Anyone capture MPEG2? Help please.

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ar Q
  • Start date Start date
A

Ar Q

When recording MPEG 2 files, I lost audio for 2 seconds while video was
frozen. It happened quite often, probably once every 10 minutes, so one hour
capturing has about six holes. Lower resolution won't help.

System specs:
ASUS P3V4X
PIII 3 900 or Celeron 1.3 on adaptor
ATI AIW7500
SBLive! 5.1 value
Win2000 Pro (SP 4)
80GB WD EIDE HD

I have installed the current VIA 4 in 1 drivers as well as VIA and SBLive
latency patches. I have tried many BIOS settings, the current setting is

Enable: CPU to PCI write buffer, fast gate A20, read after write, delayed
transaction.

Disable: PCI bursting, fast write, pipeline cache write.

UC --no cache (instead of write back cache).
Delayed DRAM read latch: 1.0 ns
PCI latency timer: 128

Are these BIOS settings good? What else should I try to make the capture
work? Thanks!

Ar Q
 
I'm new at this, but I will say that I was unable to capture video (firewire
to mpeg2) without dropped frames using the software that came with my
Hewlett-Packard 300i drive. HP told me I needed a new capture card and
refused to investigate further unless I'd purchased a new card, which I told
them that wasn't the economical way for me to proceed with testing, since
purchasing a new card (and finding out it wasn't really the problem) was my
last resort in the chain of experimenting.

Recently I downloaded the demo of U-Lead's "Movie Factory 3" and I was
surprised to find that I can capture video through this program with no
problems. Maybe it will work for you?? I only have a 1.1 gig processor. I
also have an ASUS motherboard with the VIA chipset and have also installed
the 4-in-1 drivers. I also have the Sound Blaster card but am running 98se.
How much RAM do you have? I've got 512.

Also, I don't know if it's relevant, but for about a year I had a heck of a
time exporting video. I finally found two solutions: the first was to max
out the buffering of my Pinnacle firewire card software (which is variable);
and the second was to scale back or shut off entirely graphics acceleration
in Windows. Another thing that helped was to defrag the drives--obvious, but
sometimes we're too lazy to hassle with it.

Steve S.
 
Might want to look into upgrading to something like an AMD Athlon 2500 with
a gig of RAM. You also would want a seperate hard drive for capturing.
 
Pug Fugley said:
Might want to look into upgrading to something like an AMD Athlon 2500 with
a gig of RAM. You also would want a seperate hard drive for capturing.
Click to expand...

Is this machine on a network? If the pauses are happening
exactly every 10 minutes it sounds like DHCP.. If DHCP
server or client is running, stop and disable these services.

Rick
 
Pug Fugley said:
Might want to look into upgrading to something like an AMD Athlon 2500 with
a gig of RAM. You also would want a seperate hard drive for capturing.
Click to expand...

I forgot to mention the system has 512MB RAM. When I moved all the
peripherals to other systems, I can have perfect capture, so I know the
problem is not on CPU. Motherboards I have tried (and they work) are Abit
VP6 and Aopen DX34R-U. They are all using PIII based VIA chipset. Although
these 3 all use Award BIOS, the newer two have less options on their BIOS
menus. It seems to me they took away those options because the users would
choose wrong settings. I am still thinking the problem might be that I did
not choose the right BIOS setting.

Thanks for your help.

Ar Q
 
Rick said:
Is this machine on a network? If the pauses are happening
exactly every 10 minutes it sounds like DHCP.. If DHCP
server or client is running, stop and disable these services.

Rick
Click to expand...

Nope. To pinpoint the problem, I re-installed many times. The current
configuration is starting fresh with only video card and audio card. By the
way, on one of the configuration, I added one SCSI card and drive for the
capture, since the problem was still there, I removed them.
 
Ar Q said:
When recording MPEG 2 files, I lost audio for 2 seconds while video was
frozen. It happened quite often, probably once every 10 minutes, so one hour
capturing has about six holes. Lower resolution won't help.

System specs:
ASUS P3V4X
PIII 3 900 or Celeron 1.3 on adaptor
ATI AIW7500
SBLive! 5.1 value
Win2000 Pro (SP 4)
80GB WD EIDE HD

I have installed the current VIA 4 in 1 drivers as well as VIA and SBLive
latency patches. I have tried many BIOS settings, the current setting is

Enable: CPU to PCI write buffer, fast gate A20, read after write, delayed
transaction.

Disable: PCI bursting, fast write, pipeline cache write.

UC --no cache (instead of write back cache).
Delayed DRAM read latch: 1.0 ns
PCI latency timer: 128

Are these BIOS settings good? What else should I try to make the capture
work? Thanks!

Ar Q
Click to expand...

Every ten minutes....

Have you disabled any screensaver?

Martin.
 
Hi,
How do you max out the buffering on the firewire card? Mine (the rectangular
one, not the triangular one with the Studio DV 200 )came with Studio DV 7,
but I have Studio 8 now.Thanks.
Peter Cowie
 
The answers are all relevant, btu I havbe an Athlon 2400 XP, one hard disk
at the moment, 120Gb, and I dont have capture/dropped frames issues. There
is a ssite soemwhere that went over issues, and stated that you dont need a
seperate hard disk either. Running Windows doesnt cause disk activity,
unbless you have too lkittle RAM (I have 512 DDR). I did have issues dutring
soem captures, and soem writing, so I disable auto upodate for Norton and
Windows, made sure power savibng was only gping to affect the screen going
off, and all fine. It coems down to identifying anythung that may cause disk
activity all by itself, screen savers are the obvious one, but other thinbgs
do thsi also, autoupdates being anoither chief cause
 
Tony said:
The answers are all relevant, btu I havbe an Athlon 2400 XP, one hard disk
at the moment, 120Gb, and I dont have capture/dropped frames issues. There
is a ssite soemwhere that went over issues, and stated that you dont need a
seperate hard disk either. Running Windows doesnt cause disk activity,
unbless you have too lkittle RAM (I have 512 DDR). I did have issues dutring
soem captures, and soem writing, so I disable auto upodate for Norton and
Windows, made sure power savibng was only gping to affect the screen going
off, and all fine. It coems down to identifying anythung that may cause disk
activity all by itself, screen savers are the obvious one, but other thinbgs
do thsi also, autoupdates being anoither chief cause
Click to expand...

I forgot to disable Windows auto update for this computer. Will get back to
you for the result tomorrow. (Crossing my fingers.)
 
AHh I have that P3V4X also.... 2 things hampered me when it came to video. I could never use all the memory slots and never put
anything in the #1 PCI slot, especially that SB live card. I never captured properly using that SB card and the P3v4x.

Also check for 'MS office' 'find fast' indexer.
 
JAD said:
AHh I have that P3V4X also.... 2 things hampered me when it came to video.
Click to expand...
I could never use all the memory slots and never put
anything in the #1 PCI slot, especially that SB live card. I never
Click to expand...
captured properly using that SB card and the P3v4x.

The mystery is solved!

As I suspected that it is caused by improper BIOS setting since latest Award
BIOS doesn't have so many options. My strategy is to test one option at a
time. After making about 20 recordings, I finally found out the quilty part.
After disabling "multi sector tranfers", I made full hour recording without
any freeze. And the bonus-- I used to have 1% or 0.1% frame dropping
depending on the aperature size, but after disable multi sector transfer,
there is no frame dropping. Finally I can make a perfect recording!!!
 
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