Dropping frames even with Huffyuv Lossless Codec?

[Mazrim Taim]

Hey peoples,
Here is my situation, I got two video cards installed, the second being and old crappy ATI all In wonder Pro, but hell it captures... In VirtualDub, I lose frames when capturing with almost any codec. The only codec I don't lose frames in is Divx4. Go figure, the most processor intense gives me the best results. (BY the way Pentium 3 1 gig, 256meg pc133 ram) Even using the Ati VCR 2.0 codec for my card I lose frames capturing in VirtualDub. I don't in ATIplayer though. MMC center doesn't work for my card. (I have tried 6.x. 7.1 and the ever elusive 7.5)
I'm about ready to give up on the card. My hard drive is a 7200 rpm Maxtor 40gig. (yah I know I should have went Seagate or Western Digital, but they were on sale for $160 Canadian when I bought it and both others are still over $200 canadian.)
Should I give up on this card and buy an All in Wonder Radeon 7500DV?
This card used to be used solely in my old p3 500 and it captured fine in VirtualDub. It still works alright as long as I don't make the vertical res higher than x240, but even then I still loose frames. Divx is only lossless in frames when capturing at 352x240, but the quality of the captures kinda sucks even at highest settings. Much better quality converting afterwards. My source is DTV receiver. Also getting a little bit of Vertical waves right now. Input is S-video so I know it isn't a grounding problem. The wave is the same as the picture just a litle different in brightness so that you can see it scrolling. It also distorts the picture slightly to the left. Any input on this would be sweet too. Been doing this for a while, and mostly never had problems... Wanted to VCD Shrek and Scary Movie 2. Ain't looking promising. I even Formatted system and reinstalled win98se, to hopefully fix any bugs or broken capture drivers etc. Still same problems. No frames dropped for first 5-10 seconds, then 1 frame, then 2 seconds later 2 frames, then 4 than 8 then 15 until I'm droping roughly half the frames I'm capturing (even with lossless codec Huffyuy???) Huffyuv is also using approx 40% of my Cpu. A little high for a 1 gig, for a lossles codec thats not suppossed to be proccessor intensive. It even drops frames in test video caprtue internally.
Any feedback, opinions, solutions, suggestions, etc, is extremely appreciated.
Regards
Mazrim Taim

[Triffid]

Some suggestions based on my experience:

- DMA on
- No other apps running
- Benchmark your disk (with VDub) to make sure you have plenty of bandwidth happening. Turn windows buffering OFF, and then play around with the buffer sizes. Whjen you get something optimal try to match it in the appropriate buffer setting in VDub
- No noise reduction on capture
- Set the audio buffer size to something BIG (I'm using 440834 at the moment)
- Set Huffy to 'predict left (fastest)'
- Use UYUV (or something similar) in capture format
- Before you (really) go to capture. Start Virtual dub, then when it starts to run STOP it, then start it again (and keep repeating if you get jitter straight away)
- make sure your source is RUNNING stabley (?) BEFORE you start the capture
- make sure the disk you are capturing to is not too fragmented
(I delete everything on my capture disk every time)
- Overclock your CPU, or do anything else that will give you more CPU power - eg Tweak RAM etc
- If all else fails - disable audio synch in the Timing section of VDub and see if that fixes it (you may have a tottal screwed up sound card - if this is the case you could try: Move to a dufferent PCI slot, ensure no IRQ conflicts/sharing, reduce PCU latency timer, buy a new sound card!)
- Use a separate capture disk, on the OTHER IDE cable from you system disk
- Use only Overlay, or turn off disply during capture. It can also help to use a 16 bit disply mode while capturing (especially if for some reason you need to use preview) but it felt like it speeded things up anyway (maybe it takes load of the APG bus??????)

These are some of the things I remember playing around with before I was (reasonably) happy with my cature performance!!!!

Good luck