Help! Dropping frames at every framerate, even 5fps.

[anticowboyism]

Ok, having this really crappy problem. Trying to capture with my GF4 VIVO card, uses the Philips 7108 for capture. Using VirtualDub to capture to Huffyuv 2.11.

It doesn't matter what framerate or format or size I choose. It always captures at slower rate than I specify. Here's my results:

Set to 29.97 --> captures at 26.41
Set to 14.99 --> captures at 13.19
Set to 9.99 --> captures at 8.80
Set to 5 --> captures at 4.4
Set to 59.94 --> captures at 52.84

This is so frustrating! It doesn't seem to matter what settings I choose. The same thing happens at 640, 320, 160, etc. With or without audio capture. Regardless of using the Huffyuv or uncompressed. CPU usage at 640x16bitx29.97 with 22k audio is only 20-30%. Harddrive is a standard 40gig Maxtor 5400 rpm, not the best I know, but has sustained transfer of 23Mb/s, which is plenty for 16bit video. Especially for the low fps I've tried. DMA is enabled, and HD tests confirm the transfer rates.

Anyone have any ideas what is going on here? Anything I can try? I appreciate any help.

[Petco]

I'm pretty sure its your hard drive! I have two hard drives on the same computer, 5400 and 7200 . The 5400 drops frames and my faster hard drive doesn't.

When I began video capturing, I've even read somewhere that they suggested a SCSI hard drive.

[anticowboyism]

But even when I try 160x120, Huffyuv, 5fps, no audio, it only captures at 4.4fps!! The data rate for this low of a capture is only 37kb/s. Surely my lowly 5400rpm drive can write faster than 37kb/s. ??? I know it can. I've run HD tests that report write speeds of 23MB/s.

[bunyip]

Certainly doesn't appear to be your disk - since you are able to capture at 52.84.

VDUB is notorious for frame drops, there are two capture methods in VDUB, the 'standard' method and the 'compatible' method. Have you tried both? - the capatible method tends to leave hardware alone. When setting compression make sure it is also set in compatible mode.

I would suggest you also try another capture tool - I recommend AVI_IO I never get frame-loss with it but regularly get frame-loss with VDUB.

[anticowboyism]

Thanks, I will try that.

I just really wanted to get VDub working because I hear it is such a great program...