HuffyYUV Survey

[Phire]

I wanted to make a quick survey. How many of you can capture in HuffyYUV, full resoultion and best quality settings without losing above 20 frames per half hour. I think this is actually impossible and something is wrong with the capture drivers maybe? that's why i'm starting a survey. If I capture HuffyYUV with those settings, I lose about 40 frames per half hour, im starting to suspect that frame drops are happening exactly the same times they are in previous captures, which is why I suspect something is wrong with the drivers. Currently I run on an AMD 1GHZ CPU with 256mb PC133 ram and capture to an ATA-100 drive. Please post your results and specs and the capture card you are using. I was actually thinking to buy a Quantum Atlas II becuase I was thinking maybe my Hard drive was causing the drops. I don't think anything is wrong with my cache settings, they are pretty optimal. Minimum Cache Size is 64mb, Max is 128mb, Cache Block Size is 12800 and Async IO Buffers are set to 100K. My Swap settings are min 256mb and max 256mb and are NOT set on the same drive as capture.

[Frankie G]

When people respond, please state which CPU you have. I'm considering
a FastTrak 100 plus two new drives to give me the extra
disk capacity and throughput, but will my PII-400 on a
440BX chipset have enough horsepower for HuffYUV?
When I currently try 352x480 NTSC it drops too many frames
to be useful. (Capture is to an IBM 16GXP as master
on the secondary IDE channel, nothing else with it).

[absalom]

I have been capturing full res (704x480) YUV with avi/io using huffyuv (default settings) as the compressor for about 6 months now. My source is a satellite receiver via s-video. From what I can tell, if I disable audio, frame drops for 45 minutes are reduced to almost nil. If sound is captured at 48khz PCM audio, frame drops average around 3 or 5 every 7 minutes. They are spread out so much that I don't notice them when finalizing. Sometimes I get no frame drops at all, so it's really hit or miss with me. My system specs haven't changed since then either. Avi/io + huffyuv is the best thing there is for this, imo.

p3 600 @ 800
asus p3v4x
256 pc150 sdram
matrox g400max + G-runner
aureal sq2500
promise ultra100
ibm desktar 75gxp

[Dr Mordrid]

My longest capture without any drops at all was 130,869 frames (1h:12m:46s) long. With single digit drops that count increases to more than twice that many frames. That's 704x480 YUY2/HuffYUV using the "Best" setting. The data rate was about 10 mb/s.

This has been achieved on two different systems;

PIII/850, Asus P3B-F, 256 megs, Fasttrak100 w/2 Maxtor ATA100's

CeleronII/600, Asus P3B-F, 256 megs, Fasttrak100 w/4 IBM 75GXP's

Both setups were using Win98SE optimized as per Matrox's optimization page, both AVI_IO and Ulead VCapture, 29.970fps, and usually 44.1khz audio

I'd say that a PII/400 is a tad light for this.

Dr. Mordrid



[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 18 January 2001).]

[IvanP]

I was fighting with this problem a few months before. You can search the forum. I've found the "bottleneck" is HDD throughput.
I can capture now at full resolution on Marvel G200 704x576@25Hz, audio 44.1kHz 16bit stereo.
Capture sw: AVI_IO
OS: Have to use Win98 because only 1.52 VideoTools for 98 can be patched to YUY2
Huffuy 2.1.1: Any settings

dual PIII 550, 256RAM
Marvel G200
Promise Ultra100 + ibm desktar 75gxp
Adaptec 29160 + IBM DDYS-T... SCSI160/10000x

Both HDD above provides up to 20MB/s in REALITY

Ivan



[This message has been edited by IvanP (edited 18 January 2001).]

[Technoid]

14 drops while capturing 63Min 702*576*25 PAL.
Very old tape about 10 years!

P3 550@550
128MB
IBM 30GB GXP on a Promise Ultra 100!

HuffyYUV med compression.

[Phire]

Darn, I've tried several tests over and over and I keep losing at least 2-3 frames per minute. This doesn't exactly affect the video but I'm still baffled why it's dropping these frames.

I'm starting to doubt its the IBM 7200 ATA-100 Drive considering that if I change the resoultion to 352x240 it still drops frames. And I am using AVI_IO.

I tried so many different settings with my file cache and even within AVI_IO or the Huffyyuv settings themselves, nothing made a difference.

I tried downloading the PicVideo MJPEG codec, it had alot more stable capture than Morgan, but just like when I was capturing from HuffyYUV it was dropping 2-3 frames every minute. If I use the hardware MJPEG compressor I never lose a single frame. CPU usage never goes past 10%, IO Buffers never go past 2. I would just use the hardware compressor if Matrox knew how to make a working product, unfortunatly the hardware compressor is choking on frames it can't handle which produces green flashes/corrupted areas.

If anyone can give a suggestion as to what to do, please speak up.

[daniele greco]

Hello,
my experience with Huffyuv: I have an almost dated system, with Celeron 433, two UATA66 disk, 128MB RAM, Marvel G400 TV.
I tried to capture RGB 24 bit from the Marvel, at 352x288, and well, when I use AVI_IO, with Huffyuv codec, I always loose frames with any compression method.
Using VirtualDub with "Predict left" or "Predict Left/no correlation" I had 4 frames lost in a 10 minutes capture, but the max compression ratio is 1.4:1, so the avi files are huge.
I put the captured avi in the timeline of MediaStudio 5.2 and edited them without problem, generating avi files for subsequent mpeg-1 conversion with TMPGenc.
Quality is comparable to compressed MJPEG.
Strange to say, but in general AVI_IO does not perform well on my system.
I use last drivers and tools for the Marvel.

Daniele

[JoakimC]

How many frames I drop dependes on what soundcard I am using. I drop more frames with an ESS card than a SB Live card. Some capture programs drop frames to keep audio and video in sync. If you capture with virtualdub you can see the true samplingrate of your soundcard. The SB Live is closer to 48KHz than the ESS card. I have a Pentium 3 550 MHz,IBM 5400 rpm harddrive and Hauppuage WinTV card. I can capture 720x576 25 fps with HuffYUV.

When i captured with my G200 marvel i tried three different soundcards. In 30 minutes i dropped with ESS card 20-30 frames, AWE64 10-20 and SB Live 5-10.

[Hulk]

Although I've never actually tested how long I could capture huffyuv without dropping I have capture 8-10 minutes on many occasions without dropping a single frame.

PIII850
WD 45GB 5400RPM
MSI 6163 Pro mobo
Soundblaster Live!
ATI AIW 128

[Flying dutchman]

It's all a matter of how accurate the quartzes of the sound card and the capture card are. Sound and video have to be perfectly synchronous. If the sound comes "too early", the capturing software will believe it's missed a video frame and hence it will duplicate the last frame.
If the sound comes a bit "too late", the capturing software has to discard a video frame to make picture and sound synchronous again. Both phenomena are called "dropped frames" but they are in fact entirely different beasts...

I read somewhere that the Zoran chipset of the Marvel can only handle capture rates that are an integer number of 1/10 milliseconds. I don't know if it's true, but it has some consequences for NTSC users.

PAL= 25 fps = 40.0 ms/frame which is rather trouble-free.

NTSC=29.97 fps= 33.3667 ms. Whichever way you round it, an error results....

[petermg]

ok.. I didn't see anyone else ask this.. so I will ask the obvious... did you defrag your HDD???.. or are you capturing to a separate HDD???... I am also using the HUFFYUV and the PIC MJPEG codec.. since I can get visually the same results with the PIC MJPEG codec as I can with the HUFFYUV codec at about one fourth of the datarate I just use the PIC MJPEG codec.. also.. I'd make sure that other things aren't running in the background.. maybe you should install a process viewer so that you can see thing that the CLOSE PROGRAM dialogue doesn't show you and see if they are causing any problems.. do a search for TASKINFO at download.com ... works great for doing just that..

[Defiler]

The longest thing I've tried to capture with HuffYUV is about 120 minutes. No dropped frames.
P3-1GHz
512MB PC133
90GB RAID 0 (2 x 45GB 75GXP drives on 3Ware Escalade 6400)

[Dr Mordrid]

I always capture to a dedicated drive or RAID array. Basic Video 101.

I have found that my Fasttrak RAID arrays don't need defragging. I can use the hell out of them, but when I go to defrag them it reports they are virtually frag-free.

That said it's easier and faster to empty the array and format it between projects than to defrag.

Dr. Mordrid