Capturing Nightmare. Help Please!

[graffix078]

Ok, first of all my system is as follows. I have a 1.7 GHz P4 processor, 320 MB sdram, Windows XP, All In Wonder 32MB Radeon PCI, Philips Seismic Edge Soundcard, and the Drive i am capping to is a maxtor 80 gig 7200 rpm ultra ATA 133 drive. Now. i drop frames like crazy. i have went through almost every page on this forum and tried everything from reformatting to using different drivers as well as capping from the lowest resolution to the highest resolution with every damn method of compression out there.
I really am at a loss. Every time i think i have finally found the answer, nothing. I also have a Via chipset and have installed the 4 in 1 drivers and still nothing. Tried without audio, tried defragging, and still massive frame drops. I have also tried switching the slot my sound and AIW cards are in.
If anyone can help at all in this i will be forever grateful. This is blowing my mind. Thanks in advance for your time and help!

P.S. I recently upgraded from a considerably slower computer and was capping far better than i am now.

[graffix078]

I am mainly trying to use virtual dub but i have tried nearly every kind of capturing software with no success.

[liquid217]

well for one, please verify that dma is enabled on your hard drive...in xp this can be determined by going to the device manager and looking at the ide controller properties. Another possibility is that the vfw wdm wrapper is corrupt. you can download this at
http://faq.arstechnica.com/link.php?i=714

also, you may want to just try a wdm based capture program. Because you are using vdub, vdub is a vfw based application, and your ati drivers are wdm based and as a result, the wrapper must translate the data for vdub. this this capture utility.
http://www.iulab.com/

[sdispun]

Your PC is good enough to capture elephant's DNA.

Wanna tell us a bit more? What type of file are you capturing into MPEG1 or 2? what frame size? what bitrate? and what motion search value?

[gll99]

Microsoft provided the VFW Wrapper that allows you to use vdub to capture but it has many limitations and known bugs. Even if you get it working you won't be happy.

Even though its great with virtual drivers (win98 win95), I would dump VDUB for capture purposes and remove the vfw Wrapper.

Then get "amcap" or "virtualvcr" free apps for wmv or avi, and the demo WINCODER and Powervcr II for Mpeg1 and Mpeg2.

Post the results.

[cdtruckn]

It could be your sound card

well for one, please verify that dma is enabled on your hard drive...in xp this can be determined by going to the device manager and looking at the ide controller properties. Another possibility is that the vfw wdm wrapper is corrupt. you can download this at
http://faq.arstechnica.com/link.php?i=714

also, you may want to just try a wdm based capture program. Because you are using vdub, vdub is a vfw based application, and your ati drivers are wdm based and as a result, the wrapper must translate the data for vdub. this this capture utility.
http://www.iulab.com/

im using the iulab software and im doing capturing already. Everything is fine, except when the application starts, its takin a long time to start and when i switch the channel also it takes very long. I dont know what it happened. I only remember that it was working normally (not slow) when i first install it, then my computer crashed a few times and the software ended up starting very slowly...
i did scandisk already and its still very slow.
can someone help me?????????

[dphirschler]

Is it a crummy VHS tape you are capturing from? They will often drop frames no matter how good your PC is. Try capping from a clean source.

Although your machine seems plenty fast enough, try a two pass capture. Capture the video first with the lowest possible audio settings. This minimizes the amount of data per write which will give you a tremendous speedup. Then play the tape again and record the audio using EAC (Exact Audio Copy). Trim your new audio file to match the old one and mux it in.


Darryl