Frame Dropping Question

[JDorn]

Hey guys I've been trying to archive some Alias episodes and I'm running into some trouble capturing the video into a file. My system seems to start dropping 1-2 frames every minute and I can't figure out where my problem lies.

Here's my hardware setup:

Dual P3 700 (7x100)
ECS D6VAA
Maxtor ATA66 13.6 GB HD (7200 RPM)
Seagate UW 9.1 GB SCSI HD
Ati All in Wonder Radeon 7500
256 MB PC133 Ram
running Windows XP

Ok I've got the 9 GB SCSI drive and a 9 GB partition on the ide drive setup in windows "software" raid to handle the capturing. In Virtual Dub I'm using PCM 8 bit Stereo (21 Kps) as my sound stream and I'm recording at 320x240 via YUY2 (is that right i'm trying to remember) and I've tried using Huffyuv, Divx 4.03 and no compression for the video all with no luck. As soon as I start my capture via Virutal Dub I'll begin to drop a frame or two every minute or so.

Is this a problem with my disk not writing fast enough or are my proc's not quick enough? I tried all different sizes of video to scale down the amount of data being written every second to the disks but I still get the same problem.

Any help from you AV gurus would be greatly appreciated.

JD

 

[rbV5]

Your processors are plenty powerful for what you are doing. Since you are only capturing 240 lines, I suspect the ide/SCSI software RAID may be your culprit. Try some short captures using your drives in a variety of configurations. Do you drop frames capturing in MMC?

 

[JDorn]

No it never drops frames in MMC but sometimes when recording in MMC the app just stops writing to the disk completely, why it does that has got me confused since the program still says its "recording" and the counters keep moving just fine, it just stops writing anything to the disk.

After coming to the same conclusion as you I went out and picked up a Maxtor 40 GB ATA100 7200RPM drive at lunch time and threw it into the box and was testing out some small captures. They all seemed to work fine under Virtual Dub, but I did have one that had an unexplained "bulk" dropping of frames that I couldn't figure out (caps were all about 1-1:30 minutes long). I'm gonna play around with it a bunch more this evening but any help would be appreciated.

Does anyone know of a walkthrough that details how I should setup VDub for the best mix of quality/max recording time? I really don't understand how Huffyuv works because when I select it as my compression scheme the filesize doesn't make my files any smaller than if i do totally "uncompressed". Its been boggling me because with my current settings I still drop frames at 640x480, but not at 352x288 and using Huffyuv it says I have about 1 hr worth of space on my 40 GB drive!! NOTE: Using Divx tells me i have almost 28 hrs worth of space.

JD