Ordered a new capture card

[Flying dutchman]

Your RAID sharing an IRQ with the graphics adapter definitely sounds like a bad idea.

If your PC is APIC or non-ACPI, it helps to physically re-allocate the PCI cards (or to tweak the PC bios, manually assigning IRQ's) so that the cards don't share interrupts in the first place.
In NON-ACPI mode ("Standard PC"), XP won't re-distribute its IRQ's if you disable unnecessary devices in a hardware profile.
In ACPI mode however, XP decides all by itself and there isn't a thing you can do to stop it!

Fiddling with PCI interrupts CAN potentially break a running system - make a backup first!

[landrover]

Hoi Dutch,

Too late to back up! But hell, fortunately no problems anyway!
I already dug into the case and the Bios. Disabled COM-2 and the parallel port. Disconnected the PS-2 mouse and reconnected it using a serial-to-PS-2 connector to COM-1. Supplied the Marvel and the RAID card with their own IRQ´s. XP started up smooth as a baby´s skin. Now only the Cinergy still has to share it´s IRQ with 2 USB controllers. I created a profile in which both USB controllers were disabled.
Et voilá: Cinergy captures 704x576 HuffYUV switching between 24.9 and 25fps. And just as impressive: real time DivX Pro (just under 1,000 kbps) same frame size, same frame rate.
I am a very happy man!!!

p.s. I´ll do some testing on capture stability soon.

[Flying dutchman]

I'm happy for you that it works! This IRQ sharing business never fully matured. My next board will certainly be an APIC one.

I'd recommend you to go the USB way, that way you can disable all COM and LPT ports as well as PS/2. Buy a USB mouse and you can ditch COM1 as well. USB mice, scanners and printers (even usb <-> serial and usb<-> parallel converters) are easily available and quite cheap. This way you only need 1 IRQ for all "slow" devices.

[landrover]

I know that if you disable PS-2, you can assign IRQ 12 to another device. But does that apply also to IRQ's reserved for COM and LPT ports?

[Flying dutchman]

If you disable the port in the BIOS, there's no reason why Windows would not let you assign it AFAIK. I haven't tried it though.

[landrover]

I'll check it out. I just know that the case of the PS-2 port was specifically mentioned in the MoBo manual.

[Flying dutchman]

Most motherboards only enable the PS/2 port on IRQ12 if a mouse is physically attached at boot time. If none was found, IRQ12 is free.

[Flying dutchman]

Still not completely satisfied here; I somehow can't capture safely using a MJPG codec. During capturing with the Morgan MJPG codec, capturing also stops spontaneously after 7.7 gigabytes (after 1:00:34 hours, 480x576); roughly at the same file size as the Picvideo codec. Even under Windows XP with no irq's shared. I'll start trying the new beta version of both the drivers and the CinergyTV software now.


BTW, the "MJPG codec" we discussed earlier appears to belong to DirectX 8.1.

[landrover]

How did you figure that out? I saw that besides "MJPEG Compressor", Cinergy also mentions "DV Video Encoder". I can´t imagine us all installing codecs from different makes when their equivalents come automatically with DirectX. But then, I never dug deep into DirectX anyway.

[Flying dutchman]

I read it in some forum - didn't check it out myself though.
What puzzles me much is that my system runs stable with Huffyuv and not with Mjpg. CPU load is comparable, fluctuates between 30 and 60%. Besides, Huffyuv puts a much harder strain on the PCI bus. Also this "magical" 7.7 GB boundary puzzles me.

[landrover]

As I mentioned somewhere earlier in this thread, I managed to reach 17GB in one Huff AVI, so that's way beyond 7.7GB.
I checked the device manager and the codec list states nothing like native DV or MJPEG codecs. I've got the impression that some of the installed codecs are mentioned several times in Cinergy's codec list, under different names.
About stability: last night I programmed Cinergy to capture 1 hour full res DivX and afterwards shut down the computer.
Guess what: it did exactly what it was meant to do. So it seems that, even though I use the beta driver package, since I solved the IRQ issue, it all runs very stable. In your case, Dutch, could it be that Cinergy is well optimized for WinXP and slightly less for W2K?

[Flying dutchman]

HuffYuv runs stable for me under XP (I captured 39 GB in one file !!!), MJPG does not, unfortunately.

Maybe it's a CPU issue (I only have a 0.9 GHz Celery), I dunno. Could you please try if it runs stable for you at 480x576
resolution?


PS you told the program to shutdown the PC; doesn't that only work on ACPI?

[landrover]

Don't be so harsh on your Celly, if the CPU load is around 60%, why should stability be compromised then?
I don't think the ACPI issue has anything to do with whether or not Terratec TV can shut down the PC.
I also tried to let the program shut down the system after capture back in December. It didn't work at that time, but, just like now, ACPI was enabled. As you know, I did have these IRQ issues, which could just be the reason for frame drops, sudden ending of capturing and maybe even shutting down after capturing.

I'll check what the rig does on 480x576.

We sijn met se alle bijmekaar voorelkaar, om te hellepe, niewaar?

[landrover]

Dutch,

I did what you asked and unfortunately you´re right with the MJPEG issue. Last night I scheduled Terratec Scheduler to start up Cinergy TV, switch the channel, record 2 hours in 480x576 with PICVideo MJPEG and then shut down the system.
This morning I found the computer still on. Recording had stopped after 1 hour, 25 minutes and 2 seconds, leaving me with an otherwise perfectly playable AVI of 11.2GB. So no strange 7.7GB boundary, for one thing.
Next steps will involve testing how Terratec TV behaves with Mainconcept MJPEG, several DV codecs and, perhaps particularly interesting, PICVideo´s lossless codec.

Huff and DivX are stable, that´s two down and lots to go...

[landrover]

update:

Scheduled to capture James Cameron´s Expedition Bismarck (2 hour documentary) using MainConcept DV codec and then shut down.
Cinergy did it all. Most particular to me was that it didn´t drop one frame for at least the first hour. Never experienced something like that in my Marvel days. The fourth time I checked, it had dropped 5 frames. I don´t know why, but I think it was due to sudden loss of video signal from the broadcasters side (Discovery Channel).
So DV-codecs are no problem for the card. Concerning DivX, I realised later that I only captured for one hour. Would Cinergy have ceased if I had sheduled to capture longer?