than 720000), with same settings and other tapes (i.e. bob marley concert, original tape) problems begin to appear.
anyway, I'll try to change the settings in virtualdub, about changing the drivers I'm a bit worried everything goes to hell ...
many many thanks again to everybody, cheers, jeremy.
p.s. as usual, sorry for my bad english ...