Media capture/dropouts on homebrew box..

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt (More info?)

Hi, all.

I've built a homebrew PC for the purpose, among others, of serving as
a PVR/DVD burner station. The pieces I put together work happily -
superb video/tuner input quality from the AverMedia UltraPCI 550, and
it all records as expected. There is one glitch, however; I am
experiencing very slight but noticable dropouts perhaps every 15
seconds or so for video just recorded to the hard drive. Havn't yet
burned any DVD's yet.

The box:

Abit IS10 MB (Poor choice - no ability to adjust bus speed/timings)
512 MB DDR400 RAM
Intel 2.6Ghz Celeron CPU (Poor choice - limits mem. to DDR266).
Maxtor 6Y160P0 ATA100 160GB hard drive - 140GB/20GB partitions.
WinXP Pro w/sp1a
Gigabyte Radeon9200 se 128MB video
AverMedia UltraPCI 550 (as noted above).

Starting to look for possible performance bottlenecks, I started
noticing that CPU use for viewing TV only was right at 65%. When I
started *recording*, CPU use actually *fell* to about 30%, which
surprised me (maybe it shouldn't?).

First, I was wondering if anyone has any benchmarking or diagnostic
software for PC's doing video capture, something that could run a few
tests and say "this area is a bottleneck, you need more/bigger/faster
<something>."

Next, I realize only in hindsight that my choice of CPU hasn't
afforded me the hottest possible system (it drops my RAM's effective
max speed to DDR2600, which was a stupid oversight on my part), but
even at that shouldn't this system be able to handle video recording
without significant dropouts? I guess my thought is there have been
successful video capturing PC's for a while, and although this system
isn't the hottest one around, shouldn't it be capable with a half-gig
of RAM? Or should I pick up an SATA drive in addition?

Lastly, are the dropouts necessarily performance bottlenecks, or is it
possibly something more organic, eg faulty MPEG encoding/transfer,
firmware/sofware related? Put another way, how likely am I to
eliminate the dropouts by spending more money on additional or
different HW?

Its been a few years since I put together a PC, so I've made a couple
of mistakes along the way, but at least its educational. Mistakes
notwithstanding, I'd appreciate any and all thoughtful
feedback/opinions.

-dew

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt (More info?)

Your system is much more powerful than mine and I have no problems
with video capturing and editing. This is using a BT878 card as well
as an MPEG2 PVR card, a satellite MPEG2 TS card, and Firewire.

When I've had problems like this in the past it was usually related to
DirectX and/or drivers. What version of DirectX are you running? I
would recommend 9.0b (I think) as a minimum.

It could also be the capturing/viewing software. Your CPU load
results for viewing are very strange. As for the software, I am not
familiar with the AverMedia UltraPCI 550, is that a MPEG2 PVR card?
If so you should get perfect captures. If it's a BT8x8 analog type
card then watch out for all the junky software PVR applications out
there. I've had nothing but problems with them including jerky
captures kind of like you described. Maybe you need updates to the
AverMedia drivers and software?


On 17 May 2004 13:44:06 -0700, intrepid_dw@hotmail.com (David Whitney)
wrote:

>Hi, all.
>
>I've built a homebrew PC for the purpose, among others, of serving as
>a PVR/DVD burner station. The pieces I put together work happily -
>superb video/tuner input quality from the AverMedia UltraPCI 550, and
>it all records as expected. There is one glitch, however; I am
>experiencing very slight but noticable dropouts perhaps every 15
>seconds or so for video just recorded to the hard drive. Havn't yet
>burned any DVD's yet.
>
>The box:
>
>Abit IS10 MB (Poor choice - no ability to adjust bus speed/timings)
>512 MB DDR400 RAM
>Intel 2.6Ghz Celeron CPU (Poor choice - limits mem. to DDR266).
>Maxtor 6Y160P0 ATA100 160GB hard drive - 140GB/20GB partitions.
>WinXP Pro w/sp1a
>Gigabyte Radeon9200 se 128MB video
>AverMedia UltraPCI 550 (as noted above).
>
>Starting to look for possible performance bottlenecks, I started
>noticing that CPU use for viewing TV only was right at 65%. When I
>started *recording*, CPU use actually *fell* to about 30%, which
>surprised me (maybe it shouldn't?).
>
>First, I was wondering if anyone has any benchmarking or diagnostic
>software for PC's doing video capture, something that could run a few
>tests and say "this area is a bottleneck, you need more/bigger/faster
><something>."
>
>Next, I realize only in hindsight that my choice of CPU hasn't
>afforded me the hottest possible system (it drops my RAM's effective
>max speed to DDR2600, which was a stupid oversight on my part), but
>even at that shouldn't this system be able to handle video recording
>without significant dropouts? I guess my thought is there have been
>successful video capturing PC's for a while, and although this system
>isn't the hottest one around, shouldn't it be capable with a half-gig
>of RAM? Or should I pick up an SATA drive in addition?
>
>Lastly, are the dropouts necessarily performance bottlenecks, or is it
>possibly something more organic, eg faulty MPEG encoding/transfer,
>firmware/sofware related? Put another way, how likely am I to
>eliminate the dropouts by spending more money on additional or
>different HW?
>
>Its been a few years since I put together a PC, so I've made a couple
>of mistakes along the way, but at least its educational. Mistakes
>notwithstanding, I'd appreciate any and all thoughtful
>feedback/opinions.
>
>-dew