1.8 G P4 loaded 100% when capturing in MPEG2

[walter4h]

I have got Canopus ADVC-1394, it seems to work fine, I was capturing in avi with Premiere and in MPEG1/2 with Win Producer, which came with the Canopus card. However, I was rather surprised to see that the processor load is 100% when I capture in MPEG2, even with a small window size. The audio is breaking up rather perceptibly and the frames are dropped once in a while. Somehow I expected that Pentium 4 @ 1.8 GHz and 256 MB SDRAM should be able to handle the workload.
The processor load when capturing in avi is about 20%.
At this point I have just one 40GB hard drive, I plan to buy a dedicated one just for capture after I will figure out what would be the best way to retailor my computer, which would also mean adding a DVD writer, removing a CD ROM and switching CD RW to another IDE bus, but that's for the future.
My understanding was that Canopus 1394 is capable of performing hardware compression into MPEG2 "on the fly", thus freeing up the processor, but somehow it does not seem to be happening.
Is there something I need to do on that Canopus card?
Thx Walter

[Leoslocks]

More memory is the first thing you could do. 256 is just enough to run Windows XP.

The Canopus will do "Analog video to DV conversion and capture through OHCI in realtime." but doing MPEG2 in real time would require a very fast cpu and hard drive. I have been looking and still consider a Canopus solution.

Capture to DV and then convert to MPEG2. I believe you have a nice spftware package with that.

[gf]

Hi walter4h,
I would suggest getting a dedicated 7200 rpm drive to capture video on. The drive has to be able to capture 10 MB/s for video as per Canopus, and on the primary drive where windows is there is other hard drive activity going on. That could be one problem. Also make sure your DMA is enabled on your harddrives. On my system I have 2) 30GB 7200 rpm Western Digital drives set up as Raid0. Hope this helps.
Steve

[FulciLives]

You will get a quality error free capture if you capture to DV AVI as the Canopus ADVC-1394 supports DV AVI with hardware assist whereas realtime MPEG-2 is done completely with software. That is why you are having trouble capturing direct to MPEG-2 ... your computer is simply too slow to keep up.

It can take a long time to convert a DV AVI capture to MPEG-2 after the fact but the quality will be very good and it allows you more options such as the ability to easily edit the capture before MPEG-2 conversion along with being able to "tweak" the MPEG-2 conversion including the use of 2-pass VBR which is the way to go UNLESS you are only putting approximately 60 minutes or less per disc in which case a CBR of 8000kbps is about as good as you can get for MPEG-2 DVD

If you really want realtime MPEG-2 capture then probably the easiest and most cheapest upgrade would be to get the Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250 as this PCI card has hardware MPEG-2 encoding which means it should work fine with your system as it is without upgrading the HDD and/or RAM etc.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[FulciLives]

My understanding was that Canopus 1394 is capable of performing hardware compression into MPEG2 "on the fly", thus freeing up the processor, but somehow it does not seem to be happening.
Is there something I need to do on that Canopus card?

Just to clearify ...

The Canopus ADVC-1394 does have special hardware to assit in DV AVI capture ... but that is it! There is no hardware assist for MPEG-1 or MPEG-2

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[walter4h]

Many thanks for your advice, guys. I will definitely be buying more memory and a dedicated HD. For now I just want to get experience in Premiere, as well as other software
walter