NO MORE DROPPED FRAMES

[Bstansbury]

I hope a lot of people get a chance to read this post. I won't go into the details but the answer is that the pro's out there have been telling us for a long time how to fix this,...and I finally tried it and it works. No more dropped frames.

The answer is,...before you start your capture, shut down everything on your taskbar except your capture program. Then go inside and shut down (from CNTL+Alt+del) other apps that could generate interrupts. Shut down your screen saver (it will interrupt Win checking on the mouse position). It would also help a lot to Tune your system, defragment drives, dedicate one very fast drive to just capture,..clean out your recycle bin, etc. etc.

Before I did this to my system, I was getting what I thought were dropped frames on just about every capture. In Vdub at 360x240 AVI the counter said there were no dropped frames,... but when I looked at the output there were "Jerky" scenes almost on a "clock" like spacing. I must have run 30 experiments.

Once I followed the instructions that I seen in many posts, and cleaned up my system,.. I can now capture in Vdub or MMC 7.5 all the way up to 640x480 avi with no "Dropped Frames". However, in anything above 480x480 I still see the "Jerky" output,... which tells me there is still some problems on my system. At least I feel I'm getting closer.

When I was running those experiments, I was convinced that my system performance was not good enough to capture anything at the quality level I wanted. Is was beginning to calculate what it would cost me to upgrade my system.

I have a 700-800 MHZ Duron, 100/33 MHZ FSB/PCI buss,256 MB S-DRAM, ABIT KT7, Via KT133, 20GB 7200@ata 66MHZ + 80GB 7200@66MHZ, DMA, and a ATI AIW Radeon AGP card DDR memory
PCI A3sound card, all running under Win ME. I put all this down because I've seen so many notes on this forum from people that are having all kinds of problems (just like I used to) with the same or close to my system.

The last comment is that you have to follow the advice of those that have done it. You have to get all the right software, drivers, wrappers, and get them installed properly to get this all to work. I owe a lot of thanks to all the great guys (and gals) out there that have contributed to this web site. They would have carted me off to the funny farm a week ago without your help.

Hope this helps some of the new people. By the way, if you don't have a good capture card now, CompUSA is have a sale on the ATI All in Wonder cards (either PCI or AGP) for $129. This is a great buy,..but the sale is over this weekend. Get the AGP card if you can, it has the best performance.

[dinesh]

I have a computer spec similar to yours except for the HDD and Capture card. I used to do the same thing of exiting all taskbar processes like TWAIN, EasyCD etc,I disable my screensaver, . I can capture 640x480 at only 18fps, but would like to improve it? What processes could be ended on the CTRL_ALT_DEL window? Could you provide a rough list of programs that need to run to keep windows running? I have Win 98 SE but the differences should not be much I hope.
Thanks in Advance.

thanks to bstansbury
your point is so complete that nobody can comment

here is another question :

my system : athlon 1.2G , win 98 Se with AIW radeon

whats mmc 7.5 for ( ati upgrade , windows multimedia ? )
can i use it under win 98?
can this capture directly from AIW radeon ?

where i can find Vdub ? free ware? is it good ?
can it capture directly from AIW radeon?

actualy i use MovieDv for editing and it can't capture
from radeon

atill try to find a way to compare frame lost ?

thanks again bstansbury

[ggtronic]

[quote]
thanks to bstansbury
your point is so complete that nobody can comment

here is another question :

my system : athlon 1.2G , win 98 Se with AIW radeon

whats mmc 7.5 for ( ati upgrade , windows multimedia ? )
can i use it under win 98?
can this capture directly from AIW radeon ?

where i can find Vdub ? free ware? is it good ?
can it capture directly from AIW radeon?

actualy i use MovieDv for editing and it can't capture
from radeon

I still try to find a way to compare frame lost ?

thanks again bstansbury

ggtronic

[Bstansbury]

Thanks very much for your "Thanks"

I was beginning to think that someone was missing something. Still there have only been 3 responses to the post. Here is an attempt to answer some of the questions posted.

1. MMC 7.5 is the updated version of Video Capture program you got when you purchased your ATI AIW card. Everyone with an ATI card usually has ver 7.1. If you read many of the old posts, you will see that many successful people have switched to 7.5. This version is not official and the only way to get it is to go to a "German web site". I was very reluctant to try this but after seeing the success of others I jumped in.

The download site is;
http://www.ati-news.de/HTML/Download/software.html
Here you can find MMC 7.5 to download, expand, and run the setup.
It fixes a lot of things. Then you need to get MMC Registry Tool from "Stinky". This tool allows you to go inside your PC Regristry and modify the settings of MMC, to values that will enable you to make direct compatible capture into MPEG-1 for VCD. For me it works great, give a great picture, and the file size is very small.

Wow,... I should charge by the work.....ha ha.

2. If seen posts that say it works with ME, 2k, and XP,.. but I have seen 100's of people, each with a differnet system say 100 different things about why "This or that software won't run (or will run) on their system???
If anyone could answer why or why not, a given Window program will run on an given PC, with all the variations of MOB, cards, applications, they would be able to take over Microsofts business.

3. Yes it will enable good capture directly from ATI AIW Radeon... that is my card. ( I have the AGP version)

4. By now, if you've been looking close at VCDhelp WEB page you probably have already found VirtualDub in the "How to Capture" section.

5. To run Vdub with AIW radeon (or any other ATI card) you need to get the latest version of DirectX8.1. I believe it has a embedded copy of the latest VFWWDM.drv and VFWWDM32.dll. These are Window Video Capture drivers. Another way is to get the "Wrapper" downloand and install it. The when you start Video Capture in VirtualDub it will find the ATI capture card and use it to import data. You start MMC TV windown to activate the drivers, then shut TV window down, then start VDub. There is a good help system on Vdub, and in the "How to section of Capture, you find a guide on Vdub. Follow it.

6. Once you get the Windows compatiblity Video drivers loaded most capture programs only work once they find the VFWWDM driver and then they find your capture card. Can't say if it will work on your software but if it is Windows compatilbe,... it should. As far as Vdub being good,... I've had it work OK for me,... and I've had many problems with it. It is a very complex software to get set up, and control the codec's you want to use. I'm still looking for some that are missing and can't find them.

Right now I've been very successful with direct capture of MPEG-1 VCD compatible video from MMC 7.5 and the Registry tool. It's very easy and simple and it works. I have no dropped frames or lost data. If there every is a bad frame or lost data,... it has been cause by poor data coming from my 8mm, sections of tape with no data,.. just noise,... and wow,... you should see what happens when you try to "Compress Noise" with MPEG-1.

I was not able to decyfer you last question. Hope all of this help.

[ApacheWraith]

What do you shut sown in XP? In my 98SE I close everything under Ctrl/Alt/Del except Explorer and Systray, however Xp is so different, I don't know what is needed and what is not.

Apache

[ggtronic]

thanks again

an answer on a forum is good sign ,

with a thank's , it's a reward

[Bstansbury]

Sorry for not responding to your question on Win XP. I have no knowledge of what would work or not work with Win 98, 2K, or XP. I have not used any of them.

I would say that the best thing to do is first to tune your system,.. Defrag, allocate a separate disk for capture, clean it, scan it throughly,...make sure your PIO is set at the right value for your hard disk. Choose one that is at least ATA 66MBs (ATA 100 if you have it). Shut down your screen saver, an all programs that load automatically to your Task bar.
I would leave everything alone in listed under Cntl+Alt+Del, except those things you know you are not using,.. like special printer or FAX monitoring software, any game ports, etc. Then try capturing with just MMC 7.5 in MPEG-1 format for VCD. IF you've done a good job at this, your system should be able to capture without and dropped frames or loss of video on the output. This is all that I'm doing now,.. and it has worked for me. Of course I'm using Win ME and I've had a lot of help from others on this forum to get my drivers and system at a stable state.

Now I'm spending all my time Ripping DVD.... I don't know how many of you have seen "Peral Harbor",,..what a movie. The DVD contains about 45+ minutes on how they made the movie. Unbelieveable.

[lewisp]

I have tried just about everything in your post, Bstanbury, but all to no avail!

I have a PIII 800 running Windows 98 SE, Soundblaster Live! with all the latest drivers, VIA chipset with the latest 4-in-1 drivers, GeForce DDR video with latest Detonator drivers......

Using my WinTV PCI card I try to capture from my VCR, but I *always* get jerky frames. The jerkiness happens at the same point on the playback every time, so I'm assuming it must be something to do with signal strength?

The VFW drivers in my system are as follows:

VFWWDM32.dll, size 73728 dated 23/04/1999 10:22
VFWWDM.drv, size 15664 dated 23/04/1999 10:22

I have tried some VFW drivers that were dated later but were smaller. These made the jerkiness worse. What is the latest size/date of these files?

If I run the VCR through the WinTV software I get no jerkiness at all, and I notice that the frame are jerky in VirtualDub even when I am *not* recording.

Is there something else I'm missing here? Its driving me mad!

[vcdfreak]

I also noticed that VIA has some problems with the IDE bus performance on the south bridge. I used to have a lots of problems performing CD2CD dups and MP3 conversion. But I after I realize the art of assigning the IDE bus properly, I have no problem now. Probably that's the case. You may need to get another harddisk to put in a separate IDE bus from your C-Drive (with different IDE cable) to store your captured video. Hope this helps.

[eclipsed4evr]

Ok, I just got a dedicated HD. Western Digital 7200 ATA100 40 GB. I am using this drive as a slave drive, and its on the same IDE cable as my Primary drive. From what you are saying, i should have 1 drive on each IDE cable(ie, one drive on primary bus connector, and the other on the secondary connector on the MB)??? I am still dropping frames like crazy trying to capture full frame video. If i'm at 352x240, everythings fine. NOthing needed is running in windows, and disk is defragged. I have 700 MHZ Duron, 320 MB of ram, via chipset, windows ME, and ATI Rage Fury Pro 32 MB card. Any help????

[vcdfreak]

Yes you need to separate your dedicated new HD to another IDE connector/cable or it is meaningless to have a another fast drive.

You are sharing 1 highway with people from 2 big cities with another highway unused. Why don't you have the people from the 2 big cities to use their own dedicated highway?

Either Master/Slave will do. It's also recommended to have the CD writer to write/burn files from HD with different IDE cable/connector.

Also make sure you have the DMA(Direct Memory Access) feature checked when you install your 4-in-1 driver. If this is not enabled, performing the change above is also meaningless. Just to tell the people from the big cities not to call up the state government every time they travel. They have been granted the permissions to travel anytime. An anology to the DMA feature in a PC system.

[eclipsed4evr]

Ok well i tried that and seperated the 2 drives, and still no difference. I have read that you DO NOT want to have 2 harddrives on different IDE busses, since the primary bus is faster than the secondary bus. Plus i have a cdrom and a cdwriter on the secondary buss, and if connected to one of the harddrives, it will slow me down more. Now i could see the benefit if i were doing drive to drive transfers of data, but that's not what we are doing here. We are writing data direclty from the proccessor, not getting it from the other drive, right?? I have DMA enabled on both my drives, and still can't capture at full frame with out many dropped frames. Can anyone help!!!! Nothing seems to be working, and i thought my 700 MHZ processor was fast enough for full frame capture. Anyone have anymore thoughts??? please!!!

[Sulik]

Are you using MMC 7.5 ?
How many % frames do you drop ?

Here are the 2 fastest presets you can create with MMC (7.1 & 7.5):

1. Fastest: I-frame only
2. 2nd Fastest, better quality: IBBP (P=4, B=2), set the motion estimation quality to 0%

If you can't capture I-frame only with MMC 7.5 at full resolution on a P3-800, then there is something else majorly wrong with your system, either some app running in the background, or a chipset configuration issue.
If your cpu usage is high when watching TV, then that's definitely a VIA driver issue, so you might want to try different 4in1 driver revisions.

[Bstansbury]

TO: Eclipse4ever

I canalmost "Hear" your frustration. Sounds like your are doing some of the right things. Here is a list of question I have for you. If we work on this, hopefully we can figure it out.

1. The VFW drivers you have don't seem to be the same ones I have. Locate them in Windows\System directory and once selected, right click on them and click on Properties. The version I have installed is 4.90.0.3000. for the VFWWDM.drv and the vfwwdm32.dll

2. In both of your post, you said nothting about being at MMC 7.5 and the Registry tool changes. Have you done that?

3. I would leave VituralDub alone until you can at least get your system working without dropping frames or loosing data with MMC 7.5.

4. I don't know anything about the "Fury" card. IF it has a lot of different features, or lacks some compatibility,... that could affect a lot of things. Maybe it is just not a fast capture card. Search the "Capture cards" and see what others say about the fury car and what they have done to fix it.

5. I think there has been a little confusion on the subject of Hard disk drives and IDE busses. Here is the one and only one answer.
A. The two IDE connectors on your motherboard are IDE1 and IDE2. Ide1 is the Primary and IDE2 is the Secondary. Your 2 hard disk drives should both be attached to the Primary IDE1. The first hard disk drive that is you boot disk, i.e. "C", should be set as the Master, and the second Hard disk drive should be set for a slave. Also, you probably have a CD-ROM & or a CD-RW rom. They both should be attached to the Secondary IDE buss IDE2. One should be jumpered as the Master and One should be set as the slave. Never put a CD-Rom on the same buss as one of your high performance busses. That will really slow things down.

The two high speed hard drives were designed to share a high speed IDE buss, and in your Bios they should be set as ATA 66MBs or higher if they will support it. If you have older drives that can only support 33 MBs, I don't know if they will achieve the performance you need.

6. While I haven't updated my Via chipset bios to the 4:1 change, I do have a non-standard bios I downloaded from the Via web site over a year ago. I don't know if that has fixed my Via chipset problems because I don't think I ever had one. I think it takes some very special diagnostic software to excersize your system to see what performance it can handle.

I did use VirtualDub "AuxSetup" program which has a benchmark test program that will test you harddisk and buss. Run that test and you should get no dropped frames. It will also tell you how fast you buss is really moving data.

I want all of you to know that I have only been doing this for 2+ weeks. 3 weeks ago I didn't know how to spell capture card or ever heard of ATI or had never visited this WEB site. Believe me I have had a lot of frustrating night working on this %$#)*&^% and it ain't over yet. I'm learning as I go,... and what I learned I got off this WEB site or others that were pointed to by the good people using this site. I hope I can help you the way they helped me (and they still are). I do what I can.

I'm affraid I'm going to be in deep &^%$#(*& myself very soon as now that i'm strating to rip DVD's and make some SVCD's it's getting a lot more complex, and requiring much more processing power than I have now. The main thing is that I will probably have to move up to Win2000 to get to the NTFS, to avoid the 4GB file size. I'm not 100% convinced yet but it's beginning to look that way. Also, I though my 20 GB and my 80 GB, and the 4-2GB SCSI drives I have would be enough,... ha ha ha.
Video and high quality MPEG-2 just eat up disk space.

See ya.

[vcdfreak]

My recommendation was based on the fact the W2K/NT/XP runs/stops processes on the background from time to time that causes occasional random framedropping. Capturing to separate IDE bus will help prevent the occasional consumption of the IDE bus bandwidth of C-Drive. I might be wrong but this has become an interesting topic if you can't still solve this problem.

This is something recommended by big brand capture/graphics card company such as Matrox.

[lewisp]

Bstanbury,

I have version 4.10.2222 of the VFWWDM drivers. Where can I get the latest ones? I downloaded and installed DirectX 8.1 from MS over the weekend, and it didnt appear to change the version of my VFW drivers.

By the way, in my post I didnt mention that I dont get jerk-o-vision if I run the VCR through my WinTV software. Its only when I use VirtualDub.

And also please note I get jerky frames just watching the pictures through VirtualDub. I dont have to be actually recording to get the problem. So can it still be IDE?

[robwalford]

even better, i set up a clean win98 partition with nothing on it except Virtualdub. I disabled all unused hardware in Device manager, and can capture an AVI at 768x576 25fps 44k/16bit/mono using my Pinnacle PCTV and lose only 1 frame.
superb.

[pxpx]

even better, i set up a clean win98 partition with nothing on it except Virtualdub. I disabled all unused hardware in Device manager, and can capture an AVI at 768x576 25fps 44k/16bit/mono using my Pinnacle PCTV and lose only 1 frame.
superb.

Could you tell me the spec's of you hardware? Curious.

use a Hauppauge WinTV and VirtualDub gives me loads of dropped frame's.

I use a AMD 1.4, 256 Mb DDR, Riva TNT2 and Win XP Pro build 2600.

Did you also get those results with other capture program's like AVI_io and alike?

[vitualis]

In this new age of pumped up PCs, sometimes perspective gets lost...

If you are using a Brooktree based card (? Pinnacle WinTV) you don't need a buff system to capture... you just need one that is streamlined.

For example, I can capture at 480x576 with my Brooktree based TV capture card at 25 fps (PAL), with minimal/zero framedrop with PicVideo's MJPEG codec (at quality level 20) with VirtualDub on my PC. My PC specs are as follows:
- Pentium III 500 MHz (440BX mobo)
- 128 MB of PC100 SD-RAM
- 20 GB Maxtor HDD 5400, ATA-33
- Win98SE

Although the older posts have probably gone, this was a common theme about a year/9 months ago.

I can almost capture at 704x576 with no framedrop but my CPU maxes out. Someone with a near identical setup mentioned that they could do this with a PIII 600.

Regards.

[vcdfreak]

What the config of your IDE component, viz., HDD, CDROM?

So far I notice one commonality. Those with Win98SE are running fine. Those with W2K/XP are complaining about this. Probably W2K/XP is running too many background processes compared to Win98SE and probably WinME. Correct me if I am wrong.

Minimizing the background process might solve this issue?

[vcdfreak]

Forgot to tell you guys that I set up a Win2K Matrox RT2500 system before. Initially, there are drop frames every now and then. After assigning the scratch/capture disk directory to anything other than those share the same IDE bus with C drive, the problem goes away. I have been having 0 drop frame for months now. It is a PIII 1 Gig System (with i815e chipset)

[vitualis]

What the config of your IDE component, viz., HDD, CDROM?

HDD Primary master
DVD-ROM Secondary master

Note, I have a removable HDD bay which is a secondary slave and I've had no problems capturing video to that drive either on the occasions that I did (6.4 Gb, 5400 rpm, ATA-33).

So far I notice one commonality. Those with Win98SE are running fine. Those with W2K/XP are complaining about this. Probably W2K/XP is running too many background processes compared to Win98SE and probably WinME. Correct me if I am wrong.

Perhaps... perhaps not. It may also be a WDM vs. VFW driver issue.

Regards.

[Bstansbury]

Bstanbury,
-------------------------------------

I have version 4.10.2222 of the VFWWDM drivers. Where can I get the latest ones? I downloaded and installed DirectX 8.1 from MS over the weekend, and it didnt appear to change the version of my VFW drivers.

By the way, in my post I didnt mention that I dont get jerk-o-vision if I run the VCR through my WinTV software. Its only when I use VirtualDub.

And also please note I get jerky frames just watching the pictures through VirtualDub. I dont have to be actually recording to get the problem. So can it still be IDE?

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Lewisp.

The version of VFWWDM I have came from Windows ME. Go look at the properties of your version and see who wrote it and what version. Look at the details.

If you are watching VirtualDub under the "Preview" mode, you will always get jerky motions. I believe that Vdub has purposly slowed down on screen video in "preview" mode to get better response to capture.

My suggestion for right now is forget about Vdub. Use MMC 7.5 and capture your VCR data directly to MPEG-1 for VCD output. If you want to edit in AVI, then use MMC 7.5 to capture in AVI.

I am not having dropped frames or jerky video in Vdub,.. I just can't get it to work except in yuy2 mode. Anything else=&^%$#@(*&. I know that I have something missing for Vdub,... and someday I work on finding what it is,,..but right now I'm sticking with what works.

Like I said,... The IDE buss is the only link to the hard disk and if the drives are not set up right it will be like a major traffic jam. Run the AuxSetup software that came with Vdub and run the Benchmark testing.
This will test you a lot. It does not attempt to capture data, it just moves blocks of data over the buss and checks to see what got lost.

[zzyzzx]

Any idea what the slowest CPU would do full size vide capture? I've got the AMD K6-2 3D 500 and tons of memory >300MB and a separate ATA-66 HD just for capture.

[robwalford]

In response to my previous post, my system is:
Abit KT7A mobo
Athlon 1.2 GHz 266 FSB o/c to 1.33 GHz
448 Meg PC133
Studio PCTV Rave PCI
Soundblaster PCI 16
Ultra2 SCSI PCI Adaptor
Empty 18 Gig Ultra3 10K HDD

Problem is though, at 768x576, 4 gig gets you 3 minutes,
and at 480x576, 4 gig gets you 5 minutes.
Im only transferring home video, though, so its not too much of a problem.

[TheNob]

Hi,
I have been following this post since it started. I think there maybe some truth to the post by ApacheWraith about 2000/XP running some separate programs or having the wrong drivers installed. I have what I would think to be a system that should capture 720x480 uncompressed. But, running XP, I drop a huge amount of frames. Best I can do uncompressed is 480x352. I can however, capture at 720x480 in VirtualDub using the Huffyuv codec without dropping frames. As far as HDs goes, I have a primary master 60gig ATA/100 and slave 10gig ATA/66. Both give the same results as far as droped frames. Below are my system specs:

AMD 1.2
512mb PC133 RAM
ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 32mb DDR
VIA chipset
60gig ATA/100
10gig ATA/66
12x CD-RW


TheNob