Drops....

[Rob100]

Trying to get the best from my Marvel G400 at the moment and am messing with an IWill KK266R, BIOS versios, HD configurations, sound cards etc and just about every version of Windows I have to find the optimum set up. AndrewDV has been a big help to me - thanks again.

At the moment I am mainly using Satellite TV (Sky Digital) as the source during these experiments. I am wanting/trying to capture @ either 704x576 using Matrox MJPEG or at 480x576 using huffyuv. The most I manage to capture for is about 30 minutes before I start to drop a frame or two. My aim/goal is to be able to capture for a couple of hours without dropping a frame. Am I asking too much of the Marvel? Would you all class dropping 10 frames over 2 hours acceptable? Tips and other peoples experiences welcomed. Are the frame drops always due to a problem with my system?

Thanks in advance , Rob.

[Rob100]

Update to this post. Just installed Win2k (again) and the 5.34 drivers and VidTools 2.02e, capturing at 480x576 with AVI_IO 3.19 and huffyuv. After 1 hour and 30 minutes I've dropped 4 frames. BTW audio is PCM 16bit, 44.1k stereo. Is this good going? This is the best I've ever had it.

Thing that bugs me is that having captured 195000 frames why drop 4? Is it possible to get 0 frame drop? Maybe I should try capturing from DVD to ensure stable video signal? Would that prove the point why I drop frames? MV is disabled on my DVD player so should be able to do this okay.

[Patrick]

Can you say, Obsessive-compulsive ?

Just teasing you a bit Rob, but what you've already accomplished sounds pretty good to me.

[Rob100]

>Can you say, Obsessive-compulsive ?

Yes I can, but I just want to get the most from my setup.

>Just teasing you a bit Rob, but what you've
>already accomplished sounds pretty good to >me.

I let it run for 2 hours in the end and it dropped 5 frames total. That's about 180,000 frames, so 5 drops it's pretty good I guess. I'd rather capture with Huffyuv when I can spare the disk space as I will encode the final video as SVCD using CCE SP and don't want to compress twice, but just messing with PicVideo MJPEG at the moment to see how it compares.

Let's suppose I had an RT2000 (not that I've got that kind of money ATM), but would I get zero frame drops with this?

[Aryko]

I suggest you playback your source and see if you can actually notice the 5 dropped frames over two hours!

If it's a matter of five dropped frames all at once, then that is something you can identify and fix - probably a disk access or something. But if they're spread out over the length of the capture, it could be anything.

Try AVI_IO to capture; when I used it to capture, I had rock-solid captures with hardly any dropped frames. If you have 5 over two hours with your setup, you'll probably do better than me.

And anyone will tell you that AVI_IO is a great program, anyway.

- Aryko

[Rob100]

[Aryko]

Frame drops are spread over the full duration, something like one every 30 minutes.

I use AVI_IO (currently 3.19) - what else!? ;-)

[AndrewDV]

I am using PD5.55 and VT1.54 with ME, but this is no where near as good as using Win2k with the "Matrox G200 MMS with TV Tuner" drivers released 10th April. I tried to install these when they 1st came out on my old Celeron box but they wouldn't install - probably a conflict with old drivers etc, but they go straight in on a clean Win2k installation (after editing the .inf).

Yes I am capturing to the RAID drive (2 x IBM 30 gig), formatted FAT32 with 64k strip size.

After doing my 2hr test I played back the file and noticed "flashes" (on one frame) every minute or so. I had installed Win2k as a "Standard PC" (ACPI disabled) after what you said to me before... Hmm, I flashed my BIOS with the "modded" 0416 bios that actually gives you an option to disable ACPI in the BIOS, but this didn't solve it. Even so it was nice to save an IRQ. I think I've solved the problem by reducing the AGP apature size. It was set to 128mb, but I've now dropped this down to 16mb and flashes seem to have gone. I will increases this some more and see when the flashes come back.

Don't you just love VIA chip sets... Nope!

Rob.

[This_Idiot]

Aye, when I wuz young you'd be lucky to capture one frame a second. And that'd be scrambled. And upside down. And no way of editing it. No software, no PC, not even a camera ! But we made do and put together some cracking entertainment.

Try telling the kids of today that and they won't believe ya.



Nah, honestly, it's only a couple of years back (or thereabouts) that we were messing around with Rainbow Runners and if we could get better than 1% dropped then we wuz stars ! To be honest, unless you get a "secondary infection" like the well known "Evil frames", you won't even notice drops of up to 1 frame per second (unless it's in a real critical place). To qualify this, look at subliminal advertising (that has been banned over here in the UK for some 20 years). By the insertion of a SINGLE frame into cinema ads, the average punter was expected to suddenly crave pizza (or hotdogs, whatever). The point is that even when staring intensely, you couldn't see the "offending" frame.

Chris
(T_I)

[AndrewDV]

Thanks

Where did you get the modified BIOS that allows you to shut off ACPI?

[Rob100]

AndrewDV

http://www.fullon3d.com/kk266faq/kk266faqbios.shtml

[AndrewDV]

Thanks!

[AndrewDV]

Those results are very good.

If you do not mind me asking, what version of vidtools and powerdesk are you using under WinMe?

Are you capturing to the RAID device?

Thanks

[Rob100]

A quick update for those who are interested.

The "flashes" (errors on frames) I was getting were due to the AMI RAID controller (or the drivers for). Didn't matter if I was using a single or striped pair of drives the problems were still there.

I disabled the RAID controller and put HD's back on the VIA controller and all was then fine, except I dropped about 10 frames over 2 hours instead of 5. However, after overclocking my 1 gig axia t-bird to 1400mhz (10x140) I am able to capture 2 hours at 480x576 using huffyuv and only drop 2 or 3 frames ;-) System seems very stable and I can encode the video to MPEG2 SVCD using CCESP somewhere between 0.9 and 1.2 real time depending on the source. System seems stable so experiments end here (for now...:-))

Time to do some proper work...

Rob.

[AndrewDV]

I have had similar experiences when capturing with Matrox MJPEG.

You would be interested in something that I just tried. I upgraded the vidtools and drivers to the latest version (1.54 and 5.55). Capturing with MJPEG to the non-RAID drives gives 0 drops AND 0 green flashes. The only bummer is that there is no YUY2 options.

[Rob100]

AndrewDV,

Are you able to capture for long periods with WinME? I am finding that after say 5 or 10 minutes AVI_IO's window freezes and capture has stopped working.

Update: I gave up with ME and went back to 98SE, but no matter what I do I still get capture freezing after 5 or 10 minutes. Can't understand why Win2k can be rock solid and 98/ME to be so crappy, when this has always been fine on a LX/BX/Celeron/PII/PIII combo. It makes me think it's a driver issue, but I've tried so many versions it's unbelievable. I thought it could me the VIA busmastering/udma drivers, but I get the same freezing capturing to a SCSI drive on my Adaptec controller (this works fine with Win2k also). So Andrew assuming you have perfect captures (for long duration) with ME and the KK266 could you please tell me:

1) What version of 4 in 1's are you using?
2) What version of PD/VT?
3) How are things like shadowing, AGP mode, fastwrites etc set it your BIOS?

Anything else you think could be useful?

Thanks in advance.

Rob


[This message has been edited by Rob100 (edited 29 April 2001).]

[AndrewDV]

Hi,

The AVI_IO crashes sound familar. I had to play with the various PCI settings (Dynamic Burst, etc.) till it all worked.

I am using 4.28 of the 4in1 drivers.

The PD/VT versions are 1.52/5.55.