Dropping frames in transmitting DV to external HDD on XP, Shared IRQ 9

[vhelp]

Morning all.

BTW, I also tried WinDV and it also had frames dropped continuously. During the time, CPU usage is 20% to 35% and most of the time it is between 25% to 30%.

Any other suggestions?

wayney, yes.., well.., possibly.

After your experimental CPU measuring/guaging around, turn off this Taskmanager
or whatever you are using to measure the CPU and other, timings.

I find that when I turn on Taskmanager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) under XP Home, (for the same reasons
as yours, above) and while trying to capture with my WinTV-HVR-1600, the video/audio
become unstable and break up, causing studder and other issues, which effect the recordings.

I don't know if this is your case, totally, but if you *are* keeping this TSR tools running,
even in the background (tray area) you'll have problems. I'm sure its worse for WIN98, too.

The point is, (if above is true) that you might want to turn this off completely and let
the capturing move forward. You might find better responses, later. Sometimes, you can
not rely *entirely* on measures, when there main purpose is to debug.

-vhelp 4299

[wayney]

As said above I did a separate hardware profile for capture and shut off near everything in My Computer - Manage - Services and Applications.

Hardware profile setup is under System Properties.

I was planning to set up a new account and hoped that when I log into this account it will have the environment only for DV. For regular loging, it will be with all those good services and applications (e.g. antivirus) running.

I set up an account called DVDOnly. I went to My Computer -Manage - Services and Application -Services. There are so many services. I turned those for anti-virus into Manual Start (Is this right? Hope it will not automatically start them when login). I also set Windows Update to Manual Start. I dont know which is for indexing. There was one called Index Service which was not started. Another called NMIndexingService which I set to Manual Start also.

Anything else I should set to Manual Start (There are so many there. I could not tell for sure which are Windows enssential.). The problem I am having is that it was system change. Even if I log into my regular account. They are also that way. The change or settings were not account specific. Is it possible to make it account specific or these are system services and will be system wide change?

As for Hardware Profile, I went to Control Panel - System - Hardware - Hardware Profile. But it only allowed my to Duplicate and I went into the Properties of the new profile. Not much I could do in there. It only allowed me to choose whether to make it available as options during bootup.

Any more hints to achieve what you did on setting up a new profile which only have minimum loaded?

[wayney]

I just did one DV transmission through Canon DV Camcorder -> IEEE1394 (built-in on notebook) -> Sony FX250 notebook -> USB 2.0 expansion card -> external HDD by manually shutting down a few services through the Services list edDV told before. Here below are what I got. It was not that bad. I guess I will just need to make it easier, if any of you can give me some step by step hints on how-to, by setting up different environments (accounts and profile?). In this way, I can simply boot and log into the account. Everything will be ready then and I can simply start transmission. At the same time, it will not affect my regular environment.

I used Nero Vision 4.9.6.6 and had captured/dropped around 100,000/600 for about 1 hour video. When I did the DV "capture", following are what left in the Task Manager:

IEXPLORE.exe
NMBgMonitor.exe
EXPLORER.exe
WSCNTFY.exe
CTFMON.exe
CSRSS.exe
WINLOGON.exe

as still running. I dont know what some of those are for.

[jagabo]

Iexplorer.exe is Internet Explorer. Explorer.exe is the desktop.

You can type the name of the process into google and you will find references for most of them. Or you can go to http://www.processlibrary.com/ and type in the name of the process. For example:

http://www.processlibrary.com/directory?files=nmbgmonitor.exe

nmbgmonitor.exe is a process belonging to Nero Home. This program is a non-essential process, but should not be terminated unless suspected to be causing problems.

For capturing I would terminate it.

[edDV]

Hardware profiles when set up are chosen during boot. That way you can run a a stripped down OS configuration (e.g. No Network, no printer, no disk imaging...). After capture you reboot into the normal profile.

[wayney]

Hardware profiles when set up are chosen during boot. That way you can run a a stripped down OS configuration (e.g. No Network, no printer, no disk imaging...). After capture you reboot into the normal profile.

I see. So, this has nothing to do with what I did by simply stopping those services, right? It is more for device drivers which I do not see them listed in the Services and Applications. In that way, I guess I dont have to do this since it was kind of OK without doing it.

But just in case I need to do later and for others in the future, is it something easy to do? I tried in the Hardware Profile dialog box and it only gave me option of duplicating existing one. I could not do anything on changing hardware configuration. Actually I did not know how to and that dialog box did not give any hints.

Is it possible to set up an account which will not have those services loaded if I log into that account. When I log into other regular accounts, the services will be loaded? Is this something can be done? Or, when I turn them off, it will be system wide no matter which account I will be in? If it is system wide, I guess I will just have to stop them one by one manually when I need to capture video.

[edDV]

Hardware profiles when set up are chosen during boot. That way you can run a a stripped down OS configuration (e.g. No Network, no printer, no disk imaging...). After capture you reboot into the normal profile.

I see. So, this has nothing to do with what I did by simply stopping those services, right? It is more for device drivers which I do not see them listed in the Services and Applications. In that way, I guess I dont have to do this since it was kind of OK without doing it.

But just in case I need to do later and for others in the future, is it something easy to do? I tried in the Hardware Profile dialog box and it only gave me option of duplicating existing one. I could not do anything on changing hardware configuration. Actually I did not know how to and that dialog box did not give any hints.

Is it possible to set up an account which will not have those services loaded if I log into that account. When I log into other regular accounts, the services will be loaded? Is this something can be done? Or, when I turn them off, it will be system wide no matter which account I will be in? If it is system wide, I guess I will just have to stop them one by one manually when I need to capture video.

My PIII Vaio, like yours was iffy for DV capture. My need was to capture up to one hour MiniDV tapes to hard disk usually in a hotel room or ADVC-100 dubbing over from a pro deck. After capture to the internal HDD, I'd reboot into normal XP, log the tapes and copy what I needed to the external IEEE-1394 drive. I could then use Premiere to edit.

I wanted to take a brute force approach to the problem without first becoming a Windows XP services expert. The idea was to strip out all services and only add back what was needed to do the capture. It's been a few years so I'm fuzzy about what exactly I did, but I got to low or no frame drop using WinDV.

The other product that I've used in the past is 98Lite and I've looked at XPLite.
http://www.litepc.com/

These + Linux are other paths to a stripped down PIII OS. At that time, Linux wasn't best for a Sony laptop because of driver issues. That may have changed.

In the past I've used 98Lite to allow limited MJPEG and DV editing on 486 and Pentium one machines. I'm glad those days are over.

[wayney]

Some thoughts after all the testing, benchmarking, and etc. for the benefits of others in the future.

First, I think edDV's suggestion of CPU load was crucial for my case. It was the bottleneck. Whether to use external or internal HDD was not that critical. HDD's RPM was not important at all and even 4,200 RPM could be fine. It means that if your CPU speed is even lower you may not be able to do good transmission even if you get large internal HDD in notebook.

Second, USB data transmission does impose higher load on CPU. The evidence was that the same USB expansion card with the same HDD had 44% load on slower system and 0% on a faster system. It means the same kind of load became significant on a slower system. That load actually caused the data rate to be lowered by about 50%. Of course, this data rate difference may not be all because of the CPU load (e.g. The two diff systems' PC Card Bus or ports may have some difference. But the difference should have not be so significant.) But if you have a faster system (e.g. 1.7GHz), CPU load will not be the bottleneck any more since it is not significant at all.

Third, besides USB imposed loads on CPU which impacted the data rate, how USB ports are supported also made significant difference. In my case, on a faster system, the same USB card through on-board USB support had 50% increase on data rate over PC CardBus. (BTW, mine was 32 bit CardBus, both the card and the PC Card Ports). So, when CPU is not the bottleneck, you should think first about whether it is because your USB is through PC Card instead of built-in USB support. As jagabo pointed out, the PC Card 32 bit CardBus only has rate of 33 MB/s even though USB itself can be up to 60 MB/s. So, if on-board USB support is through PCI bus (this is completely hypothetical), the bottleneck will not be the CardBus any more. It will be more limited by USB design then.

Last, USB based data transfer itself is slower. As edDV's testing shown, same kind of HDD through USB had only half of the rate of making it an internal HDD. The numbers I had did not show significant difference. But of course I didnot have the exact same HDD. Any way, I believe any HDD higher than 4200 RPM through USB2 PC Card on a system the same or above 1.7GHz should be good enough for DV transmission.

[jagabo]

Second, USB data transmission does impose higher load on CPU. The evidence was that the same USB expansion card with the same HDD had 44% load on slower system and 0% on a faster system.

I suspect your 0% CPU usage for the USB drive on the faster system was in error. I have an old 2.8 GHz P4 that gets 30 MB/s at 9 percent CPU usage, a Core 2 Duo that scores 31 MB/s with 7 percent CPU usage, on an external USB 2.0 drive.

In any case, USB drives do consume more CPU than internal drives running in DMA mode.

[wayney]

Second, USB data transmission does impose higher load on CPU. The evidence was that the same USB expansion card with the same HDD had 44% load on slower system and 0% on a faster system.

I suspect your 0% CPU usage for the USB drive on the faster system was in error. I have an old 2.8 GHz P4 that gets 30 MB/s at 9 percent CPU usage, a Core 2 Duo that scores 31 MB/s with 7 percent CPU usage, on an external USB 2.0 drive.

In any case, USB drives do consume more CPU than internal drives running in DMA mode.

I used HDTach and those 0% were reported by it.

From the numbers you and edDV had on faster systems (e.g. 2.8GHz, Core2Duo, etc.), there had been one consisency: the USB drives always had about 30MB/s rate. My USB2 drive through on-board USB2 ports also had similar number: 28+ MB/s. That is why I believed that CPU is not the bottleneck any more after going above 1.7GHz. Also, the CPU speed could be even lower (e.g. 1.5GHz or even 1.2GHz) to take it off the bottleneck list. I can only say 1.7 because that was what tested.

So, USB drives can deliver 30MB/s generally even though it can go up to 60MB/s in theory. The 60MB/s have always been "max" or "up to" types of figures. It means it can be only reached if ALL conditions are met and it may not be sustainable. So, it is reasonable to believe USB2 can only deliver about 30MB practically. When the USB ports are supported through PC Card, it will be even slower since 32-bit PC Card CardBus also has a theoretical limit 33MB/s. Again, that is the "max" number which means generally it will be slower. In that case, PC CardBus is the bottleneck and it can not allow USB 2 deliver the full speed in practical application.

I guess the ExpressCard will be able to deliver since is designed based on USB2 or PCI.