Need stable system advice

[EAO]

Been thinking about moving on from my Asus a7a 266 and 1800+. It struggles with avi video capture.

I'm starting to get convinced that it's the motherboard because I have issues that just won't go away no matter what PCI slot / irq assignment / codec I use or profile I create with XP. I'm using a Leadtek 2000xp dlx and virtual vcr.

So anyway... If I'm going to switch motherboards... I'm looking at the Athlon 64 chips. That 3000 looks mighty tempting. I'd have to keep my old geforce 3 video card and my ata 100 hard drives for a while longer to make it work, but I could upgrade the mb,cpu, and ram right now.

Looking for rock solid stability. Is anyone capturing video on a stable Athlon 64 system that can make a mb recommendation?

[northcat_8]

I don't think your MoBo really has much to do with it. Obviously if you are severely outdated then you will want to upgrade but you might upgrade your MoBo and be right back where you are now.

My system:

2.2 AMD Athlon
ASUS A7V333 Mobo on board RAID
4 NTFS formatted Hard drives. 60 GB OS drive, 120 GB capture drive and 2 - 80 GB maxtors that make up my stripe 0 RAID Array.
Nvida GeForce FX 5200 128 MB DDR
1 GB of PC2700 DDR RAM
Pinnacle AVDV PCI capture card with breakout box.

I capture 720x480 (full screen video) in DV-AVI format which is 15 minutes worth of video = approximately 4 GB of HD space.

If you are having problems capturing you problems are probably somewhere else. I captured the same video settings back before I upgraded my MoBo when I had a trash board with a 1.0 Ghz AMD.

List some system specifics and we could help you out with your current system.

Unless you are needing an excuse for the wife to spend that much money on a new system...in that case you definitely need to upgrade and it is not possible with your current system

[Gazorgan]

You know, XP does IRQ sharing by default. You have to do a virgin install with undocumented switches to turn that off. Depending on what you have installed, this is often the cause of dropped frames.

I have zero dropped frames, at any NTSC resolution with my system. This is with a $30 capture card, using Huffyuv or MJPEG Your system has the specs to capture full res with no dropped frames. It can be something as simple as your drivers.

[triphop]

Your system looks fine. Not that it is going to help you now but here is my solution to this kind of madness:- Place your Windows and application files on a separate drive or partition and then take regular snapshots of that partition. Use something like Powerquest DriveImage or Symantec Ghost. As soon as you get a screwed up system, restore from a backup and you are back in business. Store the partition backups on a DVD for extra security.

Unfortunately it seems that the hardware and software configurations are particularly prone to system instability. Toss in a couple of games and you can end up with a whole pile of hatin':

[EAO]

When the capture does work, I might get one or two dropped frames per hour. I have read elsewhere that this mobo has video capturing issues, but then maybe that person was as unexperienced as me.

I am getting random lock ups. The system will freeze - with no dropped frames - but not everytime. Some captures are two hours no problem, and some are five minutes and locked. I'm in the process of trying to install the the btwin drivers, but I'm not going to get my hopes up. My cpu usage hovers around 30 to 40 percent. Some specs: WinXP, 1800+cpu, one primary master Maxtor 80 gig hd ata 100. One secondary master 80 gig western digital ata 100. Philips Acoustic Edge sound card. 768 meg pc2100 ram. Virtyual memory/page file only on 2nd HD.

Are you telling me that even though I have assigned IRQ's (In Bios) and they show no conflict that XP is doing whatever it wants behind the scenes? Because that would suck.

[indolikaa]

I doubt seriously it's the motherboard. I retired my Asus A7V133 in October and it could capture either DV.avi or realtime MPEG-2 without any problems. This board was running an Athlon 1200/266, too.

It ran with Windows 2000 Pro and WinME. Neither was unstable or problematic.

Random lockups can be heat issues and bad power supply/underpowered system. Any thoughts on these two possibilities?

[northcat_8]

My system is also tweaked to the hilt for working with video.

Video is a very intense system process. If you are going to be working with video very much I strongly suggest that you check out and make some of the system changes he suggests.

www.mikeshaw.co.uk

I'm pretty certain that's the website, if it's not I will edit this post when I get home at 3:30 est.

[EAO]

That site looks interesting. I'll give it a whirl when I'm home from work tonight.

Thanks

[northcat_8]

Actually the link I was trying to give you is a link off of a page listed in the links section of that site.

To tweak your XP machine for hardcore video operations, check out:

http://www.videoguys.com/TweaksWINXPVE.html

You won't want to do all of them but you can figure out which ones you want and don't want.

If you do not have a seperate HD for capturing video to, you want to get one. That will save you dropped frames and other hassles that go along with filling up your OS drive with large files.

[EAO]

Actually I had already done most of the tips/suggestions at that site.

This is what I've done since.

Took my secondary - 4 month old - Maxtor ATA133 (board max is ATA100) 80 gig HD from second master and moved it to primary slave. Replaced the eide cable. (My primary HD is an 80 gig Westen Digital SE.) I removed my usb 2.0 pci card from slot 5. Then I rerouted the TV cap sound line back into Line In off the sound card instead of into the tuner card. ( Less stress this way? ) Slot 2 = modem, slot 3 = philips acoustic edge = IRQ 4, slot 4 = Leadtek tuner = IRQ 7. No shared IRQ's. No conflicts in device manager.

This is what happened.

1st 10 min cap at 640x480 onto primary HD = OK. 0 drops.
2nd 1 hr cap at 640x480 on primary HD = OK. 6 drops.
3rd 30 min cap at 480x480 -not typo - on primary HD = OK. 0 drops
4th 1 hr cap at 640x480 on second HD = crash at 10 min. 0 drops.
5th 3 hour cap at 640x480 on primary HD = OK = 12 drops.

That's as far as I got last night. But this was the most stable my system has been getting long caps. Questions.

1. Can there be a conflict when capping to a 2nd hd on the same cable, or have I just been lucky capping to the primary HD - and it'll even out in the end? Perhaps I should only cap with 1 hd in my PC?

2. The drops. On all long caps. I have no drops for the first 50 minutes. Then a 1 and 5 (4) over the next 10 minutes - every time. Very weird. Can anyone explain or suggest?

[northcat_8]

Holy Cow Dude what in the world are you trying to capture for that period of time? Converting VHS movies to DVD? Not that it's important or any of my business...I'm just saying that's a big capture.

What format are you capturing to? DV-AVI is approximately 4 GB for every 15 minutes. So 1 hour of DV-AVI capture is 16 GB. Since your 640x480 I'm going to assume you are probably capturing mpeg format, which you probably know is a compressed format and you may be fighting a - how fast it is coming in versus how fast it can encode and write it issue. I'm saying your dropped frames may come from your system trying to catch up.

In any event, given the new information, I think your issues come because of a hard disk cache issue. That is also a lot of writing to your HD and the more info on the disc the slower it will operate. You also run into fragementation issues when the files get that big. You can capture 50 minutes no problem so, if you HAVE to do a straight 2-3 hour capture I suggest that you upgrade your RAM, buy a Maxtor HD that is in the ULTRA series 7200 rpm with the 8 MB cache, you will also want to shut down all un-necessary background programs and then do this tweak: Take a high speed small HD and reformat it FAT32 and set it as the slave on the same tape as your OS drive. Boot your system and go to your contol panel > system. Click the advanced tab and then the Memory button. You need to redo your page file. on the screen you will see your HD's and your current page file which is on your OS drive. CLick your OS drive and then Click the button hole beside "custom size" and type in a number equal to your amount of RAM. Type the same number for both the minimum and maximum. (I suggest just typing in 512 MB even if you have 1 GB of RAM) after typing in 512 click the set button then click the freshly formatted HD that is the slave on your OS tape to highlight it and the click the button hole beside "custom size" and in this window type in minimum and maximum sizes 1-2 GB so 1024 or 2048. 2048 won't hurt since you are only using this drive as a page file and won't be putting anything else on it (1.5 x amount of ram is standard so if you have 1 GB of RAM you should type in 1536). When you finish typing 2048 for both the minimum and maximum, click the set button. Click OK to get out of everything and reboot your system.

What that tweak does is when your RAM gets maximized it uses 512 MB on your OS drive and the 2 GB on your page file drive like it's RAM. It is important that you don't put other files on this page file drive. You don't want anything to slow the disc down, so make sure as soon as you boot after installing this drive that you turn off system restore on it. As a matter of fact, you should install the drive, turn off restore, then reformat the drive using Partition Magic or something else to reformat it, so you know it's clean before putting the page file on it.

That tweak alone really boosted my computer's abilities working with video. It's a good idea if you have the extra HD, make sure it's a high speed HD, you don't want to do it with a slower drive. You do need to keep a page file on your OS drive or windows may not boot or work properly. So make sure you keep at least 512 MB on the OS drive.

You should capture to a seperate HD and capturing to one not on the same IDE channel as your OS is a good idea. So if you could take your 2nd HD and make it the master on your 2nd IDE channel and then let your DVD or CD drives be the slaves on you 2 IDE channels you should have a better consistency.

If you need to capture that much video it's better to capture it in smaller sections if possible. It will also be easier to manipulate on your PC rather than trying to work with a single huge video file.

Make sure you shut off system restore to your capture drive. Actually system restore should be shut off all the way around while capturing. Make sure DMA is enabled.

I'm not sure if you are lucky or not capturing to your OS drive or not, I've never had any problems either way but because of me capturing DV-AVI file sizes I only capture to my RAID stripe 0 drive (2-80 GB Maxtors). And when I render I output to a different HD (120 GB maxtor). My OS drive is only a 60 GB WD.

[EAO]

Trying to cap 3 one hour TV shows back to back.

Using Virtualvcr and picvideo at setting 20. What can I say. I like to watch at as close to original quality as I can get. I think - but don't recall - that each 1 hour cap is close to 18 gigs. I really wish there was a 19.5 setting.

I'm going to try your cache suggestions tonight. I currently have 768 meg of 2100 ddr. I have no page file on the primary drive, and the second drive is set at 1500- min and max. I did it this way because, I had read that your system was faster if the page file was not on your primary HD. (Another clue to my instability?)

About moving the second HD back to the master on the second eide. I am leary about this because that is how my system was when I began this thread. I currently got my PC scheduled remotely for a two and a half hour cap today. If it works, then I'm really not going to want to try this. Is it really not possible that there may be conflicts with two HD's on seperate ribbons? Wishful thinking that my problem was that easy.

I'm still considering going to one big hd - no partition. I can get a 200 gig seagate ultra ata100 7200 rpm. Considering the size of my caps, I can't see how this would hurt. By the way, it was the maxtor that crashed on capture, and it is an ultra ata133. But given that this drive has been primary master in the past and performed well, I know the drive is good.

Would your cache suggestions still hold if I left both drives on the primary ribbon?

System restore You know I totally forgot about this. This is one service I did not turn off. It's running on both drives during caps. Problem is if I turn it off I loose all it's previous saves, and I've always liked this safety net. Now I wonder how much of an impact this has been? I'll turn it off both drives tonight.

[northcat_8]

Whew, I don't know...18 GB is a lot of capture without restarting or resetting the program.

It is true that your system is faster if the page file is not on the OS drive but sometimes that leads to instability and some have problems even booting windows. I've never completely removed the page file from my OS drive, so I don't really know that for a fact.

Is it really not possible that there may be conflicts with two HD's on seperate ribbons?

there shouldn't be any conflicts. Only way I could see a conflict is if maybe on the 2nd HD you installed some programs to it and your OS had to access both drives when you ran that specific program. Very doubtful. I've had as many as 6 HD's hooked up before, still have 4 hooked up.

The idea for the seperate ribbons is so that your IDE is not bottlenecked because of an overload of I/O operation.

To be honest, the most I have ever "CAPTURED" is 1 hour of DV-AVI video. So anything past that and any problems encountered are speculation on my part. I'm just telling you what I would look at if I were trying to do what you are.

Something else that I would shut down is your screen saver (if it's still enabled). The screensaver runs on a timer and if you are capturing while you aren't home, you can just shut the monitor off.

You know like the one post said, it could be a heat issue. You are writing to the HD for 1 hour straight.

I am perplexed by your issue...I may have to download one of those progs and try it to figure it out.

Notes on your system settings -

your page file - you want to keep in multiples of 8. So 1500 is not optimum, I suggest multiples of 256 or 512 which are still multiples of 8.

You can go with the one big HD, but that means you will also have two 80 GB drives left over. If you don't want them you can give them to me. If I were you I would put the OS on one and then use one to capture to (the 200 GB) and then one to render to...the other 80 GB.

The cache should be fine on the same ribbon. Your extra page file NEEDS to be on the same ribbon as the OS drive.

Well I don't know how much I've helped you if at all, hell I may have slowed you down. It just seems to me that if you can go for 50 minutes straight without any dropped frames then the problem doesn't exist in the capture, the settings or anything. That consistency makes me think that you are either running low on system resources, the HD is filling up, cache is full...it has to be something in your hardware configuration and settings.

You know in your control panel > system > advanced tab > performance button >advanced tab you have the option of setting your system memory usage for "Programs" or for "System Cache" You might try setting that to system cache and see if that helps. Mine are both on programs but I'm not trying to do what you are either.

[EAO]

Came home tonight and had 2 and a half hours capped. Tonight I'll mess with my cache settings, system restore and try another large cap, but so far it's working on everything I cap to my primary drive.

I could really use that second drive to cap onto, but I've got some impt shows I want tonight, so I'm not willing to experiment more until after tonight.

Thanks for all your help. Much appreciated.

[northcat_8]

Hell if it works don't mess with it!!!!!!!!!

2.5 hours is 3x what you were getting before

If push comes to shove you can always just drag and drop the captured video to the other drive so you can keep capturing to your OS drive.

Am I getting this right...are you pretty much using your computer as a VCR?? Come on now...Target had VCR's on sale for $30 this fall...I bought 3

After you watch the show do you delete the files or put them on DVD?

Anyway, happy it's working for you.

[dxj40c]

I am using a 1.8 P4 and had the problem of dropping frames. Now, before I capture I turn off everything that is running in the taskbar. The IP taskbar, the firewall, Antivirus monitoring, everything. After, that no problems at any resolution.

[EAO]

Yes I wanted to use my PC as a VCR. But only for caps I wanted to keep. Burning to DVD.

Star Trek, Farscape, etc

Anyway, the main drive crashed last night after 1 hour and 45 minutes. I'm tempted to rebuild and do a fresh install only on what I now use. It'll be a pain, but then I'll know for sure if it's software or hardware related.

djx40c...where do you go to turn off the taskbar? When I make a new profile, I'd like that to be one of my choices.

[northcat_8]

You can turn a lot of that stuff off by going to:

control panel > administrative tools > services

scroll down to the service that says "Themes" right click and disable it. Now when you reboot everything will look very generic but you won't be wasting memory with all the window dressing of XP.

Which is a good idea if doing a heavy video load.

In any event, good luck with it. I don't think you need to do fresh install and with the quantity of video you are trying to capture at one time it might be a Mother Board issue. 1.75 hours and 2.5 hours are pretty good capture sizes if you ask me, those are huge.

One thing you need to keep in mind is that file size is dependant on several things. For example, I captured a 720x480 DV-AVI clip of a basketball game, high motion, high color, no sound, clip length 0:20.21 seconds, file size 71.2 MB. I created a 720x480 clip of just a black title. No movement, no nothing, just solid black, no sound, clip length 0:20.21 seconds, file size 74.9 MB. I captured a blue screen, no sound, no nothing, just blue, clip length 0:21.20 seconds, file size 76.4 MB.

Point being that sometimes you might be overloading your HD or PC with certain captures and what you are trying to do is just not possible. The more stuff on your HD the slower it will work. Just something to think about.

Good Luck. If all else fails try cussing and throwing stuff...you'd be suprised

[EAO]

Well... I decided to to a fresh install.

I took the 80 gig that I was using to store avi's and loaded the basics onto it. XP Pro sp1 with critical updates, directx 9.0b, Acoustic Edge drivers, Winfast drivers (very recent - I believe 01-07-04), and Virtual Vcr patched.

Turned off all possible services.

Could only test it once so far.

720x480. (Desktop was 800x600, 32bit - forgot to lower it )One hour recording = 28 gig on picvideo Mjpeg @ 20. No dropped frames

Next test will be using vvcr scheduler tonight for an hour and a half.

Off to a good start.

[EAO]

Time for an update. Things have worked out - but in an unusual way.

About a week ago, I gave up on the 80 gig. It was performing so-so, and it would still occasionally crash at setting 20. I bought a WD 120 gig HD.

I did all the right things re: removing services, checkings IRQ's. It was horrible. So bad, that it made me long for my old 80 gig. I verified that the drive was good with the diagnostics and got rid of it last Thursday.

Then I picked up a 120 gig Maxtor. Installed it with all the proper settings and capped for 1 hour at 20 with no dropped frames. The playback quality was excellent. I remembered that I had not switched my desktop and files to best performance, so I made the change, and that corrupted my whole o/s. All of a sudden I heard cracking and popping from my speakers when I opened new pages, and virtual vcr started dropping frames like crazy. Something was very wrong, and I had wanted to cap several shows in about an hour. But I had turned System Resore off, so I couldn't even try that.

Left with no options and little time I reinstalled the o/s. I 'm on 56K, and there was no time to download sp1, or any critical updates. I only had time to remove the desktop wallpaper and stop system restore. I figured I wouldn't get anything, but 'nothing ventured - nothing gained.' Next day - I had a 4 hour cap at setting 19.(Didn't have the guts to try 20) No dropped frames! And I noticed that my desktop settings were 1280 x 1024 32 bit. ( I had been using 640x480, etc)

Well considering the quality of the DVD I made, I'm not changing anything!

I've capped about 16 hours since Friday and have yet to drop one frame.

But a big test is coming up, because I will soon have to defrag, and whenever I have done so in the past, my PC would crash on the next capture.

I tell you what - if this HD performs well after the defrag, I'm not going to try and figure out why it works better with all these services enabled. I'll just move on to trying to cap at 20.