capturing problems with Dazzle Digital Video Creator 80

[Black Evil]

I tried capturing with Virtual VCR and Media Player Classic. When i start capture with either, my computer restarts.

[Black Evil]

*bump

[Arachnotron]

There is not much info here, so you end up with generic solutions. Here we go:

- make sure no old capture drivers from previous capture devices remain

- update to the latest chipset and/or usb drivers (i.e. Via Hyperion, Intel infinst etc. etc. depending on your mobo chipset)

- make sure you have either directX 9.0C installed, or if you are still running 9.0b, install the tuner patch (even if the device has no tuner)

- make sure all other related devices like audio and video cards are using the latest drivers.

- run the latest service packs

- don't overclock

- check your memory with memcheck86 or something similar

etc. etc. etc.

[edit] forget about the tuner patch. That one is only for non-NTSC countries.

[jggimi]

Sounds like hardware trouble.

If your computer is running an NT-based Windows (NT, 2000, XP) then you may have already obtained a "crash dump" of the problem, or if not, you should be able to set up your Windows system to create one the next time this happens. With DOS-based Windows (98, ME) you don't have this option.

[Arachnotron]

@Black Evil

I had a quick look at your computer specs on your website.

It looks like you are running Windows 2000 on a Celeron 533 with 264 Mb memory. I could not find the make of the chipset.

If the chipset is from Via (Apollo something or the other), be aware that Via had big problems with their USB ports in that period. You might fix this by installing the Via Hyperion drivers (previously called 4-in-1 drivers), but you may even have to use a separate PCI USB card.

However, a celeron 533 is seriously underpowered for video work, especially if the device - as I suspect the Dazzle does - unloads the compression calculations on the CPU. I could not find an answer to that on the Pinnacle site, but most cheap capping devices compress in software.
That should not crash the system, but I doubt you will ever get it to work smoothly. Even Pinnacle requires a 500 MHz pentium (not Celeron) at minimum, but recommends 1 GHz