Santa Cruz dropping frames in Win2k

[Nethermancer]

Last week I installed a Santa Cruz card with the latest Win2K drivers and now I'm dropping frames whereas I had no dropped frames with my Audigy card (drivers only instalation). I could capture 9 hours in Huffy without dropping a single frame and now I'm back to about 5 frames per hour which I had with my old SB Live. Anyone know how I can tweak the Santa Cruz to avoid these dropped frames? Thanks.

[Dr Mordrid]

Very odd given I have 6 of 'em in editing systems without issues. Hmmmm.....

Have you moved it to a different slot to get it on a different INT line?

Dr. Mordrid

[Fred H]

My SC card was interfering (INT) with my WLAN card.
Moving the SC to slot 6 and the WLAN-PCI card to slot 3 solved all the problems.
Tha SC card makes less CPU usage than other cards.
I can capture full res. PICVideo without drops (AVI_IO).
The SC is very sensitive to driver installation.
If W2K pnp finds the card DO NOT INSTALL the drivers.
Do it from the drivers own installation program.
If you have other audio card drivers uninstall them before installing the SC.

Fred H

[Nethermancer]

I put it in the same slot as the Audigy (bottom PCI one). There is nothing above it, then a Realmagic Hollywood Plus then a LinkSys network card and then my AGP slot. The pattern of drops appears to be evenly spaced and about 5 per hour in much the same way as with the SB Live I first had. Any idea what component may be causing drops at these intervals?

[Dr Mordrid]

5/hour isn't many and could be due to capturing at 30fps instead of 29.970 fps in NTSC, but you're in PAL country.

My guess: auto-insert checking by a CD, ZIP etc. or the scheduler is running.

Dr. Mordrid

[DrP]

If you are using AVI_IO its not real drops, just AVI_IO doing its tricks to keep the video and audio in sync. If audio clock is running a little fast, AVI_IO inserts a drop frame once the audio skew is too high and if the audio clock is a little slow it actually does a real drop, but its not indicated just the frame is never written. Or atleast this is my understanding of what it does.

Different sound cards (even same brand / model) will have the oscillator on the card running at slightly different frequencies giving slight variations in the artifical AVI_IO drop rate etc.

I 'drop' around 3 frames / hour with my TBSC regardless of what capture card I use. If I am using a combo capture card and do a lot of video I/O (matrox, ATI etc) I do actually drop frames. If I use a PCI capture card and do a lot of video I/O I dont drop any frames. Then again, should I really be playing games while vidcapping? I don't think so ;-)

If I use a vidcap tool that doesnt attempt to sync the audio / video, I can do 0 drop captures. There is a modded version of VirtualDub that continuously resamples the audio capture to get perfect sync with 0 'drops'. I've never had much sucess getting VirtualDub to capture smoothly on this box with WinXP, under Win98SE the resampling works a treat.

http://www-user.rhrk.uni-kl.de/~dittrich/sync/

Doing this on a Tbird with a 686b VIA based board.

[Nethermancer]

Thanks for the info. Does anyone know what services I can get rid of in W2K as there seem to be a lot more than XP and loads more threads in Task Manager. The descriptions aren't helpful and I'm afraid of removing something that will affect system stability. Also, to remove services do I just set them to manual or do I actually have to delete them? Thanks.