sudden frame 's drops after several minutes dropless capturing

[miet]

I capture using a VirtualDub and avi_io. My setting are 704x576 RGB unconpress, and 704x576 YUY2 huffyuv. In either case I do not drop even a frame for a several minutes. After this time all at once I am beguinning drops about 50% frames.
Do someone has an idea what is going on?

My Motherboard K7S5A, AMD Athlon XP 1800+, 256M RAM, GeForce2 64Mb TV out,PixelView PlayTV Pro PV-BT878P+FM NICAM (Rew. 9D), HDD 40Gb 7200 divided to two patrition 6Gb and 34Gb, Windows XP ,NTFS, WDM

Miet

[VILLA21]

I think that VirtualDub works only with VFM drivers...or not?
Anyway try a different codec e.g. MJPEG and set Quality to 20 maximum,
or try another capture application that works only with WDM drivers e.g. FlyDS 1.2.5 or iuVCR 4.

[Didée]

Well, if it first works flawless, and suddenly begins heavy stumbling ... that sounds very much like XP is doing some `magic´ in the background (or maybe any other background tasks you have running).
Can´t give you a particular hint, sorry ... you have to check for yourself seriously what goes on underwater.
Let me mention, after a fresh XP installation, I am busy for (at least) a whole day to tell XP how it sould behave.
A good starting point is to use XP anti-spyand apply its default optimizations.
Also set your swap file to min=max=1*RAM up to 2*RAM (depending on how much you have installed), but in any case min=max.
Turn OFF the, ah, how is this in english?, ...the function that watches all your drives for system rollback... Turn this off for all HDs but the XP partition.
And the list goes on ... configuring any windows OS to perform really well is quite an art!
And I don´t need to tell you about (de)fragmentation!

Good luck

Didée

[Acide ascorbique]

I had the same problem than you.
At the time of dropping it seems that the HDD was crazy (probably trying to write for both the capture & some XP task on both partition).
Open the task manager and found out which applications are running during dropping and stop then one by one.

In my case, it was the task CISVC.exe that I had to stop.
Of course, you better stop all anti-virus and other running program as much as.

If you are familiar with XP, run msconfig and launch only the application you need at start-up.

[miet]

I think you are right. XP doing some task in the background. Before I start to captue I always turn off all programs but I forgot about tasks. I will try to track it down during this weekend (if my wife will let me :D ). Thanks for tips.
Miet

[Belgabor]

Do you have a dedicated capture partition? This sounds like what happened to me when a file was 'in the way' of the growing capture file. You could try to capture till the framedrops occur and then look at the partition with a defrag program that shows the file which owns a block on the HD. Look out for a system log file of NTFS (that was right in the middle of my partition when such happened to me).

Regards
Belgabor

[miet]

I made some tests and it turn out that I had strange avi file on my capture disk. I left it couple day ago because I could not cut it. Every time I was going to cut it Windows gave a mesage "some program use this file" but no program was running at all. I formated disk and not came across the problem ever since.
Miet