DV to PC via firewire issues.

[Shark_jlc]

About 4 months ago I used my company laptop running XP Pro to transfer 1 video tape from my Panasonic miniDV camcorder to the laptop via WinDV, and it worked perfectly.

I recently decided to buy a firewire card for my PC, also running XP Pro, and continue to transfer the rest of my tapes.

Every single time I tried to capture the video, I could see the movie play ok in WinDV (or Windows Movie Maker), but as soon as I would hit CAPTURE, it would stutter horribly and start dropping a massive amount of frames (500 per 30 seconds of tape). When the resultant recording was played on the PC, it was as if it was in Fast Forward, which makes sense, granted the amount of frames were lost - But I could not for the life of me figure out why this was happening.

I had Task Manager running on my other monitor and never saw the CPU go higher then 20%, I never ran out of ram, my hard drive is defragged, and I have at least 20 GB of free space.

I ran ProcessExplorer, FileMon, and a few other utils from Systernals looking for bottlenecks, with none found.

VirtualDub’s Benchmark tests said 0 dropped frames and indicated I had more then enough throughput on the hard drives to transfer the video adequately.

I even installed a hotfix from Microsoft in relation to the FireWire drivers. (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885222)

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So, with that all said, my only working theory is that the Via chip in all 5 of the firewire cards I tried (yes...5), blows.

I have returned all the cards and no longer have one in my system, and I plan on buying a card from Newegg with an Agere (Lucent), or Texas Instruments, chip in it.

Barring that, what advice do you guys have if this new card I order still doesn't work?

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My system:

Athlon XP 1700+ (1.5 ghz) Overclocked to 1837 mhz
512 MB ram
(2) 80 GB maxtor (in RAID mirror using the onboard Promise RAID controller)

[henryho_hk]

I suppose your DV cam is 1394a. The best bet would be a 1394a card with Ti chipset.

Is your XP running your harddisk in DMA mode? Is it a Serial ATA drive? Is it attached together with CD/DVD drive?

are you using MS' default IDE/ATA driver? Have you installed Intel's or Nvidia's (etc.) IDE driver?

so many doubts to clarify....

[Shark_jlc]

I suppose your DV cam is 1394a. The best bet would be a 1394a card with Ti chipset.

.....

so many doubts to clarify....

Actually, if you consider the fact I mentioned the drives are running RAID, most of these were answered already, but I will specify here....

Is your XP running your harddisk in DMA mode?

The motherboard sees the drives as a single scsi device due to the RAID. In the RAID BIOS however the drives are set to UDMA Mode 6.

Is it a Serial ATA drive?

IDE drives all around.

Is it attached together with CD/DVD drive?

Both drives are on their own cable, connected by themselves, to their own controllor IDE port.

are you using MS' default IDE/ATA driver?

Promise's IDE RAID driver, for the hard drives. Via drivers for the cd/rw and dvd drive.

Have you installed Intel's or Nvidia's (etc.) IDE driver?

Granted its a VIA motherboard, AND on the promise raid controllor, no.

[communist]

I think its nothing todo with the 1394 chip being from VIA or Ti. I've been using my super cheapo VIA chip powered 1394 PCI card for more than a year and it works just perfect. Have you tried those 'bad cards' in another PC to rule out the possibility that its your PC and not the cards fault?
Also did you follow the instructions about modifying the registry after applying the Hotfix?

What you can do / check:
Open up WinDV - click on config and check if under the Capturing from DV device tab the setting Every N-th frame is set to 1.

You could also try another capture tool like DVIO or try out a trial version of Ulead's VideoStudio / Adobe's PremierePro.

http://www.carr-engineering.com/dvio.htm
http://www.ulead.com/vs/features.htm
http://www.adobe.com/products/tryadobe/main.jsp#product=98

[Shark_jlc]

....I think its nothing todo with the 1394 chip being from VIA or Ti. I've been using my super cheapo VIA chip powered 1394 PCI card for more than a year and it works just perfect.....
Have you tried those 'bad cards' in another PC to rule out the possibility that its your PC and not the cards fault?

No other computer to try in, and like I said before, with all the tools I used to try to find a bottleneck, I could find nothing wrong with my system. What I believe the issue at hand is, some sort of incompatibility with my motherboard (MSI KT3 Ultra-ARU) and the via chip on the firewire card.... although I am posting here to make sure I didn't miss something obvious as I am VERY new to all of this.

Also did you follow the instructions about modifying the registry after applying the Hotfix?

Yes, I tried setting the value specified to 2, and to 3, rebooting between each, with no change in performance.

You could also try another capture tool like DVIO or try out a trial version of Ulead's VideoStudio / Adobe's PremierePro.

I tried Windows Movie Maker, VirutalDub, and WinDV. Would trying with these suggested tools make any difference?

Interesting to note, that VirtualDub would capture the video flawlessly, depending on the setting I chose, but with no audio.

What you can do / check:
Open up WinDV - click on config and check if under the Capturing from DV device tab the setting Every N-th frame is set to 1.

I will try this next time around, thank you for the suggestion.

[henryho_hk]

Sorry, I did not notice your config... the fonts are small in size... ^_^

Run cpuid and post the config here (http://www.cpuid.org/) When you use Virtualdub, do you capture in RCA or S-Video? What codec did you use?

As for the CPU load during capture, did you enable "Show Kernel Time" in taskmgr?

[theReal]

Have you tried using another PCI slot for the card?
Are there any background tasks running, like O&O auto defrag or some kind of bloated virus scanner? I guess not (seems like you know well how to configure a computer)

These are the last things I could think of... other than that I'd just try another brand of firewire card. I've only had one card for years, it's a cheap card with an NEC chip and it never made any problems at all with different motherboards.

[Shark_jlc]

When you use Virtualdub, do you capture in RCA or S-Video?

Firewire.... did I miss something here?

What codec did you use?

I have no idea. Is a codec used on a capture? If so, I assume I want the panasonic codec, since I have a panasonic camera?

As for the CPU load during capture, did you enable "Show Kernel Time" in taskmgr?

No.. why would the kernel time matter? I find they are never higher then the CPU time as is, and since my cpu never went over 20%.....

Have you tried using another PCI slot for the card?

This I did not try, altough I did make sure it had its own IRQ, no matter what plug and play is supposed to do :)

Are there any background tasks running, like O&O auto defrag or some kind of bloated virus scanner? I guess not (seems like you know well how to configure a computer)

Nothing was running in the background... and thanks :)

These are the last things I could think of... other than that I'd just try another brand of firewire card. I've only had one card for years, it's a cheap card with an NEC chip and it never made any problems at all with different motherboards.

This is my plan, good to hear about NEC.

[communist]

When you use Virtualdub, do you capture in RCA or S-Video?

Firewire.... did I miss something here?

What codec did you use?

I have no idea. Is a codec used on a capture? If so, I assume I want the panasonic codec, since I have a panasonic camera?
Transfer of DV material over firewire involves no codec since its just a copy process (the bitstream is read from tape - transferred via firewire - and written to harddisk).

I tried Windows Movie Maker, VirutalDub, and WinDV. Would trying with these suggested tools make any difference?

Interesting to note, that VirtualDub would capture the video flawlessly, depending on the setting I chose, but with no audio.



I dont remember being able to 'cap' from firewire sources last time I used VirtualDub - how did you use VirtualDub?

[Shark_jlc]

Transfer of DV material over firewire involves no codec since its just a copy process (the bitstream is read from tape - transferred via firewire - and written to harddisk).
Ok, I thought as much

I dont remember being able to 'cap' from firewire sources last time I used VirtualDub - how did you use VirtualDub?
Yeah, it was kinda odd. I changed my device from the firewire device to "Microsoft WDM Image Capture"... I think. Just to see what I got. I was pleased when I saw the image capture (normal playback), but then saddened at the lack of sound.

[henryho_hk]

Actually, 20% CPU time during DV data dump via firewire is a bit too high. Enabling kernel time display allows you to know what's going on; is it your anti-virus, the promise driver or something else?

The Promise chip is not fully hardware-based. In addition, unless your two harddisks are physically identical, your mirror setup would have additional impact on the write performance.

Other than that, as theReal said, you should also make sure that the promise controller and the DV card are not sharing the same PCI slot/channel.

I have been using KT333 and KT400 for 4 years too. As we know, VIA chipsets (system, fireware, usb .....) always have tweaking possibilities (you know what I mean :devil: ). For your case, you may want to try an unofficial program "PCI Latency Patch": http://www.georgebreese.com/net/software/#PCI