Some VHS-tapes drops frames like crazy!

[budbrain]

Hello
I´ve got a leadtek winfast tv 2000 card and im using the latest drivers from http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/download.html.
Most of my captures works flawless! 25fps with rgb24 or yuy2, about no dropped frames. Somehow though I can´t get rid of dropped frames if im doing more than 7 minute captures, I usually get 1 dropped frame after 7 minutes or so, how come this appear? It doesn´t matter if I capture at 176x144 or 480x576, so it can´t be the Harddrive or the CPU, cause the cpu load does not even reach 30% @ 176x144 with huffy. Anyway thats just a litte wondering, the reason i posted is because some VHS tapes i try to rip is totally impossible to capture !!??

When i´m in preview mode the image is laggy and it looks very interlaced somehow, when i try to capture i get loooads of dropped frames. No matter if i set the fps to 15 it´s always 5 fps beneath the selected. Is it some kind of signal or copy protection??

If so, is it possible to bypass this!?

My system:

Athlon 1400 @ 1600mhz
Abit KG7
IBM 60gxp 30gig
WD 80 gig
Winfast tv 2000
ATI radeon 8500
etc

[Rickyblaze]

How old are the vhs tapes? I was having the same problem with my older home videos and was going mad trying to fix the problem. Then I got to reading all the posts about the same problem and found out it is the age of the tape that was giving the bad captures. After a while the tapes start to degrade and loose the strength of their signals and need a device such as a time base correct to help sort these weak signals out and make them more recognisable to the capture card. I finally received a tbc3000 and it has helped by about 100%. It has the feature of being able to adjust color tint bright and contrast plus re-syncing the vid and aud ,It has made the videos come out a lot cleaner looking on disc.

[pbwgap]

I may have a solution for you. This is my experience, I do not know if some one has already posted it before.

I had the same problem with some old tapes as well as some new ones, which have scenes with lots of water or sand (I live in Middle East). I always capture at 480X576. But the bad tapes used to drop frames even if I set at 352X288 (PAL). I even tried some lower resolutions for testing purpose, but it still dropped frames. As you mentioned, it would drop frames like crazy, though the CPU usage was 30% or so.

However, one day I decided to try all the resolutions available for my card (as listed in Virtualdub's 'custom format'). And I suddenly found that at 352X480, it didn't drop any frame at all. then I tested all my bad tapes at that resolution and it worked! So, I think, there may probabaly be one PROPER resolution for your card/PC configuration, which works with maximum efficiency.

Hope this info helps you and others with similar problem.

[budbrain]

How odd!!
I tryed the 352x480 you recomended but it didn´t work, then i tryed the maximum resolution 720x576 and boom the picture stopped to lag?
Im not sure it works 100% though, il be back for more info

[Guyver]

I tried the 352x480 and it works great, I only dropped 6 frames while last time i dropped 600 on the same capture

[budbrain]

Alright, the lowest res i could reach without losing frames was 704x512.. If i go lower than that on two of the strange tapes things gets messed up, can anyone explain why you have to reach this resolution without dropping frames?

[Allan55]

Hi,

Just FF and REW the tapes a few times. This often reduces dropped frames.

Allan