avi_io running out of buffers. Suggestions?

[Hulk]

I have a PIII550e and a 27.3GB WD expert drive. After about 1:40 of full screen capture huffyuv at 29.97fps the buffers hit 50 and capture stops. Anyway to get a little more performance out of my system?

Also, how can I capture with files larger than 2Gb and will TMPGE deal with them?

I'd like to capture with avi_io, compress using TMPGE and then edit with Ulead Videostudio 4.0

[kefoo]

The first thing to check is to make sure nothing else is running, and I mean nothing. Shutdown anything in your system tray, and ctrl-alt-del everything you can, except system processes. In the system properties for your capture disk (in control panel), turn off write behind caching. Some people recommend disabling your network adapter and putting a CD in your CD-ROM drive to prevent Windows from polling it, which can eat up a substantial amount of cpu time. Use your capture disk only for capturing, put it on its own IDE channel, and keep it defragmented. I hear from a lot of people who capture with your settings on slower processors without incident. I'm running a P-III 650 and I have to overclock to 780 to avoid running out of buffers. YMMV, I guess. Hope this helps.

Kefoo

[Hulk]

Thanks for the tips. With the tweaks you mentioned I'm able to capture for almost 5 minutes before running out of buffers. Not bad and the quality is really nice.

I'm compressing to MPEG II using TMPGEnc using 2 pass with highest quality settings. What average bit rate to you think is sufficient. I'm not seeing much difference over 5000. Assuming good input quality video.

[IvanP]

Hi Hulk,

Have a look here:
http://forums.murc.ws/ubb/Forum2/HTML/004221.html

The problem is 99% solved for me. 550MHz CPU is enough I think. But performance of HDD is on the edge (7200rot. Barracida UW SCSI.)
Don't forget you need up to 12Mbps to write to your HDD. Some complex scenes can make a problems with too high datarate > 12MBps.

Try newest version of HuffYUV with different compression methods. They are all loseless (differs only in compression ratio). You can choose fastest (highest datarate) one to extract the CPU influence.
Also try VirtualDub capture. It shows the CPU ussage.


Good luck

Ivan

[This message has been edited by IvanP (edited 13 September 2000).]

[Todd1]

I had the same problem with buffers until I increased my hard drive "speed." I'm using the Promise Fasttrak 66 with muliple drives in a striped array and AVI_IO never reports buffer use higher than 2 at 30 fps full screen capture for a 60 minute video.