It may be that your Firewire card isn't completely OHCI compatible, it could be that your firewire card is sharing resources with other devices on your system.

Have you checked your resources in Control Panel, to see what devices are on which IRQ's?

Just caught your second post, JeniJM.
It's the weekend, the forums run slower then. Don't get discouraged, this is a really great forum.
You can also find other great Vegas forums:


DVX Users
DVInfo.net
This is likely the busiest one, but you'll find a lot of other users in those above fora.

Thanks for your help. I checked my card and it is OHCI compatible and there's nothing else connected to it, but I don't know how to check the resource sharing. Sorry, don't know what IRQ stands for.

Can you try connecting the hard drive with USB instead of firewire?

Now why didn't I think of that? It actually works! Although, the playback is kind of choppy--I suppose because of the slower bandwidth of USB v. Firewire? At least it doesn't crash my system. I'd still like to get the Firewire working, if possible, so if anyone else might know what else I can try, I'd appreciate any ideas...

Thanks!

YOu need to see if the Firewire is sharing any IRQs with another device.

Go to System Tools, System information on Windows and see what IRQs are being used and by what device.

If the the Firewire is sharing with the Video card or the audio card, it could cause a problem.

Dave T2

I couldn't find the area that you were talking about, but when I go to the device manager and look at both my firewire card and my audiocard and look at the resources tab, they both have a list of Resource types, under which is listed "IRQ" and setting "05." Does this mean they are sharing? If so, how do I (very specifically) fix it, if at all?

Sorry, but I am kind of lost when it comes to hardware issues.

One thing to try then is to Physically move either the audio card or the firewire card in the computer to a different slot. On most motherboards this will force the IRQs to move.

It might fix it, but it could introduce other issues, but it is an easy thing to try.

Dave T2

I will try it tonight and let you know if that works.

Thanks for your help!

PS. to all: I didn't mean to sound so impatient in my post above, just that I hadn't gotten a response in 4 days so I thought perhaps my post got lost in the shuffle or something. I appreciate all the advice I've gotten today. It's really helped.

I have had exactly the problem you describe. The solution was to download a Microsoft 1394 patch. If you are running XP Service Pack 1, then read this:

Firewire 1394 SP1 Solutions

If you are running XP SP2, then read this:

Performance of 1394 devices may decrease after you install Windows XP Service Pack 2

Once you apply the patch, re-boot and then try again. I think you will find that your problem has gone away.

I would certainly do this prior to messing around with IRQ settings. IRQ problems were extremely common a long time ago, but since the advent of "plug-and-play" and XP, such problems are rare to the point of being almost nonexistent.

Yeah, I forgot about the Firewire patch.

Definitely try that first.

Dave T2

Okay, I downloaded it (SP2), and it worked for a bit longer, but it still crashed eventually. Should I still try and move my firewire card?

It actually works! Although, the playback is kind of choppy--I suppose because of the slower bandwidth of USB v. Firewire?

I do most of my editing from USB2 attached drives... and I do not experience any playback issues. The bandwidth required for DV playback is really really low in comparison to the Max USB2 bandwidth.

For the record: USB 2.0 has a slightly higher bitrate than Firewire 400 (480Mbps vs. 400Mbps). However, Firewire typically uses less CPU than USB 2.0 (at least on PCs - don't know about Macs or Linux systems). So, once you go beyond just one device, you usually see better performance with firewire (unless you have some monstro CPU that handles everything without breaking a sweat...).

One thing you never mentioned (or I'm blind) was the speed of your system. If you have an old PC with slow CPU and slow bus, I guess it's possible to overwork your system by reading in a DV stream over USB 2.0.

As far as the firewire crash, I really haven't experienced that before on my XP SP2 system, but if it's an add-on card, and not part of the motherboard, maybe it's time to try a new card - they typically run about $30.

I was not suggesting that you download SP2; if you had SP1, you should have first tried to patch that using the first link I gave you. That provides the best solution to the problem.

Another thing to check is to make sure you only have one Firewire card in your system. For instance, if your motherboard has Firewire, and you also have it on your video card or as a separate card, you might try disabling one of them. I definitely had conflicts in my computer between the Firewire on my ATI Radeon 8500 DV and the Firewire on my motherboard.

No, I understood. I had SP2 already, so I downloaded the second patch. It still didn't work. The firewire card was an add-on as my PC is about 5 years old.

As for the USB choppy playback, I don't have that issue when I just run the clips from my internal drive, so I'm not sure if my older CPU really is the problem. ETA: I did upgrade my RAM at the time that I started editing videos.

I think I may still try to move the firewire card I have and see if that helps. I really think the audio card may be sharing resources and that's causing the crashes.

Alright, I switched slots and the IRQ seems to be different than the audio card now, but it still crashed during playback.

Do you think I may just have a bad firewire card? Or would it make more sense to just go w/ USB until I get a new PC w/ an integrated firewire card on the motherboard? Other thoughts?

Thanks for all the help.

I would go out and purchase an ADS Pyro card, arent they around $30 bucks now, and pop that sucker in and see what that does. Any firewire card with the texas instruments chipset should do the job but the Pyro is considered "gold standard" by most people around here.

Also, since your digging around in your computer already - plunk down another $100 bucks or so and get a big Ide harddrive to add to your system. If you only have 1 harddrive already you should have a spare connector or two on your ide cables. This should give you a fairly "bombproof" drive to capture to while you get your firewire issue sorted out, plus everybody can use more storage space.

hope this helps and good luck

I may try the new card. I have an Adaptec card in there now. Weirdly, I don't have any issues capturing or moving things around/saving files to my external drive using firewire (lots of storage space there). Just the playback issue.

Thanks!

Two other things not mentioned above. Is the external HD 7200RPM? Are you using USB 2.0? While somebody else talked about USB 2.0, you didn't say if you were using it or USB 1. (these may seem obvious, but you never know.)