I am able to successfully capture with my Pinnacle PCTV (NTSC) PCI card with Sourceforge drivers and Virtualdub.

One of the consistent problems I encounter is that I drop about 65 frames during each two hour movie capture. I recently discovered in my capture settings that I had Virtualdub set to capture at 25 fps (PAL). When it was set this way the first frame of my capture would always be dropped. I then changed the setting to 29.97 fps (NTSC). The first frame no longer dropped and it seemed like I solved my frame dropping issue.

Unfortunately, this isn't the case. I still drop about 65 frames during each movie capture. I have checked all of my settings.

My capture drive is a Western Digital 250GB 7200 RPM with a 50GB Capture Partition and a 200GB Video Filtering and Processing Partition. I have defragmented my capture partition and still encounter the same issue. I don't have any programs running when I capture.

The output to DVD after video processing is exceptional. I encode to MPEG-2 using TMPGEnc (2-Pass VBR). When playing the DVD the audio and video are in sync. Although, the video might be a fraction of a millisecond faster than the audio. It's hardly noticeable, however.

My Virtualdub settings are as follows:

Frame rate: 29.9706
Lock video stream to audio (enabled)
Drop %limit 10
Video buffer limit 150
Audio buffer limit 10
Audio buffer size 36000
Video Compression: PicVideo MJPEG Codec (Quality setting 19/Luminance Quality 2, Chrominance Quality 3, Subsampling 4/2/2, 2 Fields if more than '240' Lines enabled)
Resolution (720 x 480 YUY2)
CPU Utilization during capture: 25-33%


My system is a hand-built:

Pentium 4 2.4B
512MB Kingston RAM 2.5CL
60GB 7200 RPM Drive (System Drive)
250GB 7200 RPM Drive (Video Encoding)
Plextor DVD+R
Hitachi DVD-ROM
ABIT IT-7 (not Max2) Motherboard
Pinnacle PCTV PCI Capture Card
Realtek '97 Onboard Audio

I capture from:

Tivo using Composite for TV shows
Tivo using S-Video for movies I really like

Any advice on what's causing this would be greatly appreciated. It's something very minor. I just want to know if I can eliminate frame drops all together.