an average of 3.5 frames dropped every second!!!!!!!!

[andyg]

This is getting really depressing. My system is an AMD 1800+ with 512MB Ram and I am using a seperate HD to the one my OS is on. I have windows 98 and have a WinTV2000 card (If I remember rightly!)

Problem is this - during capturing, if the motion is slow or still then I don't loose any frames but if the camera moves left to right rapidly or zooms in and out rapidly then I loose on average 3.5 frames a second! Is this right? I'm an amateur when it comes to capturing and I would've assumed that if my system was overloaded then this dropping of frames would be constant as opposed to only during high action scenes.

Tried disconnecting from internet and closing as many programs as possible but didn't make much difference.

Am currently defragmenting my HDD in the hope that that will help but it has recently been defragmented so I can't see it making much difference.

Have tried PICVideo MJPeg Codec, DivX codec and uncompressed to see if that helped - still no joy!

Settings in WinTv2000/Virtual Dub are:

Capturing at 25fps using MJPeg codec with quality setting 10, capture size 352x288 at 24bit RGB and sound at 44100Hz 16bit Stereo 172KB/s.

Are my settings wrong? Am I supposed to allocate the space on disk before I capture? Also, what are video buffers?

Any help or advice would be much appreciated.

TIA

[tweedledee]

Are you capturing from a TV or VCR? I had a lot of trouble with Virtual Dub. The quality was poor, I dropped frames, and the video went off colour. I know a lot of people here swear by it, but I started using Powervcr and that was a big inprovement. If you capture from a VCR then I suggest, if you can, to use a DV camera pass through.
Good luck.

[deckard8]

You should really streamline your system first. I would do this >

1. If you're using WInXP, create a separate hardware profile, call it anything you like, 'video capture profile' etc.

2. In this profile turn off all hardware you don't need for capturing i.e usb, device drivers etc.

3. Boot up with this profile. Turn off and many items as you can in the system tray i.e antivirus, firewall. You could also check with Msconfig any stuff thats automatically loaded in the background and tack the tick off and reboot.

3. Install the Bt8xx WDM video adquisition Drivers in place of your old capture drivers.

http://www.btwincap.sourceforge.net

4. Don't capture in RGB, capture in YUY2 - it's faster

5. Use FlyCapDS v3.0 capture software.

http://www.asvzzz.com

6. If you still get dropped frames after that lot. Change codec too.
MJpeg is quite resource hungry. Use HuffyYUV or if hard disc space is
in short supply, XVID, max bitate, one pass with all options turned off.

[johns0]

Try using a higher quality setting like 19 cause 10 might be too low for fast action scenes causing frame drops and divx isnt a good capture codec to use,taxes the cpu too much.

[deckard8]

I found Xvid with all options off taxes cpu a lot less than MJPeg (less dropped frames at higher capture resolution)

[andyg]

Don't think CPU usage is the issue here. Tried closing down everything bar virtual dub and still have dropped frames - CPU usage between 35% - 50%

Any more clues?

Tried FlyCapDS but it crashes when I open it and I have to reboot my PC to get it to recognise my capture card!

Link to drivers:

http://www.btwincap.sourceforge.net

takes me to a dead page. Anybody got another link?

TIA

[FokeyJoe]

1. read the frame drop sticky.. It really does have most frame drop reasons. Also, read the capture card section for your card, there's always tips from people about how they resolved issues.

2. you could try and use amcap (google will find it) to test your capture. VirtualDub capture isn't always reliable or fast since it uses the older vfw interface which is slower anyway.

3. as deckard8 states, you need your system to be as clean as possible (ideally a clean room os, but that's not always possible). This includes drivers, as conflicts can occur, particularly with nvidia drivers. Also, you should try to capture to a clean partition, ideally towards the end of the drive space.

4. the link is http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/. There are also some BT8x8 tweaked drivers at http://iulabs.com/ (I aso recommend iuVCR at the same URL).

5. If you're still having problems, when you reply can you describe a little more about your kit? I.e. What mobo do you have? Soundcard, ethernet, etc.. possibly driver versions, but it doesn't always help.

[Werble]

Andyg, I agree with deckard8 as far as the hardware profile. I use winxp and have everything that is not related to capturing disabled including floppy drives, game port on my sound card, hard drives that are not being utilized (I have four but only need two for capturing), usb, nic cards, etc. I have tried using virtualdub and I love the program as far as picture quality, but it does drop frames. Instead I use virtualvcr. Virtualvcr does not drop frames when compared to Virtualdub with the same exact settings. I capture at 29.97 fps, 720 X 480 video and 48000 hz PCM audio. I use either Huffyuv or Picvideo MJPEG on both programs at their highest quality setting and have found no dropped frames in virtualvcr but virtualdub would drop frames. It's possible that virtualvcr is a more simple and streamlined proggie that does not hog cpu resources. I think Huffyuv would yeild better quality captures than picvideo mjpeg.

By the way, my system is a 1ghz pentium III with 512 megs of ram so a faster processor would not necessarily yield less or no dropped frames as my system does the job (albeit slowly when converting avi to mpeg2).

Some may disagree with me on this but I have two hard drives, one at 5400 rpm and the other at 7200 rpm (both maxtors). I found that capturing to the 5400 had dropped frames whereas capturing to the 7200 did not. Not sure if this actually improves things as I have read that capturing even on a 5400 rpm drive would not even come close to over saturating the 5400 drive with video information. However, this is my observation.

Whatever you do, DO NOT use progs like power vcr or win dvr. They are nothing but crap. It does software encoding to mpeg 1 & 2, but the picture quality is horrible, not to mention the ghosting effect you get with fast motion scenes that drives me nuts.

OK I wrote a book but I hope this helps. Good luck Andyg.

[andyg]

Think I've solved it!! If I capture at 320x240 I loose virtually no frames same goes for 768x568 anything else and I have problems.

Anyway, got another problem now. No matter what I 'tweak' before I capture the end result isn't very clear (quite blocky!). If I capture at 768x568 then the finished product has very bad interlace lines on it. If I re-encode it then in TMPGEnc to remove this it ends up very blocky (the same as if I capture at 320x240) Is there anything I can do to clean up my capturing?

I've tried different codecs (Div X, X Vid, PicVideo with different settings) - Will it just be the limitations of my capture card?

[FokeyJoe]

Glad to hear you've sussed it (wish I could say the same for my problems ).

As for your macroblock problem, you must first establish if it came from the card or not. To do this, use a lossless codec (typically huffyuv) and examine the feed it captures. If the macroblocks are there, then it's a limited card. Otherwise it's the codec you're capturing with, so you should use huffyuv then re-encode at your leisure (use 2-pass divx5.1 at app. 800-1000kbps).

Interlacing can be done when you're re-encoding using the above procedure. I use VirtualDub for this, which has a deinterlace filter. I think new versions of iuVCR can do it at capture-time.

HTH

[pyrohydra]

Make sure you're not capturing using Virtualdub's compatibility mode. Use regular mode instead. (hit F6 to capture instead of F5).