DIVX 4.12 Capture w/ AIW Radeon & Lots of Dropped Frames

[strep]

Can anyone give me some pointers on reducing my dropped frame rate when using Divx4.12 to capture at 720x480 with Virtualdub using my ATI AIW Radeon card. I can capture fine at lower resolutions, but as soon as I push the envelope to 720x480, frame drops becomes immense. More dramatic than resolution is the frame capture rate. I can capture at 720x480 at say 15fps with no dropped frames, but playback is a little goofy. When I bump it to 29.97fps, frame drops become monstrous. Any ideas how to improve the capture?

I am using a P4 1.4Ghz, 256MB RDRAM, ATI AIW Radeon 32mb, 60gb 7200rpm HD. Source is composite TV. Will adding more Ram help in reducing frame drops? Or is there any other way I can save a capture at 29.97fps, 720x480, in some kind of compressed format. I want to do this in real time and avoid a post-capture encode. Thanks for any ideas

[Torontonian]

I bet your system (even if it's P-IV) canNOT handle 720x480 format with DivX. Check task manager while capturing - most probably CPU usage is 100% and you have dropped frames.
Try to capture at lower resolution or use M-JPEG codec for higher ones.

[jgl24]

I second that... That's some intense processing
you're asking for.

[homerpez]

Hmm... "I was pushing the envelope, and it didn't work very well". If I had a dime for every time I heard that one...

720x480 is pretty intense for MMC, let alone MPEG-2 (you might get away with that), let alone Divx (which even needs more CPU power for capture, I think).

The only way I can think of would be to use th M-JPEG, or better yet, Huffy, and a HUGE hard drive. Dropped frames become a thing of the past, in general.

You could also try cranking the bitrate to ungodly extremes, and capture "I" frames only. But this is similar to uncompressed as far as drive space is concerned.