Who here uses just ONE drive?

[richie_r1ch]

How many people here capture using only one drive on their pc? Meaning you capture to the drive that also contains the OS.

What are the highest settings you can capture at with little or no frame drops? Which codec, resolution, programs etc..

I wanna see how well others are doing without a seperate capture drive. Maybe someone has a setup that can get good results that can help some of us out

Me
I can't get passed 352x480 using Picvideo MJPEG @ 19 - no dropped frames. anything higher and it drops

I drop alot of frames with Huffy at anything higher than 352x240. I'm trying to cap at 704x480 with either codec.

How is huffy working for you guys at resolutions higher than standard vcd?

My System Specs are on my profile

Thanks to those who reply.

[fmctm1sw]

I used to. When I got a spare 20GB ATA-100 drive, I decided to go with a "dedicated" capture drive. Probably the best move I ever made. My measured maximum for speed with the virtualdub benchmark was in the neighborhood of about 30000 (kbps?). I installed the 80GB drive as a primary on the secondary IDE channel with my DVD burner. I used the virtualdub benchmark test again and ended up with about 47000 or 48000 (kbps). I remember I could cap at 720x480 w/ 24 bit color, but it would drop a few frames here and there. Not anymore. Not only this, but dubbing operations are faster too when you go from one drive to the other instead of back to the same drive. I would definitely recommend a two drive set up.

[spiderman2k1]

I do it some time's when my E drive get full and need to record some thing.

[hoola_loop]

i have an old HP 1.2ghz (celeron!) with tv wonder ve xp pro that i use to capture to same drive been using the same generic 60gig hd that came with it. i use virtualdubmod and can capture with huffy a max res of 640/384 without dropped frames or at most 1 per hour anything above that and i drop frames on the amount of 20 or so per minute. but i use mjpeg registered @q19 and capture 640/480+uncompressed audio with no frame drop for the most part. if i have a long capture of say more than an hour and a half i will drop a frame (1) sometimes. i have xp performance set to best performance. i have all bells and whistles cut off.run the classic skin. i run defrag when im not encoding or capturing. various services disabled. i obviously make sure VS and such are turned off during capture.

[snafu099]

I have a single hdd installed in amd 1.2 system. My experience has been that it is not seperate drive that is relivant but the data transfer rate of hdd. After having bought some high end, high $ drives that I did not benchmark I found that they were not capable of the data speeds I was trying to use. New drive with 8m cache gives 14+mb/s so I can capture at any dvd compliant bitrate

BTW I use Ads usb IDVD-2 connected via add-on usb2 card

[redwudz]

I used my boot drive when I first tried to capture. Had problems, but they were more related to my CPU speed and memory. A second dedicated drive will probably help the most if your CPU and capture card are a little slow. Some people would also recommend just partitioning your boot drive and using part of it for capturing. Using NTFS in XP will also improve your speed a little. The problem with the boot drive is the OS accessing it during capture. If you can limit the access, that will help. Though, with the price of HD's being low, I would still recommend a second drive.

[fossil]

I capture 6 hour video tapes to my 40GB 5400rpm drive, i use any setting in ati mmc with little lesst than 18 dropped frame out of 6 hours that's darn good, and then the video gets transfered over the network to my main computer.

also it works good in virtualdub using huffy codec it drop very few frames a bit more than mmc about 40 frames at most out of 6 hours, then it gets transfered to my main rig.

i have athlonxp2000+ and 512mb SDram RADEON VIVO for capture

[mgh]

If you have not-pl enable DMA for your HD.
With my earlier PC PIII 800-Win 98-VFW drivers-could capture with PICvideo(quality 16) and PCM audio at 720x576 PAL without dropped frames .Pl. remember the CPU works for compression and also for writing to HD.
With my old system- I could capture with settings of PICvideo from 9 to 17 with no dropped frames at 720x576. Lower or higher settings of PICvideo resulted in dropped frames.

[vcd4ever]

I'm using a PII 400Mhz and i can capture at 704x576 using picvideo 18 without dropping any frames.

vcd4ever.

[richie_r1ch]

I'm using a PII 400Mhz and i can capture at 704x576 using picvideo 18 without dropping any frames.

vcd4ever.

and you're doing this with just one hard drive in your pc?

Your profile says you're using Win95? Is that what you're using to capture or is your profile outdated?

[richie_r1ch]

also it works good in virtualdub using huffy codec it drop very few frames a bit more than mmc about 40 frames at most out of 6 hours, then it gets transfered to my main rig.

i have athlonxp2000+ and 512mb SDram RADEON VIVO for capture

what resolution are you capping with using Huffy?

[vhelp]

Hi guys..

@ richie_r1ch,

Getting a good capture requires a few good points to thing about.

* Motherboard (mobo) and Chipsets
* Capture card setup (good pci slot - away from Slot #1, I think)
* Capture card Driver setup - properly tuned (installed)
* Hard drive spec AT-33 is minimal, but 100 is better.
* Source condition or device being captured from.

These Five are some good keys to successful zero-hassel capture :P

But, assided from mobo/chipset/hdrive, Capture Card Driver is very important.
Don't forget, that if you are using higher OS, ie, W2k/XP you are undoubltly
using WDM as your driver.

Most capture apps (ie, avi_io and vdub) are VFW mode apps.

There are other issues too, but just somethings to think about.
-vhelp

[vcd4ever]

and you're doing this with just one hard drive in your pc?.

I'm using a PII 400Mhz and i can capture at 704x576 using picvideo 18 without dropping any frames.

vcd4ever.

Yes, i can do this with one hard drive and i can also do this with 2 hard drives. I'm now using 2 hard drives and it doesn't matter if i'm capturing to the hard drive that contains the OS.

Your profile says you're using Win95? Is that what you're using to capture or is your profile outdated?

My profile is not outdated, i'm still using Win95 for capturing.

vcd4ever.

[vcd4ever]

Hi guys..

@ richie_r1ch,

Getting a good capture requires a few good points to thing about.

* Motherboard (mobo) and Chipsets
* Capture card setup (good pci slot - away from Slot #1, I think)
* Capture card Driver setup - properly tuned (installed)
* Hard drive spec AT-33 is minimal, but 100 is better.
* Source condition or device being captured from.

These Five are some good keys to successful zero-hassel capture :P

But, assided from mobo/chipset/hdrive, Capture Card Driver is very important.
Don't forget, that if you are using higher OS, ie, W2k/XP you are undoubltly
using WDM as your driver.

Most capture apps (ie, avi_io and vdub) are VFW mode apps.

There are other issues too, but just somethings to think about.
-vhelp

Tell me about it, i spent about 4 weeks trying to find the right combination of capture card driver and capture program.

vcd4ever.

[lchiu7]

I have one machine that I use for capturing from cable with a Pinnacle DC10+ card so the compression is hardware MJPEG. The machine is a Duron 1.3Gz and it has two hard drives, one 80G and one 40G, both 7200 ATA/133 with 8MB cache but both on the same channel.

The 80G (primary) replaced a drive that had died so I had to rebuild XP. I found I could capture with IUVCR MJPEG to the 40G (720x576) with no frame drops at all but drops galore to the 80G. This was really puzzling. Then I found the 80G was set to run in PIO mode while the 40G was set in UDMA5. No idea why but once I deleted the primary IDE channel from Windows, had it rediscover the hardware etc. it got reset to UDMA5 also and captures to that drive are drop free

I find I can also capture PicVideo MJPEG quality 19 to a 120G WD drive in a USB2.0 external case with no drops and even burn a DVD at the same time (albeit the source coming from the internal hard drive!). This is on an Athlon 2400+ with 1G RAM

[Northstar]

Im using a Maxtor/120gb/133/7200rpm second h/d to capture to, i use VirtualVCR, Morgan M-Jpeg V3 set at 99 and capture at 640x or 720x and get no dropped frames... this is with also using Emule downloading to the same drive (i am right now), it dosent affect my capture (very rarely) unless it finishes a dowload while capturing then it goes a bit mad from there on in (i just make sure its nowhere near finished before i start)

[richie_r1ch]

Thanks for all the replys

I'm gonna continue messing around with my hardware configuration