DVB capture and dropped frames?

[Rauli]

I'm using Hauppauge WinTV Nova-t dvb card. When I record the mpeg2 stream the resulting file misses video frames. Missing video frames are quite frequent even a few frames missing every minute. I can use PVAStrumento to correct the stream but it cuts the audio where it finds missing video, resulting in words missing in the audio every now and then. If I play the original mpeg2 stream with WinDVD it plays back fine without any dropped audio or even video. If I do not correct the mpeg2 stream with PVAStrumento and convert to divx4 the audio gets out of sync because the audio file is longer than the video file.
Are any of you having the same problem? If you are missing videoframes how frequent are they? What kind of method are you using to convert dvb mpeg2 steams to divx?

[Zhnujm]

there should be no missing frames in your capture.(at least i have none)
you can try the usual solutions for such a problem:
- check if the irq is shared with another card
- any programs running in the background
- try another program for capturing (but i think you have not much choices with a dvb-t card)

also is your pc fast enough ? the capturing is no problem but the wintv nova card has no hardware mpeg-2 decoder so the cpu is also needed for decoding and displaying the tv-picture.

[Rauli]

Zhnujm thanks for your reply. Since you don't have any drops I am suspecting my antenna then, or the capture prog. My CPU is an 1000athlon so that is not the problem. Also, as I mentioned, if I play the file in windvd it plays back fine.

I experimented a little with avisynth and opened the video with the directstreamsource. It seems that that can read the mpeg2 steam better than mpeg2dec. I have not yet tested that method with a long capture but I will do so in the future.

If you don't mind me asking Zhnujm, in what country do you live in? Are you using DVB-t , s or c?

Also do you know of any dvb-t discussion board in english?

[Zhnujm]

i use a dvb-s card, dvb-t is only future here in germany. but i think if the problem is the antenna you would see this also in the live picture.
my usual way of converting is:
-capture as mpeg-2 stream
-demux and fix to m2v/mpa with pvastrumento (make sure you use the newest version 2.0.19)
-convert the mpa to mp3 with besweet
-make a dvd2avi project file of the m2v (avisynths mpeg2source cannot read m2v directly)
-virtualdub (with help of avisynth) to compress and cut the file and the audio muxing.

a simple all-in-one solution is vidomi. i remember it can even read pva files directly, but maybe im wrong. it didnt supports upscaling so its not useful for me.

but i think the main goal should be to capture without missing frames. have you tried switching the card in another pci slot ? or is your pc overclocked ? i had some problems when the pci bus was clocked higher than 33MHz.