Mysterious frame drops when capturing audio

[kefoo]

Hi. I had to reinstall Windows 98 a few days ago, and since then I haven't been able to do a capture with audio without dropping about 5 frames per second. If I just capture video without audio, it works without a single drop. This was working perfectly before the reinstall, so I'm wondering if some resources got shuffled around and something isn't playing nice now. I'm using AVI_IO, an RRG connected to a G400 DualHead, and a SoundBlaster AWE64 Gold ISA sound card. Any ideas?

Kevin

[Dr Mordrid]

Did you install the full-shot AWE64 drivers or are you using the ones Windows installed from its CD? The default Windows ones work better for capturing.

Also if you do have the full-shot drivers have you turned off the reverb, spatial and 3D features? Those are resource hogs.

Dr. Mordrid

[kefoo]

I backed out the AWE64 drivers to the Windows versions and there was a little improvement. I have full duplex and 3D effects turned off. I couldn't find the other setting you mentioned. Now the drops are more erratic. I captured 4 minutes of video with about 1 drop per 1000 frames, then it suddently dropped 20 frames in a few seconds. I restated the capture and it was dropping frames almost immediately.

Kevin

[kefoo]

Something else I just noticed... right now I'm capturing from the composite input. If I capture from the coaxial input, there are no drops beyond the normal ones AVI_IO drops to keep the sync. Does the composite input require more cpu time that the coax input? I get some noise using the coax input so it's not an option.

Kevin

[This message has been edited by kefoo (edited 04 July 2000).]

[This_Idiot]

Check that DMA is switched on on your drives

[kefoo]

I'm using an Ultra66 drive to capture and my system sees it as a SCSI drive, so DMA isn't an available option. The drive benchmarks at 18.5 MB/sec, and the video datarate is about 8MB/sec. Some other stuff I forgot to mention originally... I'm capturing in YUY2 using HuffYUV @ 704x480 29.97 fps.

Kevin

[This message has been edited by kefoo (edited 05 July 2000).]

[kefoo]

Well, the problem seems to have fixed itself. It's back to only dropping a frame every now and then for timing reasons. I cleaned the heads on my VCR, so maybe it was noisy source material.

Kevin