What should i replace to make my captures good

[TurboRunner]

Hi,

I've got an AMD K6-2-300mhz with 3DNow Tech, 320MB SDRam, 13.6GB 7200rpm IDe HDD, an AVerMedia Capture card with the bt chipset, SB16 Sound Card and my 2d card is a s3 virge DX,

Ok When i capture at 352x288 25fps resolution i loose alot of frames but am not sure what could be slowing it down i suppose replacing my CPU and MB will make it better but i'm afraid there might be something else that will cause a problem since when i capture Virtual Dub says it's only using 40% Cpu power.

Has anybody got any idea of what i should replace to make my captures better as i don't have much money so i don't want to replace something that wasn't going to make my captures any better.

Thanks TurboRunner

[adamp007]

Hi,

One thing to always check is that the DMA setting is set for your hard drive - it will make a world of difference. It also sometimes depends on the capture software eg. a lot of people seem to use VirtualDub but for my setup (Miroo Dc30) i was getting a huge number of dropped frames - the Miro Capture (and also AVIO - brilliant product) work perfectly in all resolutions.

Cheers
Adam

[Dman65]

Are you certain that you have DMA enabled on your hard drive? Do you have a separate hard drive for video capture than the one the Windows swap file is on?

Try the benchmarking program and see what kind of sustained data transfer rate you have on the hard drive you are using for capture.

[TurboRunner]

Yes i definately do have DMA switched on on both hard drive i have my fastest hdd which is a seagate 13.6gb 7200rpm ide on secondary by itself no other devices are attached to secondary but you have said a point to run a benchmark programme will give it a try any hdd benchmarking programme you recommend?

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
On 2001-08-08 04:22:28, Dman65 wrote:

Are you certain that you have DMA enabled on your hard drive? Do you have a separate hard drive for video capture than the one the Windows swap file is on?

Try the benchmarking program and see what kind of sustained data transfer rate you have on the hard drive you are using for capture.

</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

[disturbed1]

V-Dub has a built in bench marking program. Be sure to choose a large enough test file, around 1500 mb is what I use.

Having a 10,000 rpm drive wouldn't make a difference with ata 33mb/s.

Have you tried turning off overlay while capping.

You can also right-click on my computer, select properties, performance, file system, trouble shooting, and disable write behind cache. This will help HD's when capping.

Some people have a lot of problems with SB cards, unplug the sound card and try capping again. Creative cards are known pci bandwidth hogs.

You didn't say what OS your using, hopefully not Win 95.

[TurboRunner]

My Sb16 is an ISA Sound Card it's probably 6 years old, so it wouldn't be hogging the pci bus, I have Overlay Off and preview off. I'm using Win98se i have installed the directx capture update.

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
On 2001-08-10 01:43:13, disturbed1 wrote:
V-Dub has a built in bench marking program. Be sure to choose a large enough test file, around 1500 mb is what I use.

Having a 10,000 rpm drive wouldn't make a difference with ata 33mb/s.

Have you tried turning off overlay while capping.

You can also right-click on my computer, select properties, performance, file system, trouble shooting, and disable write behind cache. This will help HD's when capping.

Some people have a lot of problems with SB cards, unplug the sound card and try capping again. Creative cards are known pci bandwidth hogs.

You didn't say what OS your using, hopefully not Win 95.
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

[Dman65]

Can you tell us precisely how many frames you are dropping during a given period of time?

Have you tried capturing video only to see if that makes any difference?

[saspgmr]

What resolution are you runing your monitor at? Most capture programs seem to have a problem if you're running any higher than 800x600. I was dropping 50 - 100 frames per minute at 1600x1200, zero frames dropped at 800x600 or 640x480. Try it. Good luck.

[TurboRunner]

My Display Resolution is at 800x600x16 since the higher resolution looks too small on my 14" monitor,
and i drop about 15 to 30 frames persecond,

I ran the benchmark on my hard drive and it has a sustained write thoroughput of 17MB/per second which is definatly ample since i use the huffy codec.

It says it is using 50% CPU and has a data rate of 2300kbts for video.

I tried capturing without sound and it's still drops the same amount of frames as with sound.

also pulled out the cards not needed for capturing and still no luck.

It seems i have a bottleneck but where it says it only using 50% cpu, sound doesn't seem to be the cause since i still drop the same amount without it.

not sure if this could be the cause my primary hdd on the master controller that i use for win98 and it's swapfile is a quantum bigfoot 4GB 5400rpm. and my seagate is on the secondary controller as primary by itself no other devices is using it and it's only going to be used as the capture drive as it's the fastest drive.

[holistic]

Some info :
I use the following - Be6-2 mobo, celeron 600@903, 384MB RAM, maxtor 30 GB ATA66 drive (7200 rpm)and a similar card -http://www.aver.com/products/tv9801.html
Some Facts :
I capture at 640*480 (full) NTSC - this results in : 0.9 MB (per frame for NO COMPRESSION.)* 29.97 = over 26 Mb data per second and no frame loss BUT HUGE AVI files

As mentioned earlied - 7200 rpm is not a magic number - the density of the platters and 'quality' of drive will also affect disk seek/read/write times. Also i have experimented and found the best captures to be on my 4GB 'D' partition the closer to the inside of the disk the faster the access.
Your report of 17Mb/s sustained seems more than ample if using a compression codec. DMA [on] yep !
Try this application - clibench mk iii
http://clibench.daemonware.ch/index.php?seite=download

Suspect the drive to be #1 on list to replace followed by CPU.
Try overclocking the CPU.
What is your motherboard?


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: holistic on 2001-08-12 01:51:14 ]</font>

[Braindrain]

I agree. Try o/c'ing the CPU. If you can't, think about replacing the whole mobo/CPU.

[Anonymous65]

You mention the screen resolution was 800x600x16, I assume that is 16 bit color, and not 16 colors. You should try 24 bit color resolution. For me, I drop less frames at 24 bit than 16 bit. 32 bit is overkill, and takes extra CPU power.

I also have a frame drop issue at 640x480 captures (in Vdub). With a 1 gig P3 CPU and 40 gig ATA100 hard drive, there should not be any dropped frames. I would like to know where the bottleneck is. I do have two hard drives, a primary and slave, not sure if that will slow down capture a lot? Both are connected to a 80 pair IDE drive cable. I also have 256MB of PC133 memory. Will getting 512MB of memory speed up capture?

SK

[Dman65]

Hello Turbo,

Have you tried a CODEC other than Huffy? I used it a couple of times but it doesn't really fit with the type of capturing I do (capturing sattelite TV to view later in the day) but when I used it I noticed that it was very processor intensive on my K6-500. Try using a different CODEC like MJPEG and see if that helps at all.