D
David Whitney
Hi, all.
I've built a homebrew PC for the purpose, among others, of serving as
a PVR/DVD burner station. The pieces I put together work happily -
superb video/tuner input quality from the AverMedia UltraPCI 550, and
it all records as expected. There is one glitch, however; I am
experiencing very slight but noticable dropouts perhaps every 15
seconds or so for video just recorded to the hard drive. Havn't yet
burned any DVD's yet.
The box:
Abit IS10 MB (Poor choice - no ability to adjust bus speed/timings)
512 MB DDR400 RAM
Intel 2.6Ghz Celeron CPU (Poor choice - limits mem. to DDR266).
Maxtor 6Y160P0 ATA100 160GB hard drive - 140GB/20GB partitions.
WinXP Pro w/sp1a
Gigabyte Radeon9200 se 128MB video
AverMedia UltraPCI 550 (as noted above).
Starting to look for possible performance bottlenecks, I started
noticing that CPU use for viewing TV only was right at 65%. When I
started *recording*, CPU use actually *fell* to about 30%, which
surprised me (maybe it shouldn't?).
First, I was wondering if anyone has any benchmarking or diagnostic
software for PC's doing video capture, something that could run a few
tests and say "this area is a bottleneck, you need more/bigger/faster
<something>."
Next, I realize only in hindsight that my choice of CPU hasn't
afforded me the hottest possible system (it drops my RAM's effective
max speed to DDR2600, which was a stupid oversight on my part), but
even at that shouldn't this system be able to handle video recording
without significant dropouts? I guess my thought is there have been
successful video capturing PC's for a while, and although this system
isn't the hottest one around, shouldn't it be capable with a half-gig
of RAM? Or should I pick up an SATA drive in addition?
Lastly, are the dropouts necessarily performance bottlenecks, or is it
possibly something more organic, eg faulty MPEG encoding/transfer,
firmware/sofware related? Put another way, how likely am I to
eliminate the dropouts by spending more money on additional or
different HW?
Its been a few years since I put together a PC, so I've made a couple
of mistakes along the way, but at least its educational. Mistakes
notwithstanding, I'd appreciate any and all thoughtful
feedback/opinions.
-dew
I've built a homebrew PC for the purpose, among others, of serving as
a PVR/DVD burner station. The pieces I put together work happily -
superb video/tuner input quality from the AverMedia UltraPCI 550, and
it all records as expected. There is one glitch, however; I am
experiencing very slight but noticable dropouts perhaps every 15
seconds or so for video just recorded to the hard drive. Havn't yet
burned any DVD's yet.
The box:
Abit IS10 MB (Poor choice - no ability to adjust bus speed/timings)
512 MB DDR400 RAM
Intel 2.6Ghz Celeron CPU (Poor choice - limits mem. to DDR266).
Maxtor 6Y160P0 ATA100 160GB hard drive - 140GB/20GB partitions.
WinXP Pro w/sp1a
Gigabyte Radeon9200 se 128MB video
AverMedia UltraPCI 550 (as noted above).
Starting to look for possible performance bottlenecks, I started
noticing that CPU use for viewing TV only was right at 65%. When I
started *recording*, CPU use actually *fell* to about 30%, which
surprised me (maybe it shouldn't?).
First, I was wondering if anyone has any benchmarking or diagnostic
software for PC's doing video capture, something that could run a few
tests and say "this area is a bottleneck, you need more/bigger/faster
<something>."
Next, I realize only in hindsight that my choice of CPU hasn't
afforded me the hottest possible system (it drops my RAM's effective
max speed to DDR2600, which was a stupid oversight on my part), but
even at that shouldn't this system be able to handle video recording
without significant dropouts? I guess my thought is there have been
successful video capturing PC's for a while, and although this system
isn't the hottest one around, shouldn't it be capable with a half-gig
of RAM? Or should I pick up an SATA drive in addition?
Lastly, are the dropouts necessarily performance bottlenecks, or is it
possibly something more organic, eg faulty MPEG encoding/transfer,
firmware/sofware related? Put another way, how likely am I to
eliminate the dropouts by spending more money on additional or
different HW?
Its been a few years since I put together a PC, so I've made a couple
of mistakes along the way, but at least its educational. Mistakes
notwithstanding, I'd appreciate any and all thoughtful
feedback/opinions.
-dew