Help ATI AIW Capturing Problems

[bslinker]

I just bought a ATI All In Wonder 128 PCI with 32mb Ram on it.

No matter what I capture at, as far as frame rate, etc... I drop frames BIG TIME. I get the same results in Vdub and the software that came with the Video Card. I also downloaded the latest DirectX 8.1 with the Capture Update to it. I am also using the drivers that came with the CD as they are the version that you can download from the net (if I'm not mistaken).

My System Stats are:

AMD K6-2 500
512mb Ram
6gb UDMA hard drive
Windows ME

Any Suggestions?
Barry

[warthawg]

AMD K62-500.... OUCH!!! You for one really should upgrade to a faster CPU.

What software are you using to capture with? What codec? etc etc. All details would help.

wh

[bslinker]

I am using quite a few different codecs; Divx 4.2, Divx 3.11, Huffy, and also tried a few others and I drop frames constantly no matter what I use.
As stated above, I use the latest version of VirtualDub. Even with the ATI software I still drop. Any suggestions?

Barry

[next]

Two possibilities. First the k62-500 is not powerful enough to get the results you may desire. The AIW series really depends alot on the power of the CPU. Second is you may have a resource conflict. Make sure you are not sharing an irq with you capture card.

If you are looking for great quality with your setup you may be better off with an mpeg hardware encoder instead of the AIW.

[bslinker]

I am using the following:

AMD K6-2 500 mhz
512mb Ram
6 Gig UDMA hard drive with DMA supported in "Device Mangler"
(Device Manager)
ATI AIW 128 PCI 32mb Ram
Usiing the latest software for the video capture(as far as I am aware of)
DirectX 8.1 with the capture update for it.
Win ME (I can put on 2000 or XP if need be)


Using VirtualDub with multiple codecs installed:
Divx 3.11
Divx 4.12
MPEG-4 A
MPEG-4 B
MPEG-4 C
Huffy
And just regular uncompressed.
Also tried RGB and the YUYV (or whatever it is)


I reallly don't think its my system specs because I used to have a Pinnacle DC10+ and even though I couldn't use any compression other than the MJPEG, at least I was capturing movies pretty flawlessly but TMPEGenc didn't wouldn't encode the video when I would capture something. Neither would the program "avi2vcd". It would always encode the video upside down.

Any sugesstions?

[maxxnostra]

I had the very same system liek you but my HDD was 40G 7200rpm. I was able to capture RAW AVI up to VCD resolution (352x240). Tryed compression drivers and it sucked.. Got droped frames like crazy (baout 30% droped frames no matter what software was used).... I knew it is my system. Memory (512) does not play big role in video-cap. HDD and CPU speed are the most imporatant factors. Especially HDD speed if your CPU is less then 1Gig. Got Athlon 1600+ XP, MSI K7 266 Pro with Raid controlers, same hard drive (Matrox 40G 7200rpm), upgraded my 512 SDRAM to 512 DDR, same AIW138Pro PCI (16Mb) and voila.... I can capture 720x480 without droped frames using Huffy with best quality setting. I am so happy about it. Got one more Matrox 80G drive, formated it with NTSC so I can capture 1 hr in full resolution. I am near professional DVD qulity with this.

BELIVE ME --- IT IS YOUR SYSTEM. I had the very same system and it sucked (mostly MMX/3Dnow optimizations are not good on this CPU for this kind of tasks). It's time for you to buy new system, anyways you need to upgrade your CPU and Motherboard for start then try buying better HDD if still having problems. In Canadian $ total for MB and CPU would be arround 400$ + 200$ for 80G HDD.

[ColtWalker]

Bslinker: It is _not_ your system. I had the same problem with that ATI All In Wonder. On capture it dropped frames, most of them. The only exception was on AVI capture, which seemed to be fine. I uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers, same problem.

Culprit: Simply a hosed driver or file related to the ATI video codecs. I can't tell you which one. Uninstalling and reinstalling ATI drivers and software does not cure the problem. The offending hosed driver is left behind and then not replaced on the reinstallation.

Solution: I had to completely wipe my drive, reinstall Windows, and install the ATI drivers and software from scratch. The video capture was fine after that. This was done an older 600 MHz machine I no longer use. The machine itself was fast enough after the hosed driver problem was resolved. Yet, as always, the faster the better hey!

There is a better solution, if the offending file could be located and removed, reinstalling the ATI drivers and software would work. However, I was unable to locate the offending driver file. If the ATI uninstall did what it was supposed to, it would remove everything, but it does not, which is not uncommon for Winblowze software.

May I strongly suggest that you switch from Windows ME to Windows 2000. Windows ME is very unstable and is probably the reason the driver file got hosed in the first place.

[Tbear]

First what UDMA speed? 33/66/100 You will have dropped frames when
you throughput to HDD is not good enough. I have ATA 100 dropped frames rarely, compressed or raw. Video capture needs fast bus speed.

Use the How to guide to capture AVI with ATI AIW. It will tell you how to install the drivers in the right order.

[Sulik]

Also try MPEG capturing with MMC 7.5 - it's much faster than 7.1 and drops less frames.

[ColtWalker]

A couple other site members and myself have been searching all over for the illusive but often mentioned MMC 7.5. Since you have also suggested obtaining MMC 7.5 in a thread, could you *please* explain just where it may be obtained.

It was at one time available from
http://www.subzerotech.com/news/files/MmcDvd75.exe

But it is no longer there.

Would you consider offering it for download at your web site?
http://pweb.jps.net/~olivierl/

Thank you

[Sulik]

I don't have that kind of room at jps.net.
There is a bunch of links at rage3d.com - one of them has to work.
(If they're up and running - they had some server trouble the past couple of days)

[ColtWalker]

Well Sulik, rage3d has been down all day and even if they were up I seriously doubt that it is still there. Do you have the download? I have the disk space necessary to post it for other members and I am willing to do this for free in the spirit of sharing. Maybe you could email the file to me. Please let me know if you are willing to do this.

Thank you

[zihuiw]

Hi All

does someone know how to make compatible VCD file with MMC6.3?

[Brook]

i have an ati all in wonder 128 and i used to be able to capture in mpeg 2 fine. Edited everything perfectly with tmpgenc then for some strange reason it stopped working. So i reinstalled everything and i can't get it to record in mpeg-2 anymore. When i record it will only save as an mp2 file. Don't know what else to do.

[Fred©]

Hi bslinker,

Your system must be the problem... I had an AMD 500MHZ before starting video capture... when I bought my ATI AIW 128 pro, I had the change MOBO and CPU (the old mobo didnt had AGP slot)... Now I have a Duron 800 MHz and its pretty ok for my home video capture...

Also, the system have influence... even when changed hardware, I had to reinstall windows from the scratch, then directx 8.1, then sound card drivers, then ATI drivers (this order) then all the other appz...

After reinstalling system, my dropped frames became rare... BUT you MUST have an ADD ON sound card.... ONBOARD is not good for capture...

I have dual boot system... windows 98 and windows 2000... Using windows 2000, ZERO dropped frames I easily report!!! But I can only capture AVI files (no MPEG option available in MMC 7.1).... I am still looking for the reason of it

At windows 98, some dropped frames, related to audio sync problems and drivers (my sound card has not the clock stability required for MMC7.1)...

Your 6GB HD must be ULTRADMA 33.... it is slow!!! Buy an UDMA 100!

Good luck

Fred©
Brazil

[Tommy]

Its your system speed. Sorry but a AMD k62-500 is to slow. The ATI AIW can capture pretty good but only if your computer has a lot of power.

[TA69]

i'm going to have to say, your system is just a little to slow for capturing, especially that hard-drive, i doubt if it's even 66. I know how hard it is to upgrade, i worked at shitty ass mcdonald's for a year and a half to be able to build my new computer. since you just bought an expensive piece of hard-ware already, you might not have alot of money. you can always try some of the stuff here; http://forum.vcdhelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=81808
hope this helps some...
TA69

[HobbieMan]

Doesn't the pinnacle DC10+ card have HARDWARE for the video capture/encoding?
If so, it explains why your system did not drop any frames when you used it.
The ATI AIW 128 does not have hardware capture/encoding, so it must use
SOFTWARE to do it. Software uses your CPU cycles and since your CPU is
rather slow (for video encoding purposes), it will drop frames...

[Bstansbury]

It's been so long since you originally posted your first note, I'm not sure you are still concerned with your problem. Anyway, I must also agree with many other comments,... your system is very marginal. The CPU at
500 MHZ may be the weak point but your hard disk drive of 5 BG is not even enough room for an operating system + other application, let along 4.5 GB's of space needed to capture any kind of movie in AVI.

However, having said all of that, if you want to try and "Tune your System".... go look in the "User How to Forum" on this web site and you can find my post of "How to tune your System for ATI capture".

Hope it helps you some.

[psycaz]

Not sure if your still having the problem or not..
But I used to capture with my K63-400 and only drop about 1 frame in 3000 or so. I used Pegasus Imaging's PICVideo Motion JPEG Compressor, set at 18. Captures were great. This codec worked well with Tmpgenc to convert to vcd. Just frame served from Virtual dub to Tmpgenc. You will want to turn off overlay when you capture - that is probably adding to your drops.
Hope this helps.

[mbbecker]

Hey guys,

I think many of you have to learn a few things about what demands are placed on a system for different capturing situations. The above poster obviously has some idea of what is involved.

I have a:
K63-450
AIW 128 16mb AGP
MSI mobo
Adaptec 2940UW
4GB UW Drive

I can capture 640x480 W/Huffy or PicVid in Virtual Dub with no problems at all. The main factor with RGB capturing is not CPU speed, but sustained drive transfer speed. Many of you will immediatly say that a person needs a drive that has a faster interface on it. (ie. UltraDMA 66/100/133 etc.) What you fail to realize is that this is the interface transfer speed and is NOT the speed that a SINGLE drive can sustain a write operation.

If a person with a slower machine >400Mhz but <800Mhz wants to have high quality captures, but can't afford a new system then the cheapest upgrade today is to buy a large 7200RPM IDE drive. Most single drives even today can just barely keep up a write operation at UDMA33. Remember this is 33MBs/Sec that translates to 264 MEGA-BITS/sec.

When you are doing a capture in virtual dub with the Huffy codec @ 640x480 the normal sustained transfer rate is ~7-10MB/Sec. A new drive can easily keep up with this and the interface has bandwidth to spare. Now on an older drive, such as his, the maximum sustained transfer rate will most likely be ~4MB/S. This will limit capture to about 352X240. He may even be able to sustain capture with Huffy at 480x240. With an 80GB drive, 720x480 capture using Huffy at bandwidth of ~10MB/s you will be able to record 2.2 hours of video. Usually enough for a full film. Now if you want to capture MPEG2 video at full D1 Res at 15Mbit/S (that translates to 1.875 MegaBYTES/s) you WILL need a FAST processor, but you will be able to get 12 Hours of video that will be indistinguishable from the raw RGB capture.

Unless you are capturing fully uncompressed video (Very inefficient) or have a card that can capture >D1 resolution, you will not need a super fast IDE interface. The benefit to a fast interface comes into play when you are transfering small files back and forth to the drive. These files can transfer faster because they are not actually getting written to disk in real time. They are being written to the drives cache memory.

Ever wonder why RAID controllers unually have a very large cache attached? It is much more efficient to wrte a file to the cache and then let the RAID controller write the file to the disk array later. It also allows you to achieve larger and faster partitions.

Sorry to be a bore with the really long post, but I felt that this needs to be clarified. So many people just don't understand what is involved with different capture setups.

-Moon123

[Gameshow Host]

I'm a little confused about how you tell if frames have been dropped with the ATI AIW. I can't find any documentation that tells me which key toggles the FPS display. And I can't find any log file that tells me if frames were dropped. How are you supposed to know if frames were dropped?

[psycaz]

If you are using MMC, you should get a new window when you start recording. Just above the point where it tells you how much time left on the selected capture drive, you will see a black/black bar. If you drop frames, it will display:
<1% frames dropped
or the like.