Strange capture problem

[PaulM]

Hi all,

I'm trying to capture at 704x576 using a Rainbow Runner Studio/Mystique (blast from the past I know - hopefully be upgrading in the near future). Anyway, the strange problem I'm getting is that I'm dropping a lot of frames but almost only when the scene contains on-screen subtitles or captions. The number of frames dropped seems to be proportional to the data rate so, using 13 minute test captures, at 6.6:1 I dropped 800 frames, at 8.3:1 100 frames etc down to 16.5:1 where I only dropped 1 frame. Source was the composite output of a digital cable box.

I say 'almost' because it does drop the odd frames on other scenes as well but with nowhere near the consistency of subtitles. I'm sure the rest of my system is ok because I can capture for up to 3 minutes without a single frame drop and then suddenly drop more than 70 in a few seconds.

If anyone has any ideas I would be very grateful to hear them.

For the gory details: Athlon 900, Abit KT7A-RAID, Capture disks are 2 (empty) IBM 60GXP using on-board HPT 370 RAID 0, 896 MB PC-133 RAM, WinME (same with Win98), Sonic Fury. Also, I've applied all the usual tweaks from this and the Matrox forums as well as Videoguy's.

Thanks for listening!

Paul

[paulw]

I have simalar problems with mine. I suspect that it is a buss problem. I can't capture at all at 3Meg/sec. I can capture fine from my Hi8 camcorder at 2.5Meg but wiill get frame dops on things like photo flashs and then the capture stops. I can't capture from my VHS deck for more that 2 minutes at 2.5Meg before it grinds to a half with a verticle sinc message

At 2Meg I can capture from camcorder and VHS deck all day with vertually no drops.

My system video partition is a P3 550, Win95 osr2, Segate 60Gig 7200 rpm running at udma 66 capture drive.

I have never been able to sort this out. I guess when the day comes that my Mystique or RRS dies the problem may then get solved..

[smitty]

I've been using RRS+Mystique for many years now
No problem . mine is NTSC though
windows 98se PIII850 but I had it in a PII500 and a PI 233 and was able to do 3mg/sec no drops SO IT SHOULD BE POSSIBLE
If you load up system monitor and see what it says during capture maybe we can narrow it down to the cause.
What capture app are you using?
smitty

[PaulM]

Firstly, thanks for the replies - it seems a little odd posting questions about RRS the day after something like the Parhelia is announced

smitty - I've tried them all - VirtualDub, AVI_IO, Media Studio etc - same in all cases.

paulw - it's interesting that you have the same problem because I was starting to think that maybe there was a card limitation - or maybe it's just some cards since smitty has no problem at all.

Another concern about all of this is that I didn't want to go out and buy a new card to find I get similar problems so it would have been nice to get it resolved. I guess I'll just make do with the higher compression/lower resolution for now.

Thanks again,
Paul

[mrtj1]

i have a similar problem - kind of. if i just start capping end credits then it works fine, but if i cap a film, then when it reaches the end credits it loses frames like a mofo

[mits]

Hi all,
i've been using a Millennium II / RRS for about 4 years know with almost no problems. I can capture an hour or more with no or few dropped frames depending on the machine :
Old PIII at 500MHZ, 312 RAM, Maxtor DMax+40 30Gb, SB AWE32, Intel BX chipset : 0-10 drops in an hour
New system P4 2GHz, 512 DDR, 2*Maxtor D740X (40GB each), on borad pci sound chip, intel 845D chipset : 0 drops in 70-80 minutes capture.
OS is win98se on both machines and i always use avi_io for cap and frame size is 704*576 @6.6:1 compression ( or 352*576 @3.2:1 using doc's registry hack for overclocking the RRS)

However, there is a possibility for the RRS to start dropping frames when either there is a tape fault, or when a frame is full of a single color (like a white or gray wall or a very strong flash). The latter case usually occurs when the card is overclocked and this is probably due to the Zoran chip.

PaulM, are all drivers for your m/b properly installed ? (via 4in1 etc)

[PaulM]

mits - I've got the latest drivers for everything, 4-in-1, Highpoint, Sonic Fury etc. Not sure off the top of my head if I've updated the HPT BIOS or M/B BIOS - I'll check tonight.

One question though - does Doc's overclocking fix work with all capture programs?

Cheers,
Paul

[smitty]

paul(s) have you looked at system monitor to see if cpu is bagged out during capture or what the memory is doin or hard drive?did you try RGB capture ?

[mits]

Paul,
Doc's registry hack works with both any cap program except pc-vcr from matrox.
As far as the HPT is concerned once i had problems with pionner 106 dvd connected to the HPT; the problem was very slow rip speed (almost *1), the problem dissapeared when the dvd was connected back to the m/b controller, so give it a try to cap by connecting your hd to your m/b controller. (i know it's hard to try , especially if you have already set up a raid 0 then you'd have to reformat and reinstall everything)

[PaulM]

Now that's one of the things that's been driving me mad about all of this. I downloaded procexp from the sysinternals website to check what was actually going on. Under normal load (min compression) AVIO_IO uses about 10% CPU and procexp uses about 2-3%. The I/O buffers field on the status line flashes between 1 and 2.

However, when it starts dropping frames, the CPU for AVI_IO drops to about 6%, procexp stays the same and the I/O buffers flash betwen 0 and 1. Nothing else is using the processor or disk.

As a test I used Virtual Dub and hiked the priority up a couple of notches - no difference.

Whatever is going on, I'm certain it's not CPU or disk bandwidth constrained. I don't know enough about internal bus usage to investigate that but I can't think of anything else.

And given the utilisation figures here, you can see why I was expecting better capture performance!

Paul

[smitty]

paul it sounds like you have covered the bases. if the system is working good i wonder about #1 the video source #2 the capture card
#1 - have you tried a couple of other sources?
- swapped out the video cables?
- tried a svhs source?

#2 - have you tried RGB capture?
hope you find something here
smitty

[PaulM]

I suddenly realised that I hadn't checked for a BIOS update for my Mystique and sure enough I was 3 revs behind. I downloaded and flashed the bios to 1.8 and ... slight improvement. Only seems to drop about half as many frames now.

However, I have come to a conclusion - purely by chance a few days ago I was doing a test capture (composite out of cable box) of a film that includes a scene with captions and my RRS started dropping frames like mad. As it happens, I also have this film on DVD so I tried capturing the same scene - sure enough it started dropping at exactly the same point - as soon as the captions appear.

For a final test, I tried capturing from a broadcast signal (composite in) and then a VHS recording of the same program. When the captions appear it drops frames and even from VHS it drops some, but not as many. I don't have an S-Video source that I can test unfortunately.

So, my conclusion is that when the scene contains sharp sub-titles, my RRS seems to reach some sort of limit in terms of its ability to compress the scene and it drops the subsequent frames. Dropping the data rate means that this limit is reached less frequently. The VHS recording is also more reliable because the titles are fuzzier and presumably 'easier' for the JPEG compression.

I would guess that this is close to the threshold for RRS cards - some will manage it and some won't. As you can probably tell, my understanding of exactly how the hardware compression works is a little fuzzy

Anyway, unless anyone can suggest anything else I'm now satisfied that I've tried everything I can - I'll use half-frame capture for VHS and try to upgrade sometime later in the year.

Thanks again to all.

[stark]

PoulM,

I have the same problem with my MArvel G200 capture card and WinXP...