Framedrops with Philips SAA7134 & Athlon 1G

[fellaw]

I'm using the Terratec Cingery 400(based on the Philips SAA7134) to capture, and I'm getting massive framedrops at YUV2. system specs and capture software/settings:

Athlon TB 1000 Mhz, 100 MHz FSB
KT133 Chipset, newest BIOS & 4in1
Geforce2Ultra, Detonator 40.72 WHQL
Terratec DMX XFire 1024
2x256 MB PC133 CL2 @133 MHz
empty 60GB NTFS drive, ATA66
WinXP Pro SP1 + all patches

iuVCR 4.4.0.260
Picvideo2 MJPG
768x576@25FPS@YUV2, SmartTee enabled, no filters
CD-quality audio, PCM


1. I tried several BIOS Tweaks, e.g. other PCI latency values.
2. I disabled SmartTee and tried lower resolutions.
3. I switched through all those options in iuVCR!
4. I used an empty 60 GB FAT32 drive
5. no background tasks running despites explorer.exe and svchost.exe

Nothing did help! There are lots of framedrops with YUV2, about 50%. It gets better with Y41P, but still lots of dropped frames. And the preview window is flipped vertically with Y41P!
What's wrong with the settings above?!? I'm having double the system requirements stated by Terratec! Is there any reference driver for the SAA7134 chipset?, to check if it's a driver fault? My old BT878 card didn't cause such a behaviour!

Please someone help me with that, I'm about to turn on the waters!

[^^-+I4004+-^^]

seems like philips chips prefer "UYVY" color format
(reversed YUY2)
so try that first.......
(also everythign that's said for asus combo boards
affects now you too.(for better or worse--LOL!)..as that's the same chip....or at least
simillar variant...)

[dar1us]

PRAISE!!!

Thanks for the decent description... I tell ya' the kids these days...:)

Try a different colourspace. UYVY as IVO said (that post wasn't there when I hit reply but I see it now). Try various colourspaces until it works but my Phillips would ONLY work in reversed YUY2.

>WHEN< you get it working, could you post some samples because we have none from users of the mighty Phillips (I got a 7108 but I am real interested to see what the 7134 looks like). A motion sample would be cool for me (but to suit IVO(i40+++ whatever) a frame grab:)

If u need space to share it, just shout.

One other thing, try capping at 48KHz audio and 720x576 (dunno how the Phillips like 768).

Have you benchmarked your Hard-Disk to check speed, then refered to iuVCR to see what datarate is required. If you arn't getting enough, a format would be the SIMPLEST solution

Just read u tried lower res's. Hmm?

[fellaw]

First, something I forgot to mention in my first post: I installed both DirectX 8.1 and DX9!

@^^-+I4004+-^^
iuVCR only lets me choose between YUY2, RGB24/32, Y41P and YVU9.
YUY2 runs great in preview without SmartTee, with ST enabled the preview doesn't run flawlessly. YVU9 looks awful, RGB24/32 give me a black preview and capture, Y41P flips the picture the preview, the AVI looks fine, though. I tried Graphedit(bttr), it gives me all colorspaces, so the incomplete list must be an issue with iuVCR. But none of the available spaces resulted in < 20 dropped frames per 5 seconds despite using pure Graphedit without SmartTee.

@dar1us & all
I've done some HD benchmarking a while ago, but I don't rembember the score. Should be enough, (768*576*16bit*25/8 Bytes/sec + 176400 Bytes/sec)/1024/1024 = 21,26 MB/sec uncompressed YUY2, for my good ol' Barracuda running at ATA66! Even uncompressed RGB24 gives me only roughly 31 MB/sec. As I wrote, I used a clean drive, both formatted(real, not quick!) with NTFS and FAT32. I'm using the PicVideo MJPEG at 18, so this should be far enough! What made me :confused:, is the CPU usage(->lower res). It's about 10-20% without and 50-70% when capping, even with this performance eating SmartTee!

I've done a short 640x480 cap without any drops recently. Couldn't keep this on for long, so only a short sample. I encoded it to Divx 5.02, of course after applying my own filter chain. Unfortunately, I don't have the original capped file anymore. I need some space to upload, so how about your offer :D:D:D. 4 MB should do it, ok?

/*edit
I've uploaded a still to webspace of a buddy(only 512KB/file possible :( ). Here (http://people.freenet.de/TC.Xan/images/drowning_sample.PNG) is it.
edit*/

[dar1us]

Cheers for the speedy reply, but is a Format REALLY out of the question? It sounds like it could be worth it. I am formatting this weekend to prepare myself for mondays launch of the complete Rerun of VOYAGER (which I intend to capture).

Wish me luck (sad aint' I:)

I will look further for any problems, but some sleep now. Tired after a day of learning, week break begins friday:)!!

[fellaw]

The drive was empty, but I formatted it due to your advice. As expected, that didn't help :p :p :p :p :p

/*edit
I've quickly set up a ftp on my pc, here's the sample (ftp://anonymous@sullus.dyndns.org/drowning_sample.avi).
The download(upload from my direction) has been limited to 3KB/sec, due to eMule running :sly:.
edit*/

[dar1us]

I will download that file in a min and then put it up on some fast space.

I actually meant formatting the disk running windows, a clean install. There is something not right as your spec shouldn't drop a single frame.

It is a little drastic, but I am sure that it will solve the problem. Yay, back to writing a Personal Statememt for higher education... Fun - Will download that file afterwards.

Oh... and my download isn't that much faster than 3k anyway:(

[^^-+I4004+-^^]

>The drive was empty, but I formatted it due to your advice.

why should one format a drive for capturing.....
HELL,i haven't defrag. mine for 4 or 5 months
and it's usually full of goodies...(and then i free 10-20gb and then i fill it again..never doing defrag.!
it's an matrox ata100 and VD test rates it as 33MB/s sustained...
2MB buffer it has.....)

so your hdd is least of your problems.....
i rate frame drops sources as this:
0-poor hardvare-by this i mean CPU in the first place...all newer hdd's will do.....for mjpeg even any ata33 will do....
(VIA chipset is excluded from my considerations....don't have it won't have it...)
and also poor capture hardware..(you're not the first with problems with terratec on PCI bus....a bit of a search will do...)

1-it can be poor source.....(capture cards can't capture pure noise,i guess you know that by now....)

2-frame drops as a result of unsync from audio and video capturing sections.......poorer sound card will probably give unstable
sampling frequenca so video section (ie. capture prog) drops frames as
audio is considered "master stream"....(it's not good to put it to anything else,as then you migh end up with funny FPS numbers or so...)
the more the difference between these two,the more it drops.......i can say that bt8x8 (that i have) + SB PCI drops cca. 14-24 frames per hour of capturing because of this.....
so i use VDSync and i don't get ANY drops (like zero or 0 drops per
session....session can be long as i wish and only limiting factor is hdd space.....)

and that's it...(given that you have proper drivers for device)

[fellaw]

@^^-+I4004+-^^
> so your hdd is least of your problems.....
.
.
.
> 1-it can be poor source.....(capture cards can't capture pure noise,i guess you know that by now....)
Nope, broadcast TV, the cleanest channel I could find.

> 2-frame drops as a result of unsync from audio and video capturing .
.
.
.
> hdd space.....)
That can be excluded, too. I made video only capture. Still lots of dropped frames.

I'm limited to the drivers Terratec released, because I haven't found any reference drivers for the SAA7134 yet. I've installed latest drivers for all my hardware, so that should be out of question.
I can't use any VfW related software, you know the reason why ;);)

@dar1us
Are you ser1us? I've not formated my Windoze XP for 17 months now, and it runs like the first day! Meanwhile, I've done many tweaks regarding many things(codecs, cache, registry, gui, ...) but some important I don't remember anymore how exactly I did them. So formatting this installation is out of question for lifetime! But I'll do something different: I'll partition my empty 60 GB drive into two new partitions. I'll install WinXP on this drive then and only my capture software and anything related to. After that, I'll run some tests. I'll post the results here.
/*edit
Btw, what have you done to my ftp? I looked into the log window this morning. What a mess! According to the log, you haven't got the file, have you?

How about the still sample? Does it look good enough for you guys?
edit*/

[dar1us]

I have the sample - cheers.

Yeh, I was serious, but I didn't know you had it running 'so well'. 17th months is something with XP, I format every 3 months, install a GHOST image of the hard-disk. I am formatting on friday or sometime this weekend.

That may help loads, the partition bit. I can't stand XP, 2k rules in my eyes for capping and generally everything. I hated my many trips down to tellytubby land [XP - hope someone gets it:)], I was on the BETA 1 team onwards. I had to keep testing it though as MS would cry otherwise. 2k rules. Oldie, but-a-goldie!

Grr, I wanna capture The Beach tonite on BBC but I am encoding ApocNow Redux 5 pass CCE and it is taking forever (the film is 193 mins long). There is at least 3 hours remaining (1.8x i think) but the beach starts in 2 and a half. Ohh:( - I really got to set up a new RIG for JUST internet and Ripping. This one usually captures or surfs, I got bored with games about a year ago.

[fellaw]

Sometimes I can use a 4x Xeon 2,2 GHz Dell Power Edge server running Win2k for encoding with TMPGEnc 12a overnight, that rocks!
What about the sample, does it kick ass? I didn't install WinXP to the 60G, but for sure I'll do that 'til saturday.

[dar1us]

The sample is pretty good, but the problem is that the (XVID was it?) is compressed too low, you really need a pretty shory, !HQ! sample to show off properly.

Cheers for it though.

Addition: TMPGenc 1.2a!!!?!?!?!???!?!?! U are aware we are on something like 2.59 now, (probably 2.6, 2.59 works fine for me).!>??!?!?!??!?!>"KJAFD*£%_Q£%
£%@~%£%???:D

[fellaw]

It was encoded with DivX Pro 5.0.2, Quarter Pixel, GMC & Bidirectional encoding enabled, 94% QB 1 pass.

Mainly, I've got two a reasons for still using tmpgenc 12a.

1. It's the last available version with FREE unlimited mpeg2 support
2. IMHO, the 12a mpeg2 encoder gives far better results than the latest one. This was confirmed by a buddy, who made several benchmarks regarding the encoding speed of different encoders(CCE, Xing, TMPGEnc and others).

I've put some unfiltered snapshots into a folder on my ftp, feel free to download them. One of them was taken from a non-interlaced source.

[Ookami]

Sigh. After I flew over the majority of the advices posted in this thread, all of them could be found in the FAQ (if nothing else, with a better spelling :) ).

@fellaw

I didn't read all of the postings (lack of time), but I didn't read that you've tried other software? Maybe, you should try it...

Anyway, good luck.

Good night,

Ookie.

[fellaw]

@Ookami
Of course I read the FAQ, that's because I wrote. Nothing from it did help me :-(

And I did use other software, VirtualVCR, Graphedit, Showshifter, FlyDS. All resulted in those massive frame drops!

[Ookami]

Originally posted by fellaw
@Ookami
Of course I read the FAQ, that's because I wrote. Nothing from it did help me :-(

And I did use other software, VirtualVCR, Graphedit, Showshifter, FlyDS. All resulted in those massive frame drops!

It was very clear that you've read the FAQ and your postings are very informative, no "Help me! Dropped frames..." posting :) , so I didn't meant you.

I've tried to find more infos on your Cinergy card but could only find a few postings in a german board. Is that a standalone PCI TV card or what?

I suspect that this is a driver issue. BTW, I see that you have the crappy KT133 (welcome to the world of pain :rolleyes: ), did you installed the George Breeze fix (I hope I correctly remembered the name of the man)? All masochists should try to capture with that chipset, it's going to be a joyride for them.

Another thing, I've also had big problems with the certified nvidia drivers (IIRC, that's the 40.72), I had to go back to the original manufacturer drivers of my GPU (on my old PC).

Capturing without sound?! Did you tried that? What are the results?

Also, other codecs, uncompressed etc.?

It's quite late so I'm gonna stop now, before my posting is even more unreadable.

Good night,

Mijo.

[fellaw]

> I've tried to find more infos on your Cinergy card but could only find a few postings in a german board. Is that a standalone PCI TV card or what?

You're right, it's a standalone PC capture card based on the Philips SAA7134 chipset. I switched to it because of those ugly stripes appearing with BT878 based cards. I wrote a thread about that some months ago, just do a search if you wanna read it.

> I suspect that this is a driver issue. BTW, I see that you have the crappy KT133 (welcome to the world of pain :rolleyes: )
IMHO the KT133 is fairly good compared to what VIA did after it(KT133A, KT133E). My next mobo won't have any VIA based chipset, not even hybrid!

>did you installed the George Breeze fix
It's only for the latency problems caused by the 686B south bridge. KT133 has a 686A, so no latency problems of any kind.

> All masochists should try to capture with that chipset, it's going to be a joyride for them.
:D:D:D:D:D

> Another thing, I've also had big problems with the certified nvidia > drivers (IIRC, that's the 40.72), I had to go back to the original manufacturer drivers of my GPU (on my old PC).
OK, that's something I haven't tried yet.

> Capturing without sound?! Did you tried that? What are the results?
> 2-frame drops as a result of unsync from audio and video capturing .
.
.
.
> hdd space.....)
That can be excluded, too. I made video only capture. Still lots of dropped frames.

> Also, other codecs, uncompressed etc.?
Of course: HuffYUV, Indeo 5.11 RTE, Motion Wavelets, Uncompressed, ...

Thanks four your advice anyway.

[^^-+I4004+-^^]

>I switched to it because of those ugly stripes appearing with BT878 based cards. I wrote a thread about that some months ago, just do a search if you wanna read it.

swap mobo instead........
"those ugly stripes" have nothing to
do with bt8x8 itself,as majority of people don't have it

[Swan]

@fellaw I have had a Terratec Cinergy 400 but gave it to a friend because I never got it to work properly. It works for my friend, though. He has a P4, I have an AMD Athlon XP+ processor, don't know if it's an Intel/AMD thing.

Anyway, I had massive problems with it. No "lines", though, and I have a Via KT266A chipset on my mobo (MSI K7T266 Pro2). Never had a problem with YUY2 any other BT card (I've had two, besides the Cinergy), so saying all Via chipsets are to be avoided for capturing because the ugly "lines" are bound to appear then is a misconception. Some people claim that, I just want to put my ten cents there, if that's the proper phrasing in English. :)

My problem with the Cinergy was that when I captured in 720 x 576 (YUY2), the card only captured half of the framerate of PAL. That is, at 720 x 576, It only sampled 12.5 frames per second, instead of 25. This looks like frame drops when one watches a captured file in MediaPlayer, Zoom Player, etc. Can you verify that it's frame drops you're seeing and not a reduction in the captured number of frames per second?
Do you get dropped frames (or reduction in the fps) when you capture in YUY2, HuffYuv compression and 352 x 288? That worked flawlessly for me with the Cinergy.

/Maria

[dar1us]

The sample runs at about 25fps (not checked for exact value), but I dont think there were any framedrops on it. So not 2x decimation.

YAY, last day of learning until the holidays:) Party time.

[fellaw]

Another thing, I've also had big problems with the certified nvidia drivers (IIRC, that's the 40.72), I had to go back to the original manufacturer drivers of my GPU (on my old PC).
I switched back to the 29.32 detonator. This kinda help me, now I've got zero dropped frames@640x480 with Y41P and no SmartTee enabled. YUY2 or SmartTee enabled still drops frames :(
The picture looks better in Y41P anyway. I'm experiencing some compressor related issues now when selecting a res higher than 640x480. Regardless which compression I select, it's always compressed with this crappy performance eating Booktree YUV 411. I think I can solve those myself now, but any help is appreciated. I'll upload some short HuffYuv samples to my ftp when it'll be running at 720x576|720x540|768x576.
Last thing to mention: With SmartTee enabled & Y41P, the preview is still flipped vertically. I don't know why(maybe the AVIDecompressor filter), but I don't care about that any more.

[dar1us]

Whats Y41P - is there a difinitive colourspace guide anywhere on the web?

[fellaw]

Y41P is a YUV 4:1:1 packed colorspace.

there a difinitive colourspace guide anywhere on the web?

This (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/directx9_c/directx/htm/yuvvideosubtypes.asp?frame=true) is one for the YUV subtypes.

[Ookami]

@fellaw

Glad something I've wrote helped you, you must be the first person on this board :D .

BTW, why don't you test the manufacturer drivers? I had always only problems with the generic nvidia drivers, altough I always thought that the manufacturers just put their logo in the generic driver and change a few things...

As for the colorspace guide, check for instance Dave Wilsons site: http://www.fourcc.org (seems to be down, ATM).

[simdavid]

Hi fellaw,

I thinku can try to use Virtual VCR to do your capturing..my suggestion is to try out other software and try to analyse whether is a hardware or a software problem! I was using FlyTV2000 at one time for my philips SAA chipset and I thought something was wrong with my hardrive for my dropped frames.After testing with different software..I found that I had no problems with Virtual VCR and Ulead Video Studio..So I thought u could try out Virtual VCR and see what happens.Hope it works for you!