Ordered a new capture card

[Flying dutchman]

It's mostly a matter of a limited PCI throughput. VIA southbridge, by any chance? Tough luck...

[Indiana]

No. I only once had slight problems on an VIA Mainboard with full-res captures - and this was most likely more due to the problems between VIA and the crappy SBLive as those problems were gone after exchanging the soundcard. And even then it was never more than 1 dropped frame per minute.
(this was on a KT133, a KT266 and a KT333 based board).

In no way does a VIA mainboard cause such limitations (he says only 9 fps), so there is either something configured totally wrong or his HD can't keep up with the sustained >20MB/s datarate an uncompressed full-res capture needs. Maybe he didn't enable DMA?

[Flying dutchman]

I have a Gigabyte Pentium 3 board with VIA chipset in one of my PC's with a Celeron 800. It has the dreaded VIA 686 southbridge.
All in all, this board/chipset is the greatest piece of crap I've ever had the displeasure of owning. I'll never never buy anything anymore that has VIA written on it.

The board is completely unable to play sound (through a Creative SB 128 PCI) without being choppy !!! The board is unable to capture YUY2 video through a Marvel G200 - it drops 5 frames per SECOND. When I capture MJPG it still drops 2 frames per second. Audio is unusable and choppy. The board is also unable to play a DVD through WinDVD4, all mpeg bitrates above 4 mbps result in stuttering. It barely gets away with VCD and SVCD but the sound is choppy.

The very same cpu+audio/video hardware captures and plays smooth as silk in my other board, an Asus CUSL2-C. No drops. No choppiness. Now that's a GOOD motherboard.



An interesting novelty for the Terratec Cinergy owners (and others): The new Intervideo Windvr 3 supports fine-tuning of all tv channels !

[gdf]

Hi, vliegende hollander
that sounds as if that gigabyte board has a via 693 northbridge without the 4 way bank interleave patch.
Even with patch this sucks, but half as much as without patch.

windvr 3 is a free upgrade ?

George

[Flying dutchman]

Hoi George, I believe it has a 694 northbridge. That patch you're talking about, will it also work with only 2 DIMM modules?


WinDVR 3 is not a free upgrade, but you can DL a 30-day trial which can be made into a full version if you obtain a serial number from Intervideo. I downloaded it yesterday and it's a huge improvement over WinDVR 2 - at last it tunes the channels right and it seems to have a AFC. But for some reason it needs a whole minute (!) before it starts. CPU load goes to 100% during this period.


PS I found a VIA interleave enabler, but it wasn't written by VIA but by a chap called Breese. Is this the file you mean? I installed it for testing, and it does seem to make some difference. Have you any other links to an "official" VIA version?

[gdf]

Hoi,
Bank interleave has more todo with the type of memory used on a DIMM, not the number of DIMMs installed.

Some via mobos have the interleave option in the BIOS, some not.
Or some under another fantasy name 'high performance memory blah blah' etc.

VIA memory interleave enabler is not from VIA

http://www.georgebreese.com/net/software/#INT

But you found it already.

increased the mpeg4 framerate of a celeron 566 (p3 core) on a 693 via chipset from about 12 to 22 fps. (100%CPU load)
Still not fast enough for DVD playback.

My intel 440LX mobo, original p2 233 upgraded to a celeron 533 (p2 core) , did run that mpeg4 file at 25fps at (80% cpu load)
and is just fast enough for DVD playback.

My brothers 693 based PC became unstable after the patch, but a lot faster !.

George

P.S. programs that eat 100% CPU at startup for no aparent reason, probably try to find a way to connect to the internet.

[panayiotis]

At last i followed the advice of Indiana(thanks Indiana).I had a soundblaster audigy player installed.When i removed it i could capture at 24 to 25 fps with the terratec software,and full resolution with iuvcr.
On the other hand my sound is a little choppy as Flying Dutchman mentioned,because i enabled sb pci128 that is embedded in my Gigabyte 7vrxp(i also loose 1 frame/sec)
My mobo is very stable but i am not very satisfied after all these.
Indiana are you satisfied with terratec dmx audio card?

[Flying dutchman]

Wouldn't it make sense to buy a new cheap motherboard (for example, an Elitegroup with Nvidia or SIS chipset) rather than throw a good soundcard away? I'm sure DocMordrid could give you some advise here...

[landrover]

Yeah, he could, and he would always advise on ditching the Creative card, wouldn't you, Doc?

[Indiana]

The thing with replacing the Creative soundcard is not really my advice - it's more or less a common knowledge thing on desktop video boards...
(Although this was mostly true for the SoundblasterLive!, the Audigy was said to be better)

Oh yes, I'm very happy with the DMX 6Fire24/96.

[Flying dutchman]

I merely think that replacing the motherboard has a much higher probability of success than replacing the sound card and stick with the VIA (Very Inadequate Appliance) - based motherboard...
The VIA-based board which I have the displeasure of owning won't capture adequately with ANY audio- or video capture card which I've tried so far, be it ISA-based nor PCI. In fact the motherboard sucks so hard that I wonder why my room isn't vacuum yet.

I also have an Asus CUSL2-C board (Intel i815 chipset) plus Creative Soundblaster 128 and it is rock steady. PCI bandwidth is simlpy incredible. I've successfully captured terabytes of video using a Matrox Marvel and I've now made the transition to a WDM-based Terratec Cinergy. I really wouldn't trade it for ten VIA boards...

[panayiotis]

i tried my mobo support from gigabyte but no response,i also applied the pci latency patch but nothing.
Indiana are you satisfied with your Epox 8rda+?

i think i'll buy it.
What do you suggest?

[Dr Mordrid]

Originally posted by landrover
Yeah, he could, and he would always advise on ditching the Creative card, wouldn't you, Doc?

eYUP, no Creative products is a good move. Get something from a major manuacturer with a Cirrus Logic DSP in it; Santa Cruz/Sonic Fury, GameTheater XP etc. etc. With proper drivers their resource usage playing DirectSound is almost zip.

Also nix anything that has a VIA chipset in it. IMO editing systems should be built using Intel, SiS or 100% AMD chipsets (meaning no VIA southbridges). Both VIA and nForce/nForce2 have troubles; VIA with their PCI bandwidth (or more properly the lack of same) and nForce with its screwed up AGP implementation that forces many AGP cards to fall back to PCI mode

Dr. Mordrid

[gdf]

Hi,

For those who can not get the right channel frequencies when using windvr, I just hacked a simple tool which converts a
table of frequencies to the windows frequency overrides registry entries.
Now windvr is usable for me.
It probably works for any program which uses the directx tv frequency tables.

George

tool : http://icthuis.dyndns.org/~fockert/m...dvr20_freq.zip

[Flying dutchman]

Remark: WinDVR 3 doesn't suffer from the problem, because one can fine-tune each channel.