CPU or Harddrive problems?

[RichEtheridge]

I've been using a Sony DVMC-DA2 to copy my old video tapes to CD successfully for a couple months now. Suddenly, when I had never dropped a frame before, I am dropping tons of frames. Every 20 seconds to 2 minutes it will just drop a bunch of frames, seemingly for no reason. I am unaware of anything I've installed recently that would cause this and have unstalled everything I have installed in the last month, defragged, and yet I am still having problems. Are their any good utilities out there that I might use to determine if something is grabbing a lot of CPU cycles, or an IRQ or my hard disk sporadically? Watching the processes run in the Windows Task Manager has not pointed to any problems.

[hwoodwar]

You pretty much already did most of what I would have done. I do have one suggestion (it was unclear wether you tried this.)

Try capturing from a tape that you previously captured from, with few to no dropped frames. I have found that sometimes the quality of individual tape/recording can cause more, or less dropped frames.

[SaSi]

VirtualDUB has an auxiliary program that includes a benchmark function to simulate capturing. Start it, select the capture settings you would normally use (e.g. frame size, frame rate, etc) and a capture drive. It will try to write to the drive at the anticipated data rate. This will eliminate the possibility that the CPU or hard-disk bandwidth is the bottleneck.

If the problem is there (and assuming your CPU is not on strike ) check if for some reason Ultra DMA is disabled for the IDE controllers. (assuming you use Win2K or WinXP).

[RichEtheridge]

I have tried different tapes, including ones that worked fine in the past. The DMA settings are good. This morning I captured fine to my primary drive which is FAT32. The second drive, which I normally use for capturing, is NTFS with 4K blocks. I reformatted with 16K blocks this morning and there was no difference. Tonight I'll try the VirtualDub function that SaSi suggested. Though the drive is only a few months old, I would suspect that there may be some sectors going bad, but these dropped frames are happening all over the drive.

If nothing else works I suppose I'll have to capture to 4Gig chunks on my primary drive then merge them.

[SaSi]

If you can capture on the main drive then your system is ok. This is good. If the capture drive is giving the problems, then you need to test it further. The benchmark program in VDUB is excelent for this.

I had similar and worse problems with a brand new 200GB drive that freezed for a few moments every now and then. It was impossible to capture on that and even other applications hung trying to access data. It appeared to be freezing when accesing specific files, (seemingly like bad sectors), but after shutting off and restarting, these "bad sectors" moved to other files and other areas of the disk. I had it replaced.

If it's only a few months old and if it has warranty, have it replaced.