VirtualDub ATI 600 USB dropped frames?

[Ohank]

OK. I switched to 1.9 and made adjustments in it. It seems I've made my first capture with vdub and this ati600. Maybe slightly jerky but pretty OK and the audio seems to be in sync. I have to change a number of settings in capture mode on vdub so I'm trying to find out if there's a way to save them. Thanks.

-- merged --

Oops. I did 2 more captures with 1.9 and in both the audio is way out of sync. In one it speeds up like a tape is stretching (which it wasn't). Could someone give an idea what I need to change to make this work? Thanks

[lordsmurf]

How many frames were dropped?
How many inserted?

Use the VirtualDub meters, do not guess.

[Cortez]

Quote:

Originally Posted by lordsmurf

How many frames were dropped?
How many inserted?

Use the VirtualDub meters, do not guess.

The dropped frame count can be a good measurement for the capturing quality?

[Ohank]

Some misunderstanding on this topic heading. Dropped frames was not my issue. The completely out of whack audio was. It's way off sync as well as speeding up or distorting in varying ways. Lord Smurf "Use the VirtualDub meters, do not guess."could you be more specific in saying what meters are you talking about. That link just took me back to the general pages. I guess if I can show all the parameters vdub is using on this failed captures I can get some help on it.

-- merged --

I downloaded huffyuv. I unpacked it to the C drive. Earlier I unpacked it to the download folder. I hit install and it went through the process but it doesn't show up in Vdub. I thought I'd try this to figure out what's going wrong with the audio.

[lordsmurf]

There is a Huffyuv WinVista/7/8/10 install guide in the forum. Follow it.

Loss of audio sync is also related to dropped frames.

Do you have Audio > 'Enable audio playback' turned OFF
ATI 600 USB does not allow preview while capture. (For audio preview, something else must be done, but it depends on the audio card in your computer, as well as VCR.)

[Ohank]

I don't think I have audio preview turned on in Vdub but I can certainly hear it as the capture is made? I do have video preview turned on. Should that be off too? My laptop is a dual core so is the Huffyuv v2.1.1-CCESP Patch v0.2.2 correct? I've never figured out how to change a heading one of my posts on a forum. I don't think I've been showing dropped frames. Shouldn't this heading be something like: audio sync, speed problems Vdub capture? Currently I'm trying a capture without any preview on. By turning the video preview off I'm not hearing any sound during the capture so I guess they're interconnected? ...Thanks...
...just did a few minute capture without any video preview on and the sound seems pretty accurate at first look. I'll try the full tape now.

-- merged --

Did a full capture and it came out much better. Certainly the audio speed isn't going crazy and is pretty much on sync. I have the feeling like it's not 100% on sync but very close. Having no preview let e forget about it so it ran for 20 minutes past when the video ended so I'll recapture it so all that size is reduced. Looks promising. The attachment shows the stats after capture. I'm looking at that sync error? Thanks

-- merged --

Recaptured the same thing and audio is correct speed and seems pretty close to in sync if not exact. To monitor, I plugged headphones into the camcorder as it captured. That's the first time I've looked at the video and heard the sound directly from the camcorder and I found it somehow better than what I'm used to. Of course, exactly in sync but the sound was better too. I meant to ask what you guys use to playback your video on your PC's. Do you always use Vdub? I've always really liked smplayer because it's so versatile and has so many user friendly features. I just tried the last capture in Vdub and it seemed to be having a littletrouble playing it back compared to smplayer. Still not sure if optimal playback setting on vdub. Thanks

[BW37]

Question: What are using as your capture hard drive? It is highly recommended that you capture the video files to a separate physical drive from the drive that the operating system and other software is installed on. Capturing to the OS drive can cause problems with the capture, possibly like what you are experiencing.

I looked up the specs of your laptop, Dell e1705 Inspiron Laptop, as noted in your other post. I didn't see an easy way to add a 2nd HDD, but maybe there are multiple versions of that model number. The ideal solution would be an eSATA drive but I don't see an eSATA port anywhere on that model. I see that model does have a Firewire port, but I don't know if that would be fast enough but it might be. It's certainly better then USB2 which definitely won't work. Maybe someone else can chime in with their experiences using external Firewire drives for capture.

Another option would be to add a second HDD by replacing the optical drive with a HDD caddy that installs in that space. They are readily available on eBAY. Here's one, but I don't know that it is right for your laptop. It's just to show what they look like. You'd also need a 2.5" HDD to go in it.

My

BW

[Ohank]

That's very interesting. Previously I was capturing to a Seagate portable usb3 drive from the usb2 ports on the E1705.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1
I wasn't thinking about that as a weakness. These last captures (which are the first ones that come close to working) were made to the D partition (200gb). The operating system is on the C partition (100gb). I had the portable drive it connected to on my win10 trying to play some captures which weren't working. So it was just an accident that the last captures were on the D drive. So that and the preview suggestions by Lord Smurf may have been the difference. I just looked at the link for the caddy. Certainly reasonable (oops just saw it's a direct order to China and 83% rating. but from another source maybe). Just found this. It seems to be the same? https://www.amazon.com/Highfine-Univ...cs&sr=1-3Could you suggest a good drive to put in it? Thanks for your suggestion.

-- merged --

Oops. That Amazon caddy wont work the seller says. He says "Unfortunately It didn't work. Additional hard drive is not detected". I'll have to search further on that.

[BW37]

Just a quick reply for now...

I think your laptop has an expresscard slot. If so you could get an eSATA expresscard and then get or build an eSATA external drive to capture to. That would be easier than replacing the optical drive. The expresscard route would definitely be preferred since using an external eSATA and USB 3.0 drive/enclosure would ease transfers to other PC's for further processing.

Either way I think you should spend some time looking through the manual for your laptop to understand your options. If I was looking at the right manual, there is a section in it on removing the optical drive and one discussing using expresscards. Finding the "best" expresscard looks like it would be a bit of a crapshoot. I've not used an expresscard eSATA adapter so can't advise. I did find some listed on Amazon but found more just searching online in general.

I did just test my optical drive "adapter" in my HP laptop and it seemed to work fine with a 2.5" 500GB drive I had already used elsewhere (had data on it which was read it fine - no further testing so far). If you go this route, definitely pull out the optical drive in your laptop to measure it's thickness, check it's connectors, etc. to compare with what you purchase. Again it's a bit of a crap shoot but it is cheap.

As far as drive recommendations go I won't make a recommendation for the 2.5" drive (required for the optical replacement route (Seagate or WD 2.5" 2 TB???) A 2TB drive is the biggest you want since that's the limit recognized by WinXP. If you go the expresscard route, you can get a 3.5" drive/enclosure. It seems Seagates are the recommended drives here. I'm not sure what the deal is about the SMR vs. CMR drives. That's a new one for me...

BW

[Ohank]

Appreciate the info. A lot of new areas for me. I saw this thing: https://www.ebay.com/itm/2-Port-USB-....c101195.m1851
and wondered, if it worked, if I could just plug the 2tb usb3 drive I mentioned earlier into it. Still trying to learn about eSata. For that I'd need an express to eSata and either an eSata drive or an eSata drive enclosure and a HDD. From what I gather usb3 can be written to at 5gb and eSata 6gb? I didn't quite follow "definitely pull out the optical drive in your laptop to measure it's thickness, check it's connectors, etc. to compare with what you purchase." So, are you saying if I manage to find the right caddy I need to put exactly the same size hdd I already have in the e1705? Thanks

[BW37]

Technically, WinXP doesn't support USB3 so how well a USB3 Expresscard and USB3 drive would work is uncertain. That said, I installed a USB3 card in a PC running WinXP and it "works". The card came with a WinXP driver and the instructions said it would work in XP but at a speed between USB2 and USB3. I haven't really tested it to know how well it performs in XP. It works fine in Win7 64 which I dual boot on that system.

I've seen recommendations against trying to capture to USB drives, even USB3. This might even be more true if you are using USB capture devices since they might be sharing the USB bandwidth of the system. Putting a single USB device on an Expresscard might actually work better since it will have it's own root hub. But that's getting beyond my expertise. It might be worth a try, but I wouldn't count on it.

What I mean about the optical drive is to take the drive out of the laptop so you can inspect the overall housing of the optical drive and the location and type of connections it makes within the laptop. Follow the laptop manual directions. The HDD caddy needs to fit into the same space and connect to the same connectors. There are at least two std. thicknesses 9.5mm and 12.7mm and I think there might be more than one type of connection. The different connection may only be for older laptops that have IDE drives. It's just a check to make sure the caddy "looks" and measures (thickness only) like it will fit into your laptop. Removing and replacing the optical drive is easy. Installing a bare 2.5" drive into the caddy is a bit fussy but quite doable if you're "handy". Because of this, having a pluggable external drive would be easier and more flexible.

BW

[lordsmurf]

Capturing shouldn't be this hard. And it's not this hard.
I think you're both over-thinking, and under-thinking, at the same time.

Fact: capturing to the OS drive can cause issues.
Also fact: it really depends on the speed of CPU, and space available on the drive
So there are exceptions to the rule.

What you consider a "fast" CPU may not be adequate. Understand this. It's about more than clock speed, cores, or i# naming schemes.

Buying a cheapo brand X item on eBay rarely ends well, and usually wastes money. When it comes to expansion cards, the chipset matters (not surprisingly like capture cards, where chipset matters).

Do not capture to USB. USB does not use sustained transfer method, and also affects CPU. Therefore it will cause problems, notably dropped frames. Capturing to USB is far worse than capturing the OS drive.

I have a Dell laptop that is specifically for capturing video. It runs almost nothing else, no real software beyond capture. No WiFi or wired network access. I can capturing fine to the OS drive, up to about 90-95% capacity, before it runs into problems from OS temp/paging file data. It starts to fragment the capture, and the fragmentation is the reason for dropped frames here.

If you're trying to use a random old laptop, it needs to have the non-capture software/data footprint reduced, and the system defragmented (with a real tool, not the craptastic freebie included with Windows; even freeware tools are better than the OS tool).

A lot of posts/threads about this topic, from this OP, have been somewhat erratic, and reminds me of a cartoon dog. "SQUIRREL!" and attention zips there, followed by "BONE!" and attention diverts there. You must be more focused, more meticulous, when it comes to video. You cannot shoot from the hip. Every aspect must be carefully looked at. Only then will you have a quality video capturing experience.

You MUST pay attention to the VirtualDub drop/insert frame counters. You cannot, should not, ever guess on frame drops (and in turn, if audio is properly synced). That concerns me most on this thread. Pay attention!

[hodgey]

I have done capturing to USB drives without frame drop issues on two different laptops, one a dell from around the same era with a similar chipset (using win7). One thing I did notice with the dell was that which external drive I used mattered, a smaller(and as such slower) drive I put in an external enclosure (I think it was like a 320 gb laptop drive or something) didn't manage to avoid drops, while a larger and newer one did. While I wouldn't advise it there are some tweaks you can try as well.

Firstly, the motherboard may have multiple USB buses, so plugging the drive and capture dongle into ports that are on different usb buses may help. You can see how the devices are connected in the device manager in windows if you change the view settings (don't remember the naming right now.) On the newer laptop the drive is on a USB3 port, while the capture dongle is on a USB2 one, on the dell I found that the ports that was on the docking station I had was connected via a different bus to the ones on the laptop itself.

Increasing the chunk size and number of chunks in buffer settings in virtualdub may help, the defaults are quite low I think.

Increasing the process priority of virtualdub may also help.

[Ohank]

Quote:

Originally Posted by BW37

Technically, WinXP doesn't support USB3 so how well a USB3 Expresscard and USB3 drive would work is uncertain. That said, I installed a USB3 card in a PC running WinXP and it "works". The card came with a WinXP driver and the instructions said it would work in XP but at a speed between USB2 and USB3. I haven't really tested it to know how well it performs in XP. It works fine in Win7 64 which I dual boot on that system.

I've seen recommendations against trying to capture to USB drives, even USB3. This might even be more true if you are using USB capture devices since they might be sharing the USB bandwidth of the system. Putting a single USB device on an Expresscard might actually work better since it will have it's own root hub. But that's getting beyond my expertise. It might be worth a try, but I wouldn't count on it.

What I mean about the optical drive is to take the drive out of the laptop so you can inspect the overall housing of the optical drive and the location and type of connections it makes within the laptop. Follow the laptop manual directions. The HDD caddy needs to fit into the same space and connect to the same connectors. There are at least two std. thicknesses 9.5mm and 12.7mm and I think there might be more than one type of connection. The different connection may only be for older laptops that have IDE drives. It's just a check to make sure the caddy "looks" and measures (thickness only) like it will fit into your laptop. Removing and replacing the optical drive is easy. Installing a bare 2.5" drive into the caddy is a bit fussy but quite doable if you're "handy". Because of this, having a pluggable external drive would be easier and more flexible.

BW

Good to have this perspective. I haven't done much in this way so it helps. Thanks.

Quote:

Originally Posted by lordsmurf

Capturing shouldn't be this hard. And it's not this hard.
I think you're both over-thinking, and under-thinking, at the same time.

Fact: capturing to the OS drive can cause issues.
Also fact: it really depends on the speed of CPU, and space available on the drive
So there are exceptions to the rule.

What you consider a "fast" CPU may not be adequate. Understand this. It's about more than clock speed, cores, or i# naming schemes.

Buying a cheapo brand X item on eBay rarely ends well, and usually wastes money. When it comes to expansion cards, the chipset matters (not surprisingly like capture cards, where chipset matters).

Do not capture to USB. USB does not use sustained transfer method, and also affects CPU. Therefore it will cause problems, notably dropped frames. Capturing to USB is far worse than capturing the OS drive.

I have a Dell laptop that is specifically for capturing video. It runs almost nothing else, no real software beyond capture. No WiFi or wired network access. I can capturing fine to the OS drive, up to about 90-95% capacity, before it runs into problems from OS temp/paging file data. It starts to fragment the capture, and the fragmentation is the reason for dropped frames here.

If you're trying to use a random old laptop, it needs to have the non-capture software/data footprint reduced, and the system defragmented (with a real tool, not the craptastic freebie included with Windows; even freeware tools are better than the OS tool).

A lot of posts/threads about this topic, from this OP, have been somewhat erratic, and reminds me of a cartoon dog. "SQUIRREL!" and attention zips there, followed by "BONE!" and attention diverts there. You must be more focused, more meticulous, when it comes to video. You cannot shoot from the hip. Every aspect must be carefully looked at. Only then will you have a quality video capturing experience.

You MUST pay attention to the VirtualDub drop/insert frame counters. You cannot, should not, ever guess on frame drops (and in turn, if audio is properly synced). That concerns me most on this thread. Pay attention!

OK. I'll have a look and try to get programs off that laptop. Which defragmenter would you suggest for XP? Like I mentioned before I haven't seen any dropped frames but now I need to read about what an "insert frame counter" is. What would be an acceptable one or should it always be 0? Thanks.

Quote:

Originally Posted by hodgey

I have done capturing to USB drives without frame drop issues on two different laptops, one a dell from around the same era with a similar chipset (using win7). One thing I did notice with the dell was that which external drive I used mattered, a smaller(and as such slower) drive I put in an external enclosure (I think it was like a 320 gb laptop drive or something) didn't manage to avoid drops, while a larger and newer one did. While I wouldn't advise it there are some tweaks you can try as well.

Firstly, the motherboard may have multiple USB buses, so plugging the drive and capture dongle into ports that are on different usb buses may help. You can see how the devices are connected in the device manager in windows if you change the view settings (don't remember the naming right now.) On the newer laptop the drive is on a USB3 port, while the capture dongle is on a USB2 one, on the dell I found that the ports that was on the docking station I had was connected via a different bus to the ones on the laptop itself.

Increasing the chunk size and number of chunks in buffer settings in virtualdub may help, the defaults are quite low I think.

Increasing the process priority of virtualdub may also help.

I wasn't aware of any of the things mentioned here: "Increasing the chunk size and number of chunks in buffer settings in virtualdub may help, the defaults are quite low I think.Increasing the process priority of virtualdub may also help". But will look into that. These are all live music performances so even the tiniest out of sync audio will have a significant effect. Thanks for the advice.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ohank

OK. I'll have a look and try to get programs off that laptop. Which defragmenter would you suggest for XP? Like I mentioned before I haven't seen any dropped frames but now I need to read about what an "insert frame counter" is. What would be an acceptable one or should it always be 0? Thanks.

Trying program "defraggler" now. It said my D drive was 90% fragmented. It wasn't happy with my C drive since it only has 10% free space and said it would take a long time. I'll have to see about getting some stuff off it.

[lordsmurf]

Defraggler is a decent option, for freeware.

I use the payware PerfectDisk, which is far more powerful, many more options to control actions. It's something to consider if defragging is needed regularly. There's also an option, for example, to place the paging file at the end of the drive, instead of letting it barf in the middle of the drive (thus interrupting captures, dropping frames).

Fragmentation is probably a root issue for you, and cleaning up the system, and running Defraggler, should help.

[Ohank]

Quote:

Originally Posted by lordsmurf

Defraggler is a decent option, for freeware.

I use the payware PerfectDisk, which is far more powerful, many more options to control actions. It's something to consider if defragging is needed regularly. There's also an option, for example, to place the paging file at the end of the drive, instead of letting it barf in the middle of the drive (thus interrupting captures, dropping frames).

Fragmentation is probably a root issue for you, and cleaning up the system, and running Defraggler, should help.

Good to know. I hadn't been focusing on the discs being used to capture. I was just watching to see that they wouldn't run out of room. It took a long time ca 16-20 hours. I've attached what it showed when it finished.Now I'll see about the C drive. Thanks!