evenly spaced dropped frames

[crazyjpeters]

OK, I'm capturing with iuvcr, which is the only program that seems to work properly with windows xp and the ati tvwonder that I've found. I can capture at 640x480 with a picvideo mjpeg compressor. It seems to work perfectly, even at full quality.

However, every 30 seconds or so, it just drops frames hardcore. like 20 or 40 at a time. So basically, the video stops dead for a second or so.

It's a 733 asus cusl2, 512mb, 20gb system, 80gb capture drive, both ata100. tv wonder, sb value. matrox g400 video card.

I run 2 hdware configs, the capture config has all unnecessary hardware shut off. I have messenger shut off, the only thing I have't totally been able to shut down is norton antivirus. I turn autoprotect off. Does norton mess with things.

The harddrive is dim, but when the frames drop it writes solid. Why can't it cache it to memory when it captures?

I'm trying to optimize my system, but I think I've done pretty good so far... There's got to be some king of a conflict somewhere...

I have no control over irq's because xp assigns them by itself with acpi.

And does anyone know of a program that captures mpeg 1 and 2 that works on xp without dropping the audio or video? I've tried powervcr and windvr, both work fine first opening them, but the second time opened will not start up the audio...

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.... thanks in advance.

[Snakebyte1]

You might want to End Task on the Norton AV from Task Manager (I think the process is called VPTray. Since the problem seems to happen at regular intervals (I take it it does this when capture from different sources as well) it sounds like something is going on in the background.

Check the profile you are using when capturing and make sure nothing but the very minimum is running under Task Manager and that your video hardware is not sharing any IRQs.

I had similar problems with dropped frames happening every 30 min or so, but the problem went away when I got rid of the screen saver and adjust some Power management features.