The Frames!! It's The Damn Frames I Tells Ya!!!

[priss]

Arrrgghhh! Somebody help before i tear all my hair out and end up looking like this guy!:

http://www.familycopies.sageweb.co.uk/thm_d_goodhew.jpg

Basically i have a WinTVGO card and when i first got it (not long ago) i could capture VHS and TV fine. In fact i can still capture TV fine. I do all my capturing in VDub btw.

But recently i tried to capture a VHS and sure it captures, but drops frames at about 30 or so every second!

It used to capture fine before and suddenly just decides it wants to drop frames quicker than that girl/guy who you know drops their pants! :(

Can anyone tell me whats gone wrong? Or any tips on how to solve this problem as i've got no idea what i have done wrong. :(

Should i perhaps apologise to my TV Card if i pissed it off in some way? Maybe take it out for lunch or something? But seriously, any ideas and help as to whats happened and how i can capture VHS again would be great. Thanks very much. :)

[priss]

p.s: I have read the FAQ and the post about dropped frames but it didn't reslove the issue. :(

[Rizzo]

Make sure that DMA is enabled on your hard drive(s). I recently had the same problem and had to reinstall the intel chipset drivers to fix it (Intel has a handy utility to do it for you). That is the only thing I can think of considering you read the droped frames FAQ.

[theReal]

Maybe it's just that the VHS you're capturing is hard to compress and the compression driver you are using has problems with this material. Capture in Hufyuv to see if this is the case.

Then, is your audio set to the same format than when you capture tv? If the frame drops are very regular, then it might just be VDub trying to sync audio with video. When I capture in 44.1KHz 16 bit stereo, for example, after half a minute I get the first frame drop and then it won't stop dropping frames every few seconds. When I set the audio to 48KHz 16 bit stereo, all frame drops are gone (I get like 5 in half an hour on full resolution mjpeg)

[$$$]

This sounds like the stabilizing problem BT cards have in combination with some drivers. Try to reduce the vertical resolution a few pixels, e.g. if you are now capping @ 704x576 go down to 704x574 or 704x572.

$

[priss]

Thanks all. I'll put some of that advice to good use and see what happens. :)

[priss]

Well, i tried......and failed. :(

It's really odd. I can capture directly from TV and lose maybe 3 frames or something during a 30minute tv show. But as soon as i try to capture from the VCR, i lose about 15 frames a second!

I just can't see what the problem is. If i'm not losing anything capturing live and direct from tv, why am i losing so much from VCR?

I still can't put my finger on it. Please can anyone help as it's really doing my head in now, it used to capture VCR fine. :(

[neily]

priss,

Similar problem which I am similarly tearing my hair out about. Strange thing is that I can capture fine at 768x576 50Hz video, 16 bit 44100Hz stereo audio, HuffYUV, Win98 / AVI-IO but as soon as I drop the resolution, dropped frames like crazy.

Started my capturing at high res but since getting a DVD player have been surprised at how satisfactory VCD is for certain types of programming. Everything seemed fine initially at 352x288 then went haywire, I couldn't see that I had changed anything. Captures live TV fine but not VHS tapes. Captures fine without audio. Tried various other resolutions. For a brief while 384x284 seemed to work fine but now a similar problem. Can only surmise there is some problem locking the audio frequency on my SB Live!.

Tried various driver combinations for WinTV and SB Live! but still nothing consistent. Have tried 352x288 with WDM drivers in XP, but no better.

Problem is I like AVI-IO too much. Got fed up with all those manual A-V synching hours before. And don't really want to have to capture full res for VCD as it is a waste of capturing space and post-processing time.

Someone previously mentioned a synching/stabilisation problem with WinTV cards. Anyone care to expand on this?

If I make any progress I let you know

[priss]

Yup i have WinTVGo and SB Live! too.

Anyway, like you said, i'm having similar problems. But i don't get it, my system just one day decided to do this. I wish i could find out why. :(

I captured a tv show tonight. 30mins long. 3 frames dropped.

I captured a vhs this afternoon. Caputred 30 seconds of it. 150-ish frames dropped.

WHY?

*sob* :(

[neily]

priss,

You couldn't provide a little more information, such as OS, drivers, capture software.

Like you this just seemed to happen out of the blue with no changes to the system to blame, and as I said, I can capture at 768x576 fine, or from TV, or with no audio. It is just lower resolutions that are causing problems at present.

My feeling is that an audio synching / SB Live problem is to blame. I wonder whether the ambient temperature has an effect on the clock stability of the SB Live. Have you noticed any difference by letting your system or VCR cool down first.

BTW, in Win98 with the VFW 4.2 driver and AVI-IO S-Video in, I just succeeded with a VHS capture by first tuning WinTV2000 to that channel. This sometimes seems to make a difference for some reason, but maybe it is just coincidence. You could try it.

[priss]

Sure thing! :)

I am using:

PIII 500mhz
512mb RAM
60GB WD HDD
Creative 32mb TNT2 Ultra
Soundblaster Live!
Windows XP
Hauppage WinTVGo Card

Software used to capture & encode:

VirtualDub (for capture to avi)
TMpeg (to encode to VCD or SVCD depending)

[Valky]

This seems interesting..cause I have all the same problems and equipments like you..

Everything use to work fine..I have captured 4-5 vhs-tapes with VirtualVCR or Virtual dub using resolution 352x576 or 320x480 and everything has gone very good. There exists lot of noises, but still I have managed to get only 3-5 dropped frames in the worst tapes.

And yesterday it started..as soon as I try to capture from vcr I get instantly 5-30 dropped frames after few seconds..with the same tapes I already captured fine!! Capturing from TV still work fine.

What's happening here??

My system:
Windows XP
Athlon XP 1700+
480 ram
SB Live! <---- coul it be this one?
wdm-drivers from sourceforge
80 GB empty HD

[priss]

Yup, i am using a smaller resolution too. And just like you, i have the same problem. One day it was fine, the next, BANG! major frame droppage but ONLY from the VCR not for TV.

Arrggghhh!!!!

:(

[priss]

Well, it's totally done my head in now, so tomorrow i'm formatting both my HDD's and starting fresh again and lets see where we are from there. :)

[Valky]

WAIT!!!!

I found little light on the tunnel..

I tried to change my modified wdm drivers to Haupages official XP drivers and still dropped frames, but..

..after that I did to things:

1. I unistalled Creatives Audio HQ software
2. I installed win2k vfd drivers from hauppages pageversion 3.11 (I have win XP)

and now everything works great and no dropped frames in virtuaDub with resolution 320x480.. downside is that I cant use now VirtualVCR, but at least I can now capture my 2 remaining vhs-tapes that are loaned from my friend =)

The clock is now 01.00 am here in Finland so I dont know which one of these made the trick and too tired to try..tomorrow is the new day and now I need some sleep, ut try these and tell me if it works for you.
I use picvideo with comression 19 and 20.

[priss]

Thanks m8, i will try that. But my HDD is a bit of a mess anyway so i'm going to format it anyway, but thanks for the info, i will try this tomorrow. :)

[jako77]

There is the common denominator of Windows XP which seems to behave strangely when capturing video. For my part, I get massive but random frame drop (sometimes all works well, sometimes not), only when I use a Maxtor 80 giga HD (supposed to be ATA 100). When I cap on a 40 giga IBM HD, everything works fine. I tweaked everything I could think of to no avail. Under win98 no problem at all.

[Didée]

Jako77,

Don´t create rumors, please ...

I don´t think the Maxtor HD is to blame. I capture *only* to Maxtor HD, and I drop max. 1-2 frames per hour, full-screen PAL through Huffyuv. Running XP, just to mention.
Of course, this HD deals with capturing, only with capturing, and nothing other than capturing.
As you know, it´s never a good idea to capture to a drive that *might* be dealing with any other stuff during capture ... a capturing partition on its own is good, a capturing drive on its own is much better :)
Could it be that your problems when capturing to your Maxtor have something to do with this?

But I admit: after installation of XP, there is quite some work to do to dress it ... but if you got it dressed, things are fine!

[neily]

I have found no solution as yet, but may I point out that I mainly dual boot into Win98 for capture so I can use the full res settings in AVI-IO (works fine at full res), and still have these problems at lower res.

It is interesting in WinXP using something lke the modified AMCap.exe at the BTWin site which shows the current capture frame rate. Have it tuned to the VCR and the frame rate hovers around 25 (PAL). Start playing a tape and it immediately starts dropping to around 15fps. Also, recording and not recording audio makes no difference.

Still having no problems at 768x576 PAL!! Still after fiddling, changing the size and colour space for capture, then changing it back again, occasionally get a clean capture, but repeat the capture and dropped frames again.

So from what I can surmise from reading here, XP is not a common factor. Neither are Athlon systems. Neither are graphics cards (mine's an ATI Radeon which I gave up on for capture as it detects macrovision signals even on sources where none is present). Compression codecs seem irrelevant. Creative sound cards do seem to be a common factor. I might try pulling mine out later to see what happens, and to try Valky's suggestion.

Still bemused by this happening out of the blue. Having checked my XP Update log I can't find any clues, and am not really prepared to do a full clean install. That was what the Win98 partition was for - a dedicated video capture solution.

[jako77]

Didée,
Far from me the desire to spread bad rumors about XP , which remains my favourite OS despite this problem.
I acknowledge this is only one possibility. Unfortunately, this hypothesis of a responsibility of XP is my my last one since I have no pb under win98 and I followed every piece of advice I found "to dress" XP , to no avail up to now (DMA, indexing, cache memory etc...). Furthermore, I precise that the maxtor is almost totally free, have been formatted several time, and is not the system drive on which xp is installed. So, I capture without frame drop (1-2 per hour as you do) on the IBM HD system drive (actually neither dedicated partition nor dedicated drive !)!
It might also be the MB that does not like XP (VIA chipset ?)... or anything else which remains to be identified ! Any other clue ?

[priss]

Originally posted by neily
<SNIP!>...Still bemused by this happening out of the blue...<SNIP!>

Exactly. Same here. :)

[neily]

OK,

I have kinda made some progress but don't fully understand what's going on.

To recap, this frame dropping problem for me only occurs at resolutions other than 768x576 (PAL), only occurs with video tapes regardless of whether the input is via aerial, composite, or S-Video, and the number of dropped frames varies depending on the tape. It occurs with both Hauppauge's VFW and WDM drivers, as well as the BTCap drivers. May I suggest using something like the modified AMCap utility at http://btwincap.sourceforge.net and look at your actual capture rate. The reason for dropped frames is that the actual video rate is around 15fps when being problematic.

The problem also is present under Win98 and WinXP. Still, sometimes I seem to fluke a clean capture. I had various feelings about this, mainly that it was due to starting in certain capture resolutions, then dropping down, but nothing consistent.

Anyway, this made me think that it was some sort of hardware / synching problem, so skimmed through the BT878/9 programmer's reference guide at www.conexant.com. I also came across a utility that works under Win98 / VFW drivers to change the register settings on the card. The file is Bt848ARegTool.zip at:

http://www.geocities.com/amethman/toolsite.html

I thought if I could crop the intereference off the frame, maybe synching would be better. What I found was that when capturing at 352x288 or 384x284 Bt848ARegTool.exe showed the VDelay_LO_Odd register to have a value of 0x22, the manual showing a default of 0x16. When changing the value to 0x18 or 0x16, all my problems went away. Visually, on video preview, the effect is to move the image down a couple of lines. You gain a slither of noise at the top, and lose some from the bottom.

Each time a capture is started, the register is reset, but the tool allows you to change the register during capture. So, in AVI-IO, you start capturing and get 1 or 2 dropped frames a second, then change the register and further drops disappear.

How useful for the rest of you this is I don't know. This utility doesn't work under WinXP / WDM drivers. I don't know whether such an equivalent exists. I haven't trawled the registry yet to see whether any of these settings are configurable there. I did notice in the BTCap driver readme that mention is made of register and registry settings, so I might take a look there.

Hope this helps, or hope that someone who knows more of these things can step in and offer a more definive solution.

[theReal]

I think you can encircle the problem a little closer before everyone starts blaming everything from HD's to soundcards or even room temperature:

If the frame-dropping appears only on capture from VHS, not TV, and you are using a codec which does not too heavy on the cpu (like uncompressed or huffyuv), it must be a capture-card driver problem. This is where the only difference lies: you switch the video source from tv to s-video or composite. Nothing else is changed, so the problem must be with either the capture hardware or the drivers. The hardware is ruled out because it has been working before, so the capture drivers must be the source of the problem, right?

[hanfrunz]

Hello,

try IUVCR from:

http://www.iulabs.com/eng/index.shtml

hanfrunz

[Didée]

Another quick shot:

I noticed it´s NOT a good idea to have an explorer window open in the background, showing the folder to which the capture is saved!
XP actualizes the view all the time, giving me quite some droppes sometimes!

[Valky]

just one more question: Do you guys have VIA-chipset on motherboard like I have?

It seems so strange to me that those modified wdm-drivers have worked before without any frame drops. And now with these vfm-drivers 3.11 for WIN 2K there isn't any drops. These drivers are only temporal solutions, cause I think the picture quality is little bit lower and I cant use all resolution I want if capturing from TV. (lower resolutions work fine when capturing from vhs, but for tv I prefer more...)

[neily]

Valky,

I do have a Via chipset, like I think most respondents here except perhaps the original poster.

I have experimented with the Conexant reference drivers for VFW now and think I have a clue as to what is going on, though no definitive solution, especially for capture under WDM.

The problem appears to be an interaction between the drivers and the video source. Video sources are not as clean as live transmissions. Video sources also vary. Depending on the driver, different parameters are passed to the card for cropping, offset and scaling etc, for each capture resolution and for some reason, some of these settings work better with slightly out of spec video sources than others. In addition, when changing from one capture resolution to another, particularly when going from full resolution to less than full resolution, some of the card's registers are not changed, and though they don't affect the apearance of the video feed they do have a bearing on dropped frames. Thus if you open a capture app and set to capture at 768x576, then drop to 352x288, the register entries are not the same as if you launch the app and go straight to 352x288.

My personal conclusion is that nothing peculiar is going on, and nothing has changed. The inconsistency I think stems from the fact that tapes vary, and possibly the order in which I selected capture resolutions varied. My default for capture used to be full PAL, but since getting a DVD player, I have been starting at PAL VCD resolution.

If anyone doubts my conclusions, may I suggest experimenting with a number of drivers from different sources, reading the BT878/9 reference manual, and getting hold of a BT8x8 register reporter, such as Borg TV's BT Tool.

Unless someone can come up with a driver that is user configurable, I think that capturing under certain sets of circumstances may remain difficult.

As an interesting side effect, I found that I could eliminate my persistent full PAL out of order fields problem by changing the value of the even field Vertical Delay register.

[Skullworks]

For hardware details see http://www.specialservicesmfg.com/beast.html

Running as a dual boot using U160 SCSI and RAID - I have noted that the continous transfer rates in XP are not always consistant, or as high as in W2K Pro. - This has been a common topic (gripe) on Serveral "Windows" forums.

I also have a dual boot Piii 550Mhz with AIC-7890 U2W that runs W2K & W98(R0) and have not noticed any significant difference in HDD performance between those two O/S. But the NTFS 5 of W2K does have several advantages.