Every 6 seconds - Boom!! - 30 frames dropped

[lar1r]

I just bought a pinnacle PCTV card, to use its svideo in instead of my Radeon VIVO composite in.

I could capture at 640x480 before fine.

Now, even with low CPU usage, I can't even capture at 320x240 without having 30 dropped frames just added every 6 secs.

In other words it works fine for 6 secs, something seems to pause and all of these dropped frames are added. The cycle repeats indefinately.

I am using the latest 4.02a drivers from Pinnacles site which are made for WINxp.

Any ideas?

Thx

[Milkman Dan]

Is the loss associated with disk activity? Do you have antivirus software running?

What prog are you using to capture?

[fantasymick]

Most importantly, what are you encoding in? If you're capturing the video and immediately encoding it in DivX, off course you'll get frames dropped. Check your settings.

The advised format is MPEG1. But you'll need a huge hardrive. To get decent quality, you'll need like 2MB/sec.

[fantasymick]

Oh ya, you should also wipe your freespace before encoding. Normal delete doesn't entirely erase the files. Get a wiper such as Mutilate.

[bb]

Use TaskManager to check out for tasks eating CPU while capturing.

bb

[lar1r]

It worked fine with my Radeon VIVO.
Upon placing in the PCTV, it seems to freeze when ever I stop moving my USB mouse. Everything works fine when I go back to the Radeon VIVO.

[jako77]

It seems I have the same problem as you with a pinnacle pctv rave. Everything was fine under win98... and a lot of frame dropping under win xp. What is even more curious is that it works perfectly when you reinstall the drivers as long as you do not reboot.
I have tried wdm drivers to no avail.

[Cart]

Have you tried using older, VFW drivers?

-Cart
http://www.geocities.com/lukesvideo/index.html

[lar1r]

Pinnacles drivers are VFW.
They have WDM ones in beta but then I'd need a wrapper to get it to work with Virtualdub and i've had no luck this way.

It's a wierd problem, but like the previous post says, if you really want to use the capture, you have to reinstall and not reboot.

[Cart]

If it works until you reboot, this could imply that something is being loaded. Have you checked to see if the drivers are loading any services or executables (via the registry, StartUp folder, services control, etc.)?

-Cart
http://www.geocities.com/lukesvideo/index.html