Newbie capture probs

[chalottesbeach]

Hi,

im pritty new to this board but have been capturing for quite a while and have a very serious prob....

i have a geforce 5950FX VIVO and am having serious problems with it dropping frames in lots of programs including VirtualVCR, VirtualDub and Winfast PVR infact it drops more frames than it captures there fore making the video very jerky....I am capturing using a vivo connector and a composite cable....also am having sound probs where everyone sounds like they are gargling water when they talk....

any help would be brilliant as i have been promising my client his DVDs for months(good job hes patient)..

sorry forgot about my specs.....

P4 3.2GHZ
gigabyte Geforce 5950FX(i think thats right)
1GB of ram
1 Partitoned 120GB Samsung HD
on board AC97 sound
MSI 865P chipset. Neo-2 Platinum

[Cobra]

Moved to Capturing Forum.

[chalottesbeach]

cheers diddnt know wether to put it here or in newbie so thanks for moving....

[mwkurt]

Hello,

To begin with it usually helps if you capture to a diiferent hard drive than what your system files are on. Have you tried to defrag your hard drive? I have a much slower system than you and have no problems capturing. I think that your problem could be the one hard drive.

[chalottesbeach]

hi

have tried previously capturing to single hard drive with different capture card and works perfectly not only that though i have tried capturing to a seperate phyical drive and it still doesnt work...thanks for the suggestion though

[Steen4]

Just curious. Could you give some more info, like:

Is DMA mode enabled on your capture drive?

How is your capture drive partitioned?

Which of those partitions are you capturing to?

Have you shut down all background processes before attempting to capture?

What is your capture drive's RPM rating?


I would suggest that you obtain a dedicated capture drive. Also, you should probably not capture with virtualdub if you are using (and you are) a WDM-based card, even if you don't seem to be dropping frames with it. Virtualdub is a VFW capture program and WDM-based cards must deal with virtualdub through a translation layer that is buggy and problematic.

[chalottesbeach]

i have dma enabled.

im using a samsung 7200RPM HD

and its partitioned into two parts capturing tried on the virtual drive with windows and without it made no difference.... as i said earlier as well i have tried using a seperate pysical drive for capturing and it has made no difference what so ever....

i use msconfig to cancel all startup and background tasks i just open anti-virus for using the internet but i exit it before capturing...

and yes i did use virtualdub but i use virtualVCR and winfast pvr more....

and just a little more info when capturing with ether no compression or huffyuv it captures 40 frames in a minute and drops the rest...

when using a lower codec like microsofts mpeg-4 it still drops too may frames for it too run smooth but doesnt drop as many..

[twodogs]

Have you tried capturing something else? Perhaps your source is not good.

[tdan]

Have you tried capturing something else? Perhaps your source is not good.

The other possibility is that the source has Macrovision protection. I have seen this manifest itself during capture as massive frame drops.

[Steen4]

I must say, it seems a tough nut to crack right now, but it's only because I haven't found my hammer yet...

The fact that your problems seem to be independent of the capture software suggests the answer may lie with the system substructure in some way. Check your motherboard manufacturer's website for the latest motherboard/eide drivers. Hit the forums: are people complaining about timing-related issues with your motherboard's southbridge? Are there issues concerning certain versions of the ide drivers? Always look for as much common ground as possible: are people with your system configuration (or as close to it as you can find) having the same or similar difficulties?

By the way, what capture resolution are you using? Also, mwkurt asked whether you had defragged your capture partition before capturing, but I didn't notice whether you had answered that. It's actually best to start with an empty partition, but if you must capture to one that's already populated with info, it really should be defragmented.

[chalottesbeach]

Hi after reformating and using a fresh drive with the right progs on that i use and a totaly clean SATA drive i have maged ti find the problem....

i found that people using my config had found that the graphics capture card was so powerful that it couldnt handle writing to and reading from the same drive... well i was cofused because after u meantioned the seperate drive capturing i tried and i diddnt work, well i found that a normal IDE drive was not transfering fast enough and luckly i had the ablity on my motherboard for SATA HDs so i connected a SATA HD up and i captured perfectly in 720 X 576 which is the PAL DVD standard im using for the clients home movie to DVD thing im doing.... So thanks for the help but i seem to of fixed it with the help u gave me of course.......I would like to know what u think of this solution as it cost over £200 and seems to be permenant.....

also my computer tech shop said that the reason that the hard drive couldnt handle writing and reading at the same time is because it cant jump between places fast enough to catch the missed frames......

finally(i know this post i huge Sorry) the tech at another shop said u need to buy a a pinnical raptor capture card...now after looking i cant find a pinnical raptor only a canopus raptor, and i have a absolutly perfect capture working thanks to u guys/girls and a bit of elbow grease and money. so was that tech talking rubbish cos i think he was?

thanks...

P.S. oh and i was wondering about the sound prob as it only shows itself on previously captured items but when moved onto somthing else then formating the drive and putting them back they sound great when they were gargled....problem was i formated three times to get it back to normal....any ideas?

[chalottesbeach]

Hi, again

After using the sata hard drive to capture to which is totally empty and has nothing on i found the capture worked excellent but now its started losing frames again i cant find the problem... its a brand new drive so i dont think it needs defraging but i did it any way.....still no luck, also i tried to find out about the southbridge thing that the last poster was talking about but i couldnt find anything about it so i presume there to be now probs...

im all out of ideas now people so any thing u can throw at me ill try as long as it doesnt cos too much....also the strange this is that the frames only seem to start dropping after direct x 9 has been installed even though u can tuse the card without it....also the sound probs i have been mentioning seem to be connected as the framed seem to star dropping when the sound goed gargely and vice versa....

thanks for anything you can come up with...

and in answer to the macrovision question no as far as i am aware non of the sources im using have macrovision and the source is a general VCR...using a AV adapter and Phono cables to a my VIVO connector which goes into the computer.....

[BrainStorm69]

Couple of things - (although what I'm going to discuss may be more applicable to non-SATA drives - I don't really have any experience with SATA drives)

1. Not only is is best to capture to a physically separate hard drive, it's best to actually have that drive on a different IDE channel than the drive with your OS and Apps.

2. Even if you have DMA enabled, in which DMA mode is the HD actually operating? You can check this in Device Manager. Even if you have your OS and Apps drive and Capture drive on separate IDE channels and have DMA enabled, if you have another slower drive (say a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM) on the same channel as the capture drive, the IDE channel with operate at the slowest mode of the devices connected to it. For example, if you have an Ultra ATA 133 HD, but an older CR-ROM that only runs in PIO mode, and they are both on the same IDE channel (either Primary or Secondary), that channel will only run as fast as the slowest device connected to it (i.e., PIO mode).

Even though I really don't have any experience with SATA drives, I would think the same principles would apply.

[chalottesbeach]

hi thanks for the suggestions but no the SATA drive is totaly different from the IDE channel drives plus there isnt an other SATA drive attached....

i have managed to get it working again and found that the problem was the graphics display driver that came with the card after installing the newest drive it now works..... there is only one more problem im making a DVD and need the resolution as 720 X 576 for PAL but am having trouble getting virtualVCR to do it it says it has a FAIL error and thats about it... any help would be very helpful as i know alot of you use VirtualVCR