Capturing Problem.

[merkin]

Wow thank god I found this thread!! I have been having EXACTLY the same problem. I have an Athlon 900, 512mb RAM and I think a 5400rpm 20gb ide hard drive. I simply can not capture above 352 x 288 (I'm UK so working in PAL) without getting these incredibly annoying lines cross the screen as per the picture in Spiffy's first post. I'm convinced now that it is a cross between PCI and hard drive problems, as the lines 'flick' on and off when my hard drive is being written to by the capture program, as described in an earlier post. I have also noticed that my capture card (a new Pinnacle PCTV Pro) is sharing IRQ 10 with my sound card, a Creative Live Player 5.1 - unfortunately all the PCI slots are now taken, so I can't simply move the card to a new slot to change the IRQ!! What can I do?!

[trousers]

What app are you using to capture with? What codec?

[merkin]

I am using a variety of different capture programs and codecs! I am trying Pinnacles own capture program, Cyberlink PowerVCR, VirtualVCR and FreeVCR - these programs are the only programs that let me capture about 352 x 288, the others say 'not compatible with device'. The main codec I am trying with is PicVideo MJPEG codec, quality setting on 18 as per many online guides out there. All I want to be able to do is catpure in 480 x 576 so I can make good SVCDs of my families home videos I just can't get anything to work without the annoying lines. Are there any bios tweaks that I could try in particular to video-capturing performance? If all else fails, I think I'm going to get a new hard drive and use it solely for capturing video too and see if that cures it... oh yes, my motherboard can only do UDMA66 though, should that be ok for capturing?

[lewisp]

trousers, merkin,

To follow up what I was saying earlier on, I have recently upgraded to a firewire card for my DV camcorder, so I thought my problems would go away. I set the DMA setting on my HDD back from Multiword to UDMA and guess what? I get total corruption of the picture every so often when capturing.

The only way my system will work reliably is in Multiword mode.