mkanel
26th August 2004, 04:02
I noticed that my capture drive drops groups of two or three consecutive frames every hour. The first group is normally dropped at about 55 minutes into the recording and the second group at 1:55, always exactly one hour later. Other than the groups of drops it rarely drops more than one frame/hour. When I capture to my system hard drive there are no consecutive frame drops.
Does anyone have any idea what would cause my dedicated capture drive to drop groups of frames at exactly one hour intervals?
More details if your interested.
I noticed this when capturing with VirtualVCR. I get a few drops when there are gaps in the tap and one or two random drops over a two hour recording, these show up as dropped2 frames, the consecutive drops show as regular dropped frames.
VirtualDubMod with the resample audio option also captures better to my system drive than to my capture drive but the drops do not show up at one hour intervals and are rarely consecutive.
The drives have the same basic specifications ATA 100, 7200 RPM, the capture drive is slightly faster on VirtualDub's benchmark test. The capture drive is a western digital 120 GB drive and the system drive is a 40 GB drive, both are on separate non-shared controllers.
I'm capturing with a Pinnacle PCTV PCI card, PIII 933 MHZ, normally Huff 2.2.0, 720x480, Windows XP Pro.
Dropping 5 or 6 frames during a two hour capture isn't bad but I became curious because of the regular drop interval and thought it would be easy to fix, I assumed I just had to disable some software the was running once per hour. I ended up disabling everything I could without crashing windows, pulled all the PCI cards except the video card and the capture card, capturing without audio, I even disable ACPI. I tried capturing at 320 x 240 picvideo quality 1 to provide for a very low data transfer rate and low CPU usage (normal CPU usage is 40-45%). With all this I still got the drops every hour. Out of curiosity I tried capturing to my system drive full resolution with picvideo quality 19 and had no consecutive drops and no plain dropped frames (I had 3 dropped2 frames all at gaps in the tape).
My capture drive is partitioned the other partition holds a backup of my system drive. The capture drive also has an extra tab in the device manager for SCSI properties and I've tried to enable disable all the available options.
Thanks MIke.
Does anyone have any idea what would cause my dedicated capture drive to drop groups of frames at exactly one hour intervals?
More details if your interested.
I noticed this when capturing with VirtualVCR. I get a few drops when there are gaps in the tap and one or two random drops over a two hour recording, these show up as dropped2 frames, the consecutive drops show as regular dropped frames.
VirtualDubMod with the resample audio option also captures better to my system drive than to my capture drive but the drops do not show up at one hour intervals and are rarely consecutive.
The drives have the same basic specifications ATA 100, 7200 RPM, the capture drive is slightly faster on VirtualDub's benchmark test. The capture drive is a western digital 120 GB drive and the system drive is a 40 GB drive, both are on separate non-shared controllers.
I'm capturing with a Pinnacle PCTV PCI card, PIII 933 MHZ, normally Huff 2.2.0, 720x480, Windows XP Pro.
Dropping 5 or 6 frames during a two hour capture isn't bad but I became curious because of the regular drop interval and thought it would be easy to fix, I assumed I just had to disable some software the was running once per hour. I ended up disabling everything I could without crashing windows, pulled all the PCI cards except the video card and the capture card, capturing without audio, I even disable ACPI. I tried capturing at 320 x 240 picvideo quality 1 to provide for a very low data transfer rate and low CPU usage (normal CPU usage is 40-45%). With all this I still got the drops every hour. Out of curiosity I tried capturing to my system drive full resolution with picvideo quality 19 and had no consecutive drops and no plain dropped frames (I had 3 dropped2 frames all at gaps in the tape).
My capture drive is partitioned the other partition holds a backup of my system drive. The capture drive also has an extra tab in the device manager for SCSI properties and I've tried to enable disable all the available options.
Thanks MIke.