VirtualDub or AVI-IO for capturing, which do you prefer?

[silab]

OK, i tried both and I dont see any much difference except that it seems like VirtualDub drops more frames.

I have a question in that too, why did VirtualDub drop frames during capture when its CPU usage never gone up higher than 50%. Out of 190,200 frames, it dropped 30 frames. Also, priority was set to high.

Also, i noticed that AVI_IO doesnt support larger than 2GB files? I am on NTFS and AVI_IO keeps making a new file when 2GB file has reached.

Thanks

[holocaust]

Man mine stays at 21 percent and i drop a lot more than that(Virtualdub).I use AVI_IO and i drop 1 frame every 60mins - 67mins.

I think Virtualdub is an excellent editing program cant beat it but as a capture program i think theres better around

I can change AVI_IO from 2-4 gigs on fat32 dont know about NTFS sorry.

[silab]

Well the quality was outstanding using Huffy codec.

I was just wondering why it dropped frames when it doesnt used up much CPU.

[Bstansbury]

You've just asked the Million dollar question,.... Why do I drop frames. The answer is, there could be a million reasons. Some function on your system is stealing cycles just when you don't need it. It could be the lack of DMA for your Hard disk, you could be sharging an interrupt with you capture card which will cause problems,... or your system may just not be fast enough.

I have a 750 Mhz AMD Duron CPU and I had all kinds of problems until I Tuned my system and got rid of all kinds of problems. I even found that my printer was going out every so often, checking to see if the color cartridge on my printer needed a refill so they could tell me to buy a new one. Make sure you have everything shut down on your system before you start to capture. If you don't have any success with these suggestions, send me an e-mail and I'll send you a list of things I've had to do to my system to get it tuned.

[kidfob]

please send that list my way, buddy!

hellfireclubb@hotmail.com

Peace!

[Bstansbury]

I've asked the VCDHelp if they wanted to add my "How to" in the How to section,.. but it may take awhile for them to respond. In the mean time I have sent you a copy by e-mail.

Bud

[georgia_dutchman]

I have read in more than one thread on frame dropping with VDub that it will occasionally register a dropped frame in order to keep the audio sync'd. Since reading that I have continued using VDub for capture and basically ignored the relatively low dropped frame count (like you, I will see 20 - 30 dropped frames for a 1 hour capture). I don't know if this explaination is really true or not but bottom line is the impact of 30 frame drops out of 190,000 is something I no longer worry about.

[gkirby69]

Use Winvcd to capture direct to mpg or vcd saves all the bullshit of waiting for hours on end

[silab]

Well AVI_IO and VirtualDub gives me the best quality i can get on my capture thats why I prefer those two. Besides, that gives me more chance of being able to edit the avi file before i let tmpgenc convert it to mpg file :)

Send me the list pls

clubberof7@yahoo.com

[Ronin2]

I've tried all combinations of VDub & AVI_IO with Huffyuv and PICVideo.
The best combination for me is AVI_IO & PICVideo, no dropped frames on DVD captures and recently a couple of commercial VHS tapes and an acceptable low frame drop rate on home videos.
All captures are processed through VDub and frameserved to TMPGenc, converted to MPEG2 files and burnt as SVCD's with Nero.
This is what works for me and even though I've tried and will continue to try other suggestions, this is the method I keep coming back to.

All the best,
Ronin2

[HackaShaq]

From virtualdub's page re:dropped frames

Why am I dropping frames?
Perhaps one of:


Insufficient CPU power. If you're running near the limits (>90% CPU), then you can sporadically drop frames when busy scenes pass by.

Slow hard disk. Note that most hard disks cannot handle capturing full frame, uncompressed video; that requires 18MB/sec for 16-bit RGB/YUY2 and 27MB/sec for 24-bit RGB, not counting filesystem and seek overhead. Also, if you don't have DMA set on an IDE disk, you'll get slower performance than usual and additionally will load the CPU significantly during disk access, often by 40% extra or more.

Bus bottleneck.

Bad source, such as VHS video tape, or a signal interruption such as changing the channel.

Timing correction necessary to keep the audio synchronized. Most sound cards will deviate a small fraction from the video capture device, requiring that a few frames be dropped to keep the audio in sync. Another possibility is that the source is outputting a slightly slow or fast frame rate; old videotape can do this, as well as game consoles.
The key to remember is that one dropped frame per thousand is nearly indescernable, but ten dropped frames at a single point is.