VirtualVCR - SATA Drive upgrade can't handle it

[dinkob]

I am very hesitant to any kind of new technologies and upgrades at least on my main pc computer that is just intended for work/hobby purposes, and I now I have a good reason why.

Anyway, I decided to purchase WD 250 GB Sata drive (8 MB Cache only but it should be fine though). Windows 2000 installed it fine and it's all charmy and working, however, I encountered my biggest fear; one application is showing sings of dislike to the new drive. That would be VirtualVCR 2.6.9 I believe as that is the only one available I think.

However, there are some good news - I generally don't do updates software, driver and BIOS wise so I could hunt for some options in that area. This computer is not on the internet so I could care less about Windows updates and stuff. Everything has been working except for this new drive.

When capturing video at Standard DVD resolution specs using AVI with YUY2 compression, my SATA drive will cause VirtualVCR to simply crash at about 13 minutes of capture. When I use my WD IDE Drives I can go 29 minutes without crash (aha!).

So I know the fix but I wish to use my SATA drive for capture. What are your suggestions and did you run into this before?


P.S. I had a different problem before. VirtualDub would just freeze after an hour of capture. It turns out that likely my VFW driver for Hauppage WinTV doesn't like Hyperthreading (I am also on Windows 2000 so regardless of what Intel says, HT doesn't work to well with this OS). It could be something else but to work arround it I had to install Windows 2000 with Hyperthreading off and it's been off for about 2 years now. It took me 26 days to configure this PC (I replaced mobo, CPU, all kinds of things, and it was 2.0 Celeron that gave me the clue).

I really don't want to do go through this again.

[zoobie]

try another cap ap like DVIO or WinDV?

[dinkob]

Actually it WAS the driver update.

Had to manually update the driver for Intel Sata Controller since installing the chipset drivers automatically wouldn't quite work.

I also had my network cable unplugged from an addon Gigabit card. Maybe that did the trick also if they are interferring (SATA, PCI Gigabit) while being on together.. Either way it looks like I have some options and a bit more testing. Otherwise so far 27 minutes captured a/v rate matcing 29.968.

[dinkob]

I didn't mean to double post but there is a bit of a turnarround.

The driver update unfortunately improved things only.
I get a freeze at about 30 mins of capture and it may continue or it will crash using YUY2 only but it will have some frames dropped at that point (200 drops then it continues)
Workaround; use RGB24 and huffyuv. That way my drive can handle it.

Using only RGB24 system freezes completely and the clue is that either the SATA drive cannot sustain the capture data rate, or there is some sort of a conflict in the bus so when data flow occurs something goes berzerk and it just stops. Go figure, but either way I'll use my dynamic volumes IDE drives.

[ronnylov]

Can't you use YUY2 with huffyuv to avoid the conversion to RGB24 and get smaller file size too? Without any compression almost any hard drive will have problems to keep up with the data rate. Most capture cards deliver YUY2 format as their native format so there is no reason to capture in RGB24.