FlyVideo3000 Dropped Frames

[IanD]

I am using a FlyVideo 3000 to capture NTSC source under Win98SE (ATA100 controller on 815EP chipset with UDMA5 settings on 7200RPM drives) with Fly2000TV and huffyuv codec and am experiencing 2-3 frame drops at a regular 5 minute periodicity, which seems to be tied to the PC clock rather than from the start of capture.

I have turned off every task I can think of, disabled any scheduler programs, ensured there is no IRQ conflict, disabled my NIC, used another capture program (VirtualVCR), but I'm still experiencing these regular frame drops every 5 minutes. I have also cropped the video to ensure data rate is around 6MB/s, but it makes no difference.

I'm only capturing video at this stage, to ensure there is no problem due to AV sync maintenance.

CPU utilisation is about 55% during capture, but seems to spike to 75% at the time of the frame drop. There does not seem to be any task activating at the time of frame drop according to Wintop.

I'm guessing some program is regularly tying up the PCI bus briefly every 5 minutes or interrupting the capture card, but don't know what or how to find out.

Has anyone else experienced this type of problem and know of a fix?

It's very frustrating because I get better picture quality capturing with the FlyVideo and composite than with a Canopus ADVC-100, if it wasn't for the frame drops.

Ian

[fellaw]

The FlyVideo 3000 has a Philips SA7134, hasn't it? Try disabling the USB controllers(or deattach the devices on them), just to make sure. This helped me solving those drops with my Terratec Cinergy 400.

[IanD]

The FlyVideo 3000 has a Philips SA7134, hasn't it? Try disabling the USB controllers(or deattach the devices on them), just to make
sure. This helped me solving those drops with my Terratec Cinergy 400.

Yes, the FlyVideo 3000 is based on the Philips SAA7134 chip.

I already disabled the USB capability in the Bios and there are no USB devices showing in System Device Manager, but I'm still getting the same frame drops every 5 minutes.

Out of interest, have you been able to get the onboard audio capture of the SAA7134 from line-in working? Because the FlyVideo drivers do not contain an audio capture device for the on-chip audio, it does not seem possible to use this feature as the only audio capture device is the soundcard. Consequently, one has to use passthrough to the soundcard for capture and hence AV sync is not able to be maintained.

One of the features I wanted to use with the SAA7134 was AV sync by using the chip to capture both video and analogue audio input.

Ian

[fellaw]

I wasn't able to use the onboard audio either. At least I couldn't do that with a common capture software like iuVCR. But by using GraphEdit, it's possible. First, I set up only a simple graph (http://people.freenet.de/TC.Xan/images/cinergyaudio.png) for testing purposes.
It's also possible to capture that way, but without any comfort: No segmentation, no scheduler, no max. filesize. But at least you'll have an info window for the dropped frames not rendered(it's the properties page of the video renderer). I can post the steps to construct this (http://people.freenet.de/TC.Xan/images/grapheditcapture.png) graph, if you won't manage it yourself.
However, could you please use this (http://www.iulabs.com/download/audiotst.zip) little proggie to test the quartz stability of your soundcard? Sometimes it happens that there are drops which aren't really drops, due to the contrary of the sound card's chipset. My sound card is pretty stable, 6 hours of capturing and not a single drop.

Edit: The second graph looks rather complicated, but that's only visual. Indeed, GraphEdit does most of the work four you. All you have to do is inserting the filters and connecting them in the right order.

[simdavid]

Hi, I'm using Lifeview Flyvideo 3000 as well. When I bought this card, I had problems looking for suitable capture software to cature with this card. And incidentally, my first workable software was FlyTV2000. I too had problem with drop frames with this software. Happily, I'm using virtual VCR now from www.digtv.ws with no problem. Capturing in YUY2 uncompress, no dropped frames unless my tape didn't play fluently at some poitn which dropping frames is expected.

I didn't have to disable my USB port or anything like that to use it drop frame free.

Give a try and also check out on your harddrive. How many MB can it capture per minute.

I'm using, VIA chipset motherboard and Western Digital 8mb cache 120gb. This information is just for your reference!

Oy yeah, If use virtual VCR, in A/V sync check the box that says resample audio and nothing else. In this way, even dropping frames your audio and video will still be sync!

Hope this helps!

[jrjazzman]

Ack! You get better quality on a FlyVideo 3000 than the ADVC-100?

How much better?

Originally posted by IanD
I am using a FlyVideo 3000 to capture NTSC source under Win98SE (ATA100 controller on 815EP chipset with UDMA5 settings on 7200RPM drives) with Fly2000TV and huffyuv codec and am experiencing 2-3 frame drops at a regular 5 minute periodicity, which seems to be tied to the PC clock rather than from the start of capture.

I have turned off every task I can think of, disabled any scheduler programs, ensured there is no IRQ conflict, disabled my NIC, used another capture program (VirtualVCR), but I'm still experiencing these regular frame drops every 5 minutes. I have also cropped the video to ensure data rate is around 6MB/s, but it makes no difference.

I'm only capturing video at this stage, to ensure there is no problem due to AV sync maintenance.

CPU utilisation is about 55% during capture, but seems to spike to 75% at the time of the frame drop. There does not seem to be any task activating at the time of frame drop according to Wintop.

I'm guessing some program is regularly tying up the PCI bus briefly every 5 minutes or interrupting the capture card, but don't know what or how to find out.

Has anyone else experienced this type of problem and know of a fix?

It's very frustrating because I get better picture quality capturing with the FlyVideo and composite than with a Canopus ADVC-100, if it wasn't for the frame drops.

Ian