The transition from Windows 9x to XP is a lot harder than MS makes out, especially for people with older computers.

Some common problems include:
1) XP has a higher overhead. In many situations, XP will run slower than 9x. Adding some RAM will help with older systems.
2) Drivers. XP (and 2000) uses a new driver model (WDM). Not everyone has gotten the hang of programming WDM drivers yet. Sometimes you can get vastly better performance by downloading the latest drivers from the vendors website. Unfortunately, some companies don't bother to write (good) drivers for older hardware.

That is not to say XP doesn't have any technical advantage (because it does). Win 9X is basically running on top of DOS. DOS is very efficient at running a single app for a single user, but not so good at multi-user, mutli-tasking. Still, NT has been struggling under a bloated kernel for years. It would be nice to see MS slim down for once (in both price and size) but that is unlikely to happen.

Anyway, I got off topic. Post your exact system specs (including driver versions) and we'll see what we can do.

Well, it's an HP pavillion, 500MHZ, 256MB ram, VF Ver 2.0c, 1-60G Hard Drive Partitioned into 10G (for the os) and 50G. ADS PyrobasicDV Firewire card(They didn't have any new drivers for me), Las night I installed Service Pack 1. What particular device drivers are we interested in?
Thanks Again, I ver much appreciate how helpful people are on this forum, I hope someday my knowledge base expands to the point of being able help people out the way I have been helped out.

Some random thoughts:

HP Pavillion - 500MHz. I'm guessing Pentium III although HP liked AMD.

256MB RAM - Again, I'm guessing PC-100 or PC-133. Non-DDR RAM is still dirt cheap. Adding more RAM may provide some "pop" for cheap.

Your HD seems big for a 500MHz machine. I'm guessing this is an upgrade. Is it a 7200 RPM drive? Brand\Model name would help.

Sonic Foundry recommends you use the MS drivers for Firewire, so you are OK there.

XP Service Pack 1 should mean you are up to date on DirectX (version 8.1 or newer).

The processor is a tad slow by today's standards, but it should be adequate. Everything else looks A-OK.

When you installed XP, was it a clean install or did you install on top of ME?

The two things (driver-wise) that would boost system performance would be chipset drivers and video drivers (unrelated to stuttering, but could improve overall system performance). What chipset and video card are you using? Take a peek under System Devices and/or USB Devices in the System Properties control panel for a hint about chipset brand.

The machine is a mutt. I got the case and Motherboard for free and I provided the Processor and everything else. The only thing thats original is the case and the mother board.

I put in the HD myself, it's a HD2059 Maxtor 6l060j3 (L3) 7200RPM.
It's PCC 133 Memory. It's a celeron Processor.
I installed over ME. I'm using the onboard video Intel(r) 82810 Graphics Controller. Not sure where to find out what chipset is is-out of the box this ws a HP 6635-does that help?

> I put in the HD myself, it's a HD2059 Maxtor 6l060j3 (L3) 7200RPM.

I know this HD. I used to own one. The seek noise drove me mad so I returned it (The big "THUNK" sound when I turned off the computer wasn't pretty either). Still, it was a fairly speedy drive - no problems here.

> It's PCC 133 Memory. It's a celeron Processor.

PC-133 is largely unnecessary since a 500 MHz Celeron uses a 66 MHz bus. Actually, you might want to look into upgrading your processor if possible. HP's documentation is not the clearest, but they seem to indicate you can upgrade up to a Celeron 800 (~$50).

>Not sure where to find out what chipset is is-out of the box this ws a
>HP 6635-does that help?

Yup, according to HP, that model is powered by an Intel 810. The following websites should prove illuminating:

* HP Product Page: http://h20015.www2.hp.com/en/product.jhtml?reg=&cc=&lc=en&pagetype=hppavilion20006

Check and make sure your BIOS is up to date.

* Intel 810 Page: http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/intel810/index.htm

Definitely download the graphic card drivers. The chipset identification utitlity or Application Accelerator are probably unnecessary. The Application Accelerator MAY increase HD performance but I have heard mixed reviews on stability.

> I installed over ME.

This might be your problem right here. The experts recommend that you don't do this. Even MS says you shouldn't do this if you bother to read their many readme's (Don't worry no one does ;) ). My personal experience is that it is better to do a clean install although I have successful installed over an old OS several times without incident.

Bottom line, I hate recommending an OS resintall (since that "cure" is overused in the IT community and OS reinstalls are a pain in the *#$). I would try fiddling with drivers first, see what develops.

Thanks a lot, you've been a ton of help.

More memory is probably going to be your cheapest and best help in this situation. ME probably needed about 1/4 to 1/3 of your RAM just to sit in. XP is probably using 2/3 or 3/4 of it. So now that you have XP installed you have only a very small fraction of the free RAM you used to have. Adding another 256MB should do you worlds of good.

I think my problem may be XP related too, so I am going to piggy-back on this thread.

My problem is also dropped frames. I thought I had this problem licked when I went with a dedicated hard drive and shut down every app and service except Windows Audio and Plug and Play (experience shows I need these). If I capture at 320x240 (which is the old situation I am trying to improve on) I can capture with zero dropped frames. At 640x480 I consistently drop a frame every 2 seconds or so. At 720x480 I drop a frame every quarter second or so.

This suggests to me that my "pipeline" may be constrained to some degree, either by hardware or perhaps by XP in some way. If I try to move too much information too quickly it gets bogged down. Does this make sense? Is there something I can do to unclog the pipes? Any guesses at where the bottleneck is? Someone suggested it might be the hard drive. If that is the case, is there some way to tweak it to speed it up a bit? It is a 7200 60G drive and I thought that was pretty fast.

My system is pretty decent as well, I think: Pent 4, 1.9gh; 512mb ram.

PBurdett, I doubt your HD is the problem. To write DV video you only need about a 3.5 MB/S sustained transfer rate. Pretty much every 7200 drive is capable of that.

However, your mention of various resolutions makes me think you are doing uncompressed analog capture. In that case, the transfer rate of your drive becomes more of an issue.

Please expand your computer specs to include your video card capture device (if it is an ATI All-in-Wonder, we have much to talk about).

I am using a WinTV GO capture card from Hauppage. It is the bottom of their line but I think the higher end models only have added features, not better performance.

PBurdett, i used the same WinTV Go card for a year or so and always had very good results with it. The only major problem was that i seemed to have to remove the card, completely uninstall the drivers and software, reinstall the card, reinstall the software and drivers about once a month or so. This was more an annoyance than a major problem, but usually about once a month the card would just stop working until it was reinstalled.

Even using it on an old 350MHz computer, i could usually do 640x480x29.97x16 bit captures and only lose a frame or two every minute. Normally i used the YUV9 codec (whatever that was). This seemed to give the best tradeoff for quality vs. file size.

That is a bit discouraging, Cheinworks. Maybe there is something else wrong in my system. That's scary because I spent a bunch of $ trying to get a fast system with lots of memory. Anyway, I'll try the reinstall, salt over the shoulder, voodoo dolls, or any other suggestion people come up with.

Here is an additional data point. I recently found that if my if my camera is PAUSED while I capture, then there are no dropped frames at any resolution of capture. This does not make sense to me, since I am capturing uncompressed and there should be no difference (I think) between paused and rolling tape. Is this a useful clue to any of you supersleuths?

Also, I will try some other color settings. I have been using RGB24 and have no idea what the difference is. But like I said, I'll try anything.

I have a ATI TV Wonder which uses the same chipset (bt8x8) that your WinTV uses.

There is no sense in capturing RGB24 since the bt8x8 processes video internally in a YUV colorspace where,

Y = Luminance
U = Blue - Y
V = Red - Y

Therefore, by capturing at RGB24, you are performing a YUV->RGB conversion, not to mention adding additional bits of "empty" data (most YUV codecs take up 16 bits/pixel, 8 less than RGB24). Use YUY2 instead of RGB24. In addition, 640x480 is the correct resolution (for NTSC anyway) for the square-pixel output of the bt8x8. Finally, make sure you set your framerate to 29.97 and not 30 for NTSC (PAL uses 25 fps).

However, none of these factors should have an impact on your relatively fast system, at least not to the point of dropping several frames a second (you will see a few dropped frames if you use 30 fps on NTSC material). You problem probably lies with a configuration issue. Please post more specifics on your the driver version of your capture card drivers, what program you use for capturing (hint, VidCap doesn't do a good job with analog video) and any other related specs.

BillyBoy is correct. You must purchase another hard drive and keep your OS on
one and the other clean. You should not partition. DV capturing will help a lot
but why mess around trying to change the laws of physics?

James J. Kizak

FWIW, I don't have any problems capturing to the system drive using either VidCap or Scenalyzer. Not a single dropped frame (how's that for tempting fate?). I'm using XP Pro, though for historical reasons it's setup with FAT32. Have you tried running a disk monitor to see what else is accessing the disk while you're capturing? It might be worth raising the priority of your capture program in Task Manager (NOT to real-time!!) and see if that has any effect.

Ian G.

You're right and wrong, discdude:

You are absolutely right about not using RGB24.

You are absolutely wrong about the extra work having no affect on my system.

In other words, I switched to YUY2 and get ZERO dropped frames, even in 20 minute captures! So the world is good again.

It was new information to hear that my capture chipset uses YUV internally. I can understand why my computer might be strained if it had to do a conversion on the fly.

Also, as I understand it, YUY2 will be more than sufficient for my purposes. I think YUY2 will work well for me because my ultimate destination is MPEG2 encoding and YUY2 will have more than enough color info (twice as much, I think) to feed the MPEG2 compression.

On thing I am still curious about. I was still able to capture using RGB24 if my camera was PAUSED. I am still not sure why this worked. It seems to me that the color sampling should still be taking place even if there is no motion in the picture.

I was going to try some other capturing codecs to see if they would let me do RGB24 color spacing, but I'll drop that now that I know the raw data from the chipset is in YUV format.

Also, I'll try the 640x480 res if that works best for the chipset.

Many thanks to you, discdude, and to you, Chienworks, for bringing up the color spacing issue.

Glad I could help.

Personally, I'm surprised that changing colorspaces helped so much in your case since it makes a negligible difference on my system. Perhaps I have some sort of hardware colorspace acceleration on my system (I know my Radeon does, but I thought that was for playback only. Maybe previewing is what is eating CPU cycles?).

It is possible that previewing is causing problems.

I tried to turn it off, but VF won't let me, at least not through the Preferences menu. Is there some other way?

And it is not like it is working anyway. There is no video in the preview screen when I capture at 720x480, though it does show up at lower resolutions. I was hoping that preview is automatically being turned off.

I personally don't use Vidcap to capture my (analog) videos. However, I do see a "Never Show Preview" command in the option menu of Vidcap.