New hardware - still dropping 50 % of frames

[Schlonzo]

hi everybody,
i hope someone can help me in here. i have had an pIII 450mhz machine and was trying to capture mjpeg at 20 and 480*576. i was told that my machine was too slow. so i saved money and now i got a new machine:

ATHLON XP 1900+
512 DDR RAM
GeForce2 TI 64 MB
WinTV PCI FM
Windows 98
Latest WinTV Drivers

I tried capturing in Virtual Dub with both Huffyuv 2.1.1 and PicVideo MJPEG Codec. My harddrive is set to DMA Mode on.
I was excited starting the capturing and expected not losing any frame anymore. Bute it is as bad as with the PII 450 MhZ. I lose have the frames.
Please anybody tell me what am I doing wrong?

C Ya Schlonzo[/b]

[mickboss]

Don´t get me wrong but that IMPOSSIBLE!

I captured TV images at 720x576 25fps 48KHz sound with my old system and almost no frames dropped! (1 or 2 in a 4000/5000 frames):

- Celeron 2 800 MHz (sometimes I overclocked it to 1200 MHz but not when capturing)
- 256 Mb RAM PC133
- GeFORCE MX2 32Mb AGP
- 2 Maxtor 7200 rpm HDDs (13.6 ATA66 / 20 Gb ATA100)
- Miro PCTV PRO
- SB Live! 1024


Something is wrong!
I recommend:
- Use VIRTUALDUB with multisegment capture
- Use PICVIDEO to compress video
- Use NO COMPRESSION with audio!
- DON´T USE RGB! Use YUV2 (YVY2)
- DON´T USE filters or something else!
- Enable DMA in Windows (see windows system)

IMPORTANT!: Don´t use low compression! Each SECOND of video cannot EXCEED 3000-4000 MBytes/sec!!! If it does then your system begin to lose frames!

Conclusion: It is normal to lose about 50-70 frames for each 90 minutes of film. If you lose much more than this then something is wrong

[Spicuzza]

Schlonzo,

Capturing video is one of the most demanding tasks you will ever ask of your computer. It involves high data rates and requires huge amounts of disk space. Something is wrong and my guess without being in front of your computer would be that you have multiple programs running in the background that are stressing your CPU while you are trying to capture.

You MUST shut down ALL other programs that are running before capturing video, some are hidden and you don't know they are running.

If you click the Start button, select Run, type "msconfig", click Startup tab you'll be amazed at how many programs are running in the background eating up CPU power. Uncheck everything EXCEPT:
ScanRegistry
TaskMonitor
SystemTray
LoadPowerProfile (Machine Run)
LoadPowerProfile (Machine Service), then reboot.

This technique is for WindowsME and earlier, XP is slightly different.

Doing this will probably greatly decrease and or eliminate your dropped frame problem.

Personally, I capture 352 x 480 uncompressed AVI with Ulead VideoStudio 6.0 without any dropped frames. Also, from what I understand it's more difficult for the CPU to capture MPEG than it is AVI.

Hope this will help you.

Gary Spicuzza
cic7@juno.com

[Ronin2]

Schlonzo,
You could also try out AVI_IO for capturing, I find that it drops far less frames than VDub, also you stated "mjpeg at 20 and 480*576".
I assume this is the PICVideo quality setting of 20, maybe drop this down to 19 or 18 and try again, the quality of the AVI's will still be good. You didn't state what your source material was, if it is home videos you should accept some dropped frames. As long as they are scattered throughout the capture and not in great numbers at certain points, you shouldn't notice anything distracting in the created AVI.
If you are interested the following topic contains the settings I use to capture up to 704 x 576 using a Pinnacle PCTV Card, AVI_IO and PICVideo.

https://www.videohelp.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=74588

Hope this is of help to you,
Ronin2

[Bstansbury]

Your system has plenty of performance now.,... but there are things that can be checked to see what the real problem is. Most of the suggestions listed above are very good,... especially the one from Spicuzzia. It is part of my over all guide on "How to tune your system for ATI capture". This guide is listed in the "Users Guides" Forum of this web site.

One of the key items that can cause dropped frames in interruptions or interferance of other software on shared IRQ's. YOu have got to insure that your video card is not sharing any IRQ's with any other function,.. and that the Audio Card has its own IRQ.

Go look at the guide and see if there is anything there that can help you.
Hope this helps.

[Schlonzo]

yo, thank you everybody,
i didn't expect that replies come that fast and that productiv. When I'm at home I am going to try all this out. One thing you wrote I did yesterday on my own.
I used avi io. and there where in fact many less drops of frames, but still around 30 %. and sometimes there was an error saying: "set down data rate." the 50 of 50 thing was reached. i think this is a problem of harddrive speed isn't it?
thank you so far far for all your help
c ya schlonzo

[Jestorius]

Never set the capture drive to C:\ You have a quite fast PC so the frame dropping is because the HD.

[Schlonzo]

yes might be that it's really hd thing. but i'm wondering why virtual dub displays 100% cpu usage. is this just a display error or is this both a sign for hd and cpu usage?

c ya schlonzo

[TechJunkie]

hi everybody,
i hope someone can help me in here. i have had an pIII 450mhz machine and was trying to capture mjpeg at 20 and 480*576. i was told that my machine was too slow. so i saved money and now i got a new machine:

ATHLON XP 1900+
512 DDR RAM
GeForce2 TI 64 MB
WinTV PCI FM
Windows 98
Latest WinTV Drivers

I tried capturing in Virtual Dub with both Huffyuv 2.1.1 and PicVideo MJPEG Codec. My harddrive is set to DMA Mode on.
I was excited starting the capturing and expected not losing any frame anymore. Bute it is as bad as with the PII 450 MhZ. I lose have the frames.
Please anybody tell me what am I doing wrong?

C Ya Schlonzo[/b]

I have a similar rig, but without the problem.

Buy a monster 7200RPM drive ($192 at newegg.com), put it on your secondary disk channel as a dedicated "capture disk". Defrag both the "system" disk (the one with Windows on it) and the "capture disk" (although when it's new, it won't need it).

Disable screen savers, antivirus updates, etc (as per another reply post.)

It should work. 8)

[Rich927]

Don't think a new, bigger, monster hard drive is gonna cure your problem. All that will do is allow you to capture more. Bigger drives don't mean less dropped frames. you have a resource or driver problem. What are you using to capture with? Firewire, analog card, all in one, USB? I have a PentII/256meg/XP 2 maxtor 7200rpm 20gig drives, firewire and USB capture. I'm using Videostudio 6 and Studio 7 software. I'm not dropping any frames. Firewire(pyro card) capture is 720X480 avi Type 1 and 2. USB(pinnacle linx adapter) capture 352X240 avi Type2, 352X240 mpg white book. I can capture over 90 minutes(on my small drive) and no dropped frames.Close all unecessary programs, shut down firewalls, virus checkers, printers, scanners, routers, etc.. They all use resources. Open up your cache. Used to drop frames until I changed my video settings to 16 bit medium resolution. Try Uleads Videostudio 6 trial. It's a fully functional trial. You say you are using Mjpeg. That is a highly compressed capture which works best on Capture cards that use it as hardware compression instead of software compression. Your computer isn't too slow. I have used a Pentium 160, Pentium 200 and a Celeron 330 for capture with no dropped frames. Don't let people talk you into throwing money at a problem. You either have a resource or driver problem. Try 352X240 mpg or avi capture. Good luck.

[TechJunkie]

Don't think a new, bigger, monster hard drive is gonna cure your problem. All that will do is allow you to capture more. Bigger drives don't mean less dropped frames. you have a resource or driver problem. ...
...
Don't let people talk you into throwing money at a problem. You either have a resource or driver problem. Try 352X240 mpg or avi capture. Good luck.

If you want to capture using lower resolution codecs, you don't need a monster drive nor a fast CPU. If you want to capture in DV because it's the best medium in which to edit, you need a fast monster drive in order to handle the approximately 13 GB/hr data requirements. It's best if it's on its own DMA channel.

BTW, make sure your drives are both using DMA. Go into the device manager and right click on the drives. If they're not using DMA, it could be a part of your problem. 8)

[TheInformer]

Don't think a new, bigger, monster hard drive is gonna cure your problem. All that will do is allow you to capture more.

I have to disagree with you there Rich

When you capture to a secondary hard drive, the only data that moves back and forth across the secondary channel is your video data. If on the other hand you capture to your boot drive, then not only is your video data being transferred but your Windows swap file is being accessed (even with 512MB of RAM Windows uses a swap file - go figure), temp files, and various other system related disk activity. Your data has to contend with other data being transferred which might slow down the rate at which your data can be transferred.

Another hard drive may not cure his problem, but it definitely cannot hurt! If anything it will allow him to capture more data as you mentioned.

[Rich927]

Like I said, I don't think a bigger drive is gonna solve the problem. I would solve the problem before I would invest in a bigger drive. I can capture 90 minutes on to a 10gig partition using Firewire 720X480 DV-avi Type 1 single avi stream. Actually, it is being captured to my C drive first then stores to the second drive. Tried various swap file settings. Fixed, dynamic etc... I used my old setup as an example. My buddy with his Pentium 4 has a dropping frame problem too. We got it down to less than 5%. I think his problem is that he's trying to run too many IDE devices. Has an extra ATA/IDE card installed. Runnibg DVD, CDRW, 2 hard drives 3rd drive off card. A nice feature of Videostudio 6 is when you capture using firewire, it will split the capture up by scenes. Each scene is it's own seperate file. One of my 30 minute captures had 55 scenes in it thus making 55 files. When I edit, I just load the scenes I need. Studio 7 will make a scene directory but the capture is still one file. I do use TEMPEng and VCDeasy when necessary. Must be setting something up right if I can set up a Celeron 330 with a 20 gig drive and not drop frames. Again it's just my opinion. My results are from learning my equiptment, reading suggestions and listening. I'm no Computer/Video Guru, hobby for me. In real life, I'm a Communication Technician with 28 years of school and experience. Sometimes a simple thing will solve a big problem. Knowledge is Power.

[Bstansbury]

Rich927,

You mentioned that you "opened your cache and changed your resolutions to 16 bit medium res. Could you be more specific about this. Is this a function that is in Windows XP or is it basic to all Windows systems. I've not seen it ,... but that doesn't mean much,.. there are 1000's of things that are in Windows that I don't know about.

Bud

[Quietnewbie]

It looks like you have more than enough HW to get this job done.

What you probably have a buffer allocation problem. It turns out that windows buffers can get in the way of capturing. Faster drives will not have much of an impact on a sequential IO problem which is what an uncompressed, or slightly compressed, capture is. UDMA 66 should run as fast as you need.

Go to the folder where you have VirtualDub installed and run the AUXSETUP program. Use the BENCHMARK button to start the capture test window. Try the options till you get your system working properly. You can then use the results to update your Virtual dub capture settings.

If you cannot get the rate here to match your drive then you have a different bottleneck. This could include system drivers or even hardware issues like cables.

Good Luck!

[Diablo_75]

[/quote]
Buy a monster 7200RPM drive ($192 at newegg.com), put it on your secondary disk channel as a dedicated "capture disk". Defrag both the "system" disk (the one with Windows on it) and the "capture disk" (although when it's new, it won't need it).
[/quote]

I just read a review at Tomshardware.com about this "Monstor Hard Drive" he's talking about. It could be any of the new Western Digital 7200RPM HD's like the one he has, but it's sexy feature would be it's whopping 8mb buffer. Benchmark tests show that it actually rivals the performance of 15000rpm SCSI drives!! I just put my order in for one, and may get another if I need the space. (100 gigs might not be enough for what I'm doing....but we'll see)

Why would I, or anyone need that kind of space? Lossless video. Best option if your serious about quality.

I have it on overnight delivery, I can wait to see what it can do!

[TechJunkie]

The one for $192 has a 2 MB buffer. Tom's Hardware also indicated that most applications will not benefit from the large cache.

[beach]

another possibility although slim when i record live i get 0 droped frames, if i record from tape in my camcorder, i can get quite a few, usualy at the same point on my tape, just a thought

[Shannafey]

I have to disagree with you there Rich

When you capture to a secondary hard drive, the only data that moves back and forth across the secondary channel is your video data. If on the other hand you capture to your boot drive, then not only is your video data being transferred but your Windows swap file is being accessed (even with 512MB of RAM Windows uses a swap file - go figure), temp files, and various other system related disk activity. Your data has to contend with other data being transferred which might slow down the rate at which your data can be transferred.

Another hard drive may not cure his problem, but it definitely cannot hurt! If anything it will allow him to capture more data as you mentioned.

I totally agree. I have an old AMD K6-2/350 with a Pinnacle DC-10Plus card. I put a dedicated Seagate 30gig 7200rpm drive in. I am sure I am not getting the max performance out of it with that old system, but I can capture at 640 x 480 with the least compression, and drop virtually no frames. That second drive has to be the reason.

[hitechjunkie]

One of the key items that can cause dropped frames in interruptions or interferance of other software on shared IRQ's. YOu have got to insure that your video card is not sharing any IRQ's with any other function,.. and that the Audio Card has its own IRQ.

i agree! what PCI slot is that WinTV card in? bottom or near the bottom? move it up to the topmost PCI slot in ur machine, make sure there are absolutely no background tasks running then try the capture.

another thing to consider is the quality of ur video source. are u capturing from VHS or Satellite TV? the noisier the source (old VHS tape, bad video cable/connection, dirty VCR heads), the greater the likelihood of dropped frames.

[Schlonzo]

:D thank you very much folks. i guess i now got it. i use now a second hd and now it works. has anybody of u an idea how to capture SVCD in realtime without new hardware?

c ya schlonzo

[Diablo_75]

Here's something I found helps, but I don't know why!

Preview!! When I first started doing captures, I thought it would aid system performance if I disabled preview while captureing...but for some reason, that is not the case entirly!!

Next time, in VirtualDub, turn it on when you do a capture, and it might help out a lot! I don't know why though.

[kwag]

thank you very much folks. i guess i now got it. i use now a second hd and now it works. has anybody of u an idea how to capture SVCD in realtime without new hardware?

c ya schlonzo

Try WinCoder.
http://www.intervideo.com/jsp/Home.jsp

kwag