Capture problems with SB Live Value (Marvel g400)

[Eik Brandsgaard]

I'm the prowd owner of a Marvel G400 and a SoundBlaster Live Value. The problem is, that the capture "re-initializes" every now and then causing the resulting AVI to have "gaps" - dropped frames.
I found out that if i don't capture audio (using avi_io) I can capture ANYTHING (all resolutions, all fps) with absolutely no problems. No dropped frames at all and no re-initializing of the capture.
So the question is: should I discard the SB Live or is there a software (driver) solution to the problem? Or some kind of a hack?
If I am to replace my SB Live, what should I buy instead (must be PCI - my mobo is a Soyo BA IV+)?

Any comments and suggestions are more than welcome.

(Thanks to Marcus Zing for hinting that the soundcard may be the problem)

[RBryant]

I've been using an SBLive! for captures since Dec 98 and I haven't had that problem ever. What's your exact setup? It could be some type of hardware conflict... make sure the SBLive! is not sharing an IRQ with ANYTHING at all...

RBryant

[Eik Brandsgaard]

The Marvel and SB Live actually shares the same IRQ (11), so this could be the problem. I suppose the IRQs must be set in the BIOS? I tried to make the change for both SB and Marvel in System Manager/Devices/Resources with no succes.
And with which device would you suggest the Marvel should share IRQ?

Thanks.

My setup is:
Soyo BA IV+
Celeron 366
64 MB Ram
Marvel G400
Soundblaster Live Value
Diamond SupraExpress 56i Pro (OCI modem)
Real Magic Hollywood+
Pioneer DVD 103s
IBM Deskstar GP (15GB) (ATA 66 enabled)
Maxtor DiamondMax 4320 (10 GB)

[Technoid]

Neither the marvell nor the sblive should share IRQ'S with anything!
Check your bios: in PNP/PCI you should at least be able to asign a irg to vga!
And (if you are lucky) asign irq's to pci slots!
If you can't:
dont plug anyting in the pci slot nearest the agp slot as they share the same IRQ!

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INTEL PIII550 MSI 6163
G400Mill 32MB SGRAM + RRG
SBlive
128 MB RAM
19GB HDD Space! (6.4+13 quantum drives)
SONY CDU771 32X SLOT IN
SONY CRX100E 4/2/24 CDRW

[wkulecz]

I don't know if this applies to the SB live or not, but many sound cards these days come with WDM drivers for Win98. I've had many problems with these that have been fixed by uninstalling the card (may require booting into safe mode and removing any driver remnants from device manager) and re-installing the Win95 drivers for your sound card.

Worth a shot before buying a differnet card.

--wally.

[Eik Brandsgaard]

Hmm...it didn't work. I plugged the SB into PCI slot 3 and changed the BIOS. When windows 98 was up and running, the SB and the Marvel had differnt IRQ's - not shared with anything else. But I still get these re-nitializations in capture,when I capture sound.
I even tried to make a special hardware profile disabling anything not related to capture. This didn't work either.

I think I'll try and by a cheap ISA Soundcard (I "discovered" two ISA slots when I moved the SB!)

Thanks for the help anyways.

[Brian Ellis]

Eik

I agree: separate the IRQs and make sure you disable the DOS emulation: this swallows up resources (including an IRQ) and is totally unnecessary unless you are running a game that refuses to work under Windows.

I have no problems with SB Live! and Marvel G200 on the same machine and have captured over 1,5 Gb of video and sound without a single dropped frame on a number of occasions.

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Brian (the terrible)

[Eik Brandsgaard]

Thanks for all the input, here's the latest update on the topic:

I did all of the above - nothing solved the problem. I even bought myself an ISA soundcard (Realtek ALS 100+) to replace the SB Live, but this didn't help at all! The capture still pauses unexpectedly. Very annoying :-(

However, I did get a very interresting error message about invalid settings (mis-spellings included):

"The actual framerate is higher than the one you requested! Your cpature hardware/software does not support your requestedframerate! Check your capture hardware manual for valid settings!"

I got the error message when running AVI_IO with no soundcards installed on my system at all and with the "capture audio" option enabled in AVI_IO! I would capture 25 frames before the capture stops. If I removed the checkmark from "capture audio" my Marvel would capture like a dream with no troubles at all.

What could possibly be the reason for this? Could it be a driver issue, and not a problem with the soundcard?
I should add, that I live in Europe and captures with PAL settings. Perhaps the problem is specific to PAL Marvels?

If anyone could share some light on this error message/oddity it would be greatly appreciated.

Eik.

My Display Information is as follows:
Graphics BIOS 1.5 - 22
Display Driver 4.12.01.1500
Matrox Powerdesk 5.50.005 (upgraded from 5.30.007 that didn't solve the problem either)
DirectDraw 4.12.01.1500
DirextX 4.06.03.0518

[Brian Ellis]

Eik

This kind of thing can happen and is totally unpredictable! I had it, using an Asus P2B M/B. Changed the M/B to a Bravo Baby: no further problem.

However, before you start doing radical changes, let's look at your setup.
- Are you sure your DMA is set up on your drives?
- Do you have a drive dedicated only for capturing and editing video files (all system and software on the other one)
- Is this video drive the IDE1 master file, with your C: drive as IDE0 master? Under no circumstances must it be a slave drive.
- do you have a fixed swap file, preferably on a dedicated partition, say about 180 - 200 Mbyte on a partition size of abt 260 Mb ?
- If not, do you have your swap file on any partition other than C:?
- do you have a fixed vcache set up?
- have you defragged all your partitions? Especially if you share a swap file with other functions, this is VERY important, but you must use a defragger which will also handle the swap file (the Microsoft one does NOT). I find the latest Norton Speed Disk is fantastic because it will put a fixed swap file at the head of the partition, which is second best to a dedicated partition. Furthermore, it is not sequential, like all the others I've tried.
- Is your computer set up as a Network computer (even if it isn't one)? This gives preference to sequential read-ahead on drives.
- Tweak the BIOS settings, if necessary.

I've gained an extra 12 - 13% in disk benchmark speeds over default settings by this kind of tweaking and am able to get buffered read/write rates of 174/160 Mb/s,
sequential of 9/8 Mb/s and random of 6/7 Mb/s respectively, with an IDE 28 Gb drive (Seagate).

I also recommend a good diagnostic programme, such as Sandra 99, to benchmark your improvements.

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Brian (the terrible)

[Sun]

Hi!


Disable in bios the paralel port!

[TnT]

This doesn't help anything but I have a Marvel G200 and SB Live on IRQ 11, no problems with anything. Funny thing is that I installed the SB Live on the PCI slot furthest from AGP to prevent this. I guess that is what I get for buying a cheapo MB, but it works.

[Eik Brandsgaard]

Hi, it's me again...sorry to trouble you all, but i don't sleep well at night with this little problem of mine unsolved - well actually I have put my mind to rest with the fact, that it may be a while until I'll find a solution. This is merely to add a little info to the "potential troubles with the Marvel - and what didn't work"-list :-/

First of all: thanks for your reply Brian Ellis, it left be with quite a few options to try out. Unfortunately I couldn't manage to make the pausing in the capture disapear.
I tried to make a swap-file (250 MB) on a dedicated partition (300MB), but it didn't improve performance. I downloaded Sandra99 (neat program!) to benchmark my "improvements". And the Marvel and SB Live are using each their IRQ, SB16 emulation is disabled but it doesn't help either.

Actually I dont think speed is the issue. I just captured half an hour (thats 45000 frames!) @ 25 fps 704*576 in the best quality without loosing a single frame using avi_io! This is without audio of course...as soon as I try to capture audio along with the video I get problems. So my guess is that it is a sync-problem somewhere. I can't figure out if this is hardware related or has to do with software (drivers). Does anybody now how the captured AVI is actually made? Is there some kind of seperation between video and audio and "multiplexing on the fly"?

I used to have an Iomega Buz combined with a Millenium on a P200 MMX, wich captured without drops, but the image quality was not as good as with the Marvel, and overlay was non-existent. But at least it captured video flawlessly on a much slower computer.

Heres the results from Sandra99. Anything to be concerned about?

Buffered read 59 MB/s
Sequential read 8 MB/s
random read 725 Kb/s
Buffered write 64 MB/s
Sequential write 8 MB/s
Random write 5 MB/s
Avg Acces time 80 ms


Regards,

Eik

[Brian Ellis]

Eik

Yes, I'd say there was a lot to be worried about your hard drive performance, judging by your report.

I was a little astonished at your figures so checked them against this machine, which I do NOT use for video and hasn't been tweaked to full performance for several weeks. I am getting a drive index of a little under 6 800 - it was about 7 600 after the last tweaking. I show the figures in parentheses () after your's. I also checked on my video drive on another computer: it has a drive index of 8851 and the values are in square brackets[].

Buffered read 59 MB/s (158)[204]
Sequential read 8 MB/s (8)[12]
random read 725 Kb/s (5 Mb/s)[5 Mb/s]
Buffered write 64 MB/s (139)[172]
Sequential write 8 MB/s (7)[7]
Random write 5 MB/s (6)[4]
Avg Acces time 80 ms (6 ms) [8]

My video computer is slower (PIII 450, against PIII 500, both 128 Mb)

Interpretation: with such a slow random access read and high access time, my guess is that you are in DEEP trouble for video work. I suggest that this may be because of fragmentation: try using a good defragger (not the MS crap). Better still: back up your wanted files and reformat your hard disk and try again. I think the results may be spectacular. As it is, if you try to read a video file that is even slightly fragmented, you will get stammering, stuttering, hiccups, galloping soundrot, you name it.

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Brian (the terrible)

[Brian Ellis]

Eik

Having seen how this computer (non-video) deteriorated in performance over the past couple of months, I've re-tweaked it to get the following results in curly brackets{}. The old ones are in the ordinary parentheses(). The Drive Index is now 9895 (the highest I've ever got it) against 6800

Buffered read 59 MB/s (158)[204]{182}
Sequential read 8 MB/s (8)[12]{13}
random read 725 Kb/s (5 Mb/s)[5 Mb/s]{6}
Buffered write 64 MB/s (139)[172]{163}
Sequential write 8 MB/s (7)[7]{10}
Random write 5 MB/s (6)[4]{5}
Avg Acces time 80 ms (6 ms) [8]{6}

I think this shows the value of occasionally re-tweaking. Assuming you record your video on a pristine, pref. re-formatted, disk, the most important figures are the sequential ones. I've also found that large video files, even if recorded on a defragged disk, benefit from a redefrag (keep a backup first). With the Norton 2000 Speed Disk, I've found there is a small fragmentation on such files (why, I don't know), but just sufficient to cause an odd minute hiccup on playback of full screen.


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Brian (the terrible)