Brand New Athlon 1.333GHz dropping frames! *#*#*#*#

[Raycaster]

I'm running 98se and own a Matrox Marvel 400TV.

I'm at a loss why I'm now dropping frames capturing video with a machine that is twice as fast as my last one that dropped ZERO.

I only have Explorer, pdesk and systray running and drop frames left and right. I've moved the cards arounds, loaded latest drivers, flashed the bios etc.

Zero conflicts except basically the machine is useless to me dropping frames.


Asus A7A266 Motherboard (1004 bios)
Athlon 1.333GHz CPU & 2@256 DDR
Matrox Marvel G400TV
Maxtor 40G ATA66 7200 RPM (Master ide1)
WD 20G ATA100 5400 RPM (Slave ide1)
Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-103 (Master ide2)
YAMAHA CDW8424E (Slave ide2)
Dlink 530TX+ NIC

(My old Intel never dropped frames... 8-( )So much for an upgrade..

[bishopx3368]

do u have ALL the latest drivers for your pc?
matrox,asus

u prob need those drivers.. most likely new asus ones
u may need ide bus master drivers for the asus. and u prob need to defrag your hd's

[joeyelliot]

you could try reserving a high irq for the tv card

[Phule]

Okay,

First, check to make sure that DMA is enabled on the drive you are saving the captured video to. This can make a HUGE difference since IDE drives require some attention from the CPU when they load/save. DMA will reduce this. The more CPU your IDE drive requires, the less is available for cpaturing video.

Second, get the latest 4-in-1 drivers from VIA. They have fixed a problem with ATA-100 drives that causes data problems, and also an issue with the SoundBlaster Live! cards, which was causing it to spew lots of 0 data across the PCI bus, which could cause some problems.

Third, make sure that your capture card has ITS OWN IRQ! Your MB manual should give you a little table that shows which slots occupy which IRQs. Usually, all but 1 PCI slot shares an IRQ with something else (the AGP port for your video card often will share an IRQ with one of the PCI slots. Make sure that the capture card is NOT sharing with anything else if at all possible. If this is not possible, make sure that the other card sharing the IRQ will share.

Hope this helps, because your system should be more than adequate!

Phule

[iant]

Wierd. I also have a Matrox Marvel and get zero frame drop on a K62-500.
A couple of suggestions. First, regarding your capture application. Use AVI IO. I used both the Matrox capture app and VirtualDub and still got frame drops. AVI IO gives me zero drops even at full res high quality. ( This is only on a 5400rpm drive without DMA as well. )
Second, what are you capturing from. Older tapes can be the cause of the problem or a tape may be incompatible with the tracking on your vcr. I regularly have to switch tapes between 3 vcrs just to find one that will work without problems.
Good Luck.
Ian

[patrickm]

move the capture drive to secondary master and put your windows swap file on the primary master. the two IDE channels are multitasking, but the master/slave isn't, so you'll get better perfomance that way. and you don't want windows seeking around on the drive your constantly trying to write too, which is why you move the swap file over to the main drive, not the capture drive. (or if you want to capture to the first channel master, move swap to second channel )

also, make sure capture board/video card / sound card have an IRQ >8. 8+ gets a higher priority than 1-7.

also, we had a discussion about VCR- and sound card-related drops and jitter a while back, so search the capture forum for 'jitter' and 'sound card' and 'drop' and you should find it.




<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: patrickm on 2001-07-04 15:59:20 ]</font>

[patrickm]

keep the _2_ PCI slots next to the AGP open if at all possible. i have an asus a7v133 and the first 2 slots share resources w/agp slot. you can get away with putting a card that doesn't do much there too (my second sound card is there in slot 2) but not the ethernet card, since that may use interrupts pretty often.

win98 should drop less because you're using the real vfw interface instead of the low performance WDM->VFW wrapper that a lot of cards have to use in 2k.