does macrovision cause dropped frames

[jdefed]

does copying vhs tapes with macrovision cause dropped frames. is there a difference in copying with compressed video or uncompressed as far as dropped frames. if you have the hard disc space is uncompressed better than compressed.
as an example i'm capturing a 2 hr movie with macrovision. uncompressed the file size is 120 gb, 200000+ frames and 280 dropped frames.
using vd and fusion 878 card with btwincap driver the picture when recording looks good and no out of sinc issues. is this acceptable or do i have to try and get it better.
thanks
jd

[LogicDeLuxe]

if you have the hard disc space is uncompressed better than compressed.Compare for yourself. While compressing certainly increases the CPU usage a bit, it also unloads the disk transfer.
You should make sure, the capture card and the hard disk controller use different IRQs for best performance. Usually one of the PCI slots shares the controller IRQ, hence makes it a bad choise for a videocapture card.

[illCP]

does copying vhs tapes with macrovision cause dropped frames.
That depends on which hardware is used. Some cards are "immune" against Macrovision while others will record crap only. I'm not sure what BT878-Cards do with MV.

as an example i'm capturing a 2 hr movie with macrovision. uncompressed the file size is 120 gb, 200000+ frames and 280 dropped frames.
Either the movie is not Macrovision protected or your hardware "doesn't support" Macrovision. I'm not quite sure if Macrovision causes dropped frames (I think it should), but if you're capturing a Macrovision-protected movie with a card that reacts on it, you should not get a satisfying result - half of the recorded movie should be crappy. The reason for "only" 280 dropped frames in two hours is surely caused by something else.

is there a difference in copying with compressed video or uncompressed as far as dropped frames. if you have the hard disc space is uncompressed better than compressed.
I'd never capture movies uncompressed - it's recommended to use a codec with lossless compression like e.g. HuffYUV or a good MJPEG Codec set to low compression. I think capturing video uncompressed is likely to cause more dropped frames than capturing to HuffYUV or MJPEG.

[LogicDeLuxe]

I'm not sure what BT878-Cards do with MV.With some tapes, you might need to tweak the burst delay, which shouldn't cause drop outs, though. Other than that, MV doesn't seem to affect the BT878.

[jdefed]

Some question came into my peebrain while i was experimenting with different configurations of my setup.
1) All my test are done thru VCR composite inputs. I can capture TV all day with no dropped frames, as soon as I push play on VCR I start getting dropped frames. Can I conclude that my configuration is OK and that the problem is in the tape or VCR play circuit.
2) The movie in question definitly has MV. I have 2 capture cards the fusion 878 and an Invidia card. The Invidia card does react to the MV and the 878 does not. The tape is less than 10 yrs. old but has only been played about 5 times, so the quality is good. One thing caught my attention when I was looking at the sleeve for the tape. The movie was originally released in 1954 in mono audio. This particular tape the audio has been stereo enhanced. The exact wording is "VHS hi-fi stereo enhanced" with a asterisc saying "Chase Surroud stereo-monoaural audio digitally remixed to stereo with surroud channel". Has anyone had any experience with this audio signal? Could this audio signal be the problem with the dropped frames?
My next experiment will be captureing in mono to see if that helps.
3) My card and hard drive are on different IRQ's