Tweak Guide still doesn't help me with dropped frames

[Diablo_75]

Here's my setup:

AMD 1.4gig Athlon with 266 FSB
256mb Mushkin 2100 RAM
13Gig Maxtor (For OS and crap)
100Gig Western Digital w/8mb buffer (intended for video capture and is easily capable of writting around 30 megabytes a second)
ATI TV Wonder
Voodoo 3 3000 Video card

I have tried the following:

Both Hard drives on same IDE channel with the faster one as the slave (so that the OS loads by default off of the slow Maxtor). CD-rom was on the Second IDE channel (different cable).

I have had the CD and the slow maxtor on the same IDE, with the Western Digital on the Secondary IDE as a primary.

I have gone through everything on the "How to tune your system" post, down as far as duplicating and altering a new Hardware Profile.

I've tried captures in 24 RGB format, compressed with Huffyuv, and uncompressed. Also tried the same, only at a YUY2 format. I've tried to lower the capture resolution from 640x480 to something like 480x360.

The Virtualdub stats window seems to show that the main problem is the CPU (It's always on the border line of 95~100% usage??) and drops anywhere from 3 to 8 frames each second.

The only other thing I can think of doing is overclocking the chip. The bios does have an auto shutdown@preset tempuature....

Does anyone else have any ideas?

[Diablo_75]

I seemed to have found my own remedy, but I don't understand it.

What is "Multisegment Capture"

How does it work? And why do I get these weird artifacts in the video when I try to use Huffyuv compression (as oppose to no compression).

[Diablo_75]

OK, I thought I had it figured out....but now I really do. I don't know why this works, but at least it does.

I start off a capture doing an uncompressed RGB. No frames dropped. Then, I start off a capture using uncompressed YUY. No frames dropped. I would use huffyuv, but I get weird artifacts on the screen. Blips of color....it looks like bad 8mm reel film or something. I think it might have something to do with the multisegment capture, but that's ok with me.

So, uncompressed RGB, then uncompressed YUY with multisegment and DirectX acceleration. It seems I have to do it in that order, otherwise, I get crappy results. It's as if I have to wake part of the system up before I can use YUY.

[Bstansbury]

Diablo,

There is still something wrong with your system. You have all the performance you need to "NEVER" drop a frame. I am not impressed with the ATI TV Wonder card. From what I've read on the forum, it will only work in the older version of MMC and these have always been limited in capture resolution. Before you do anything else,... double check you system.

You didn't mention your motherboard or you sound card. Is it an on board sound chip? Is your MO using the VIA chip sets. Have you checked system information to verify that you do not have a shared interrupt with your capture card.

Go to the ATI web site and check to see what the latest drivers and MMC are supported for you card. My system is half the performance of yours and I can capture whatever I want,... but before I tuned it, I couldn't capture anything.