Just as I thought, bloody SB 1024!

[Will Hay]

Thanks to assistance given in this very newsgroup, I've identified the reason I'm getting average quality captures is due to my SB Live 1024 and perhaps my Via chipset too.
Last night, as a test, I disabled my sound card and captured at a high setting. Whilst it wasn't brilliant there were hardly any frame loss but compared to capturing with sound the screen was just flashing green!
I'm therefore thinking of just upgrading my motherboard. I was going to replace my soundcard but as I have a Via chipset too thought I'd go the whole way.
Plus I may recover some of the cost of the new motherboard by selling the SB1024 on ebay.
The thing is I can't afford to change my processor (Athlon 700) or memory (512mb PC100 SDRam) so am looking for a socket 7 board with at least five PCI slots (and of course an AGP slot for my wonderful old G400 32mb).
Would it be fair to say if I went for one with sound on baord and say an SiS chipset I would eliminate the problems I'm currently experiencing?
Does anyone know of any capture problems with any other sound devices/chipsets?
It would be some irony to replace my motherboard and be stuck with exactly the same problem I have now!
I know I'm not spending a fortune but I need to ensure I get the right motherboard for the exact purpose of improving capture.
I'm the UK by the way.
Thanks,
Will

[Brian Ellis]

IMHO, you may find that changing the m/b alone will suffice. I use SB Live! with no problems, as do hundreds of others. About 3 years ago, I had insuperable problems, even with an ISA SB16 and Marvel. Changing the m/b cured them all AND with SB Live. Now I've upgraded, at low cost, away from Marvel but I still use Live! every day.

I've had a negative experience with an on-board sound system on my office computer (quality so poor that voice recognition simply would not work properly - use Live! there, as well). Of course, this may not be the case with a different m/b.

[landrover]

If you want to do some serious capturing, NEVER go for on-board sound. Use a dedicated sound card. I hear lots of negative buzz on Creative cards, but never had any problems with my Live! Platinum. On board soundchips are just too low-profile and often parasite on CPU usage.

landrover

[Will Hay]

Right, thanks
Surely if I disabled my 1024 and captured at a better standard this would point out it was my sound card?
If this is the case would I be better changing just the soundcard?
I don't want (and can't afford) to chnage my motherbaord and then find I need to change the SB1024 too.
Whilst I think the SB1024 is superb and perfect for my needs I would be prepared to forgoe it *if* I could guarantee another sound card would enable better captures.
Could it be simply that via + sb1024 = average quality captures at best, is it a combination of both and not just one on it's own?
Thanks again,
Will

[Dr Mordrid]

Just because onboard audio or a SBLive/Audigy works in one editing system it doesn't follow that they will work in others. If disabling either improves your capture situation then the proof is in the pudding and it's time to move on to something that uses fewer resources.

The fact is that Creatives cards are heavy on resource use and are often the root cause of such difficulties. Combine them with a VIA chipsets horrid PCI to host memory bandwidth and it's even more likely that you'll suffer frame drops, audio artifacts or worse.

ALive article on VIA & SBLive issues

The VIA bandwidth issue is very well known, especially with the KT series of chipsets, and is why Canopus, Matrox, Steinberg and many other audio/video hardware makers advise against using much of their hardware on VIA systems.

Long thread on tech of VIA issue....

Suggestions:

Audio: Turtle Beach Santa Cruz or Hercules Game Theater XP

Chipsets: Intel, SiS or NForce 420 (all known to work well in editing systems)

Dr. Mordrid

[Brian Ellis]

Will

It's impossible for anyone here to say whether changing any of:
1. m/b alone
2. Live! alone
3. m/b and Live!
will work for you.

IMHO, 1 may work and 3 should work, but there is no guarantee.

Why not do some borrowing from friends or a local dealer and try things out? When I was in that situation, I took my gear to a pet dealer and we tried it empirically. The m/b alone change worked for me (on trying the third one), but it may not for you. OK, a dealer may charge you a little for his time, but at least it will give you more confidence. I'm afraid that video cannot really be done on the cheap, cheap, cheap - although I do my best.

[Flying dutchman]

Since you want to keep your Athlon, I advise you select a motherboard without a VIA chipset.

The VIA chipsets deliver poor PCI performance, the worst number I've read (on tecchannel.com) was something like 60 mb/s if I'm not mistaking. The theoretical maximum should be something like 133 mb/s. Intel motherboards come close to this.

The SB-live series of soundcards are known to consume PCI bandwidth even if they're not doing anything (now this is only hearsay, but it seems the driver is sending nulls to the sound card if it is making no sound - isn't that stupid?)

The Marvel, and any other capture card, needs a tremendous lot of PCI bandwidth, in order to transfer :

(A) the captured video clip from the capture card to memory, which is something like 25 mb/s if you capture full-size YUY2

plus...

(B) the captured video from memory to hard disk (exactly the same amount, unless you use software compression).

plus...

(C) 176 kb/s audio from the sound card to memory

plus...

(D) 176 kb/s audio from memory to disk

Windows itself needs quite some PCI bandwidth, too, for accessing its swap file and for updating the screen. It all ads up to WAY over 50 megabytes per second throughput on the PCI bus that must be sustained. The VIA chipsets don't have very much capacity to spare - if any other device, such as a network card or hard drive, needs bandwidth, ít interferes with the video and audio.


Now this may sound funny, but it could help if you slow down your hard drive to ultra-DMA 33. Today's drives all support UDMA 100/133 which means they can easily consume 100% bandwidth whenever they send a burst of data over the PCI bus.

[Will Hay]

Thanks guys, that's helped a lot.
If I ever get to a position where I'm better off, I'll report back
Thanks again,
Will