Requirements For Hd Capture

[Homer_J_Fong]

I have a Leadtek DTV2000h card set up in a PIV 2.4 (HT) GHz machine- 512M RAM - MSI Mobo I think.

Works fine on SD channels.

When capturing HD, it seems it cannot - 'keep up' and the resulting files have chunks missing / stutter etc.

Here's the thing- this machine is purely accessed via remote desktop and hence has a crappy/slow video card (really don't need one at all I suppose?)

Even though I an capturing in silent mode and am not interested in actually watching on this machine, does the type of graphics card affect the HD capture?

According to the minimum PC requirements , I should get flawless HD (Signal is virtually 100% on all channels)

I write to C: drive (to D: makes no difference) I even tried writing back over the network to my main machine - same deal.

So do I need a better graphics card, more RAM or ??

H J S

[Owen]

Even an old PII PC has no trouble writing a 20mbps data stream off to disk, so I don’t know what your issue is mate.

20mbps is only 2.5Megabytes per second, which is nothing for a PC, even a 7 year old one.

Try another application for capture, maybe Web Scheduler.

Do you have any other applications like virus scanners running? If so get rid of them.

[mtv]

Are you saying you are trying to capture over a network (between two machines - remote desktop?)

If so, what configuration is the second machine?

How are the two machines connected?

For the data transfer rate required, it would need to be USB 2.0 or firewire.

[Owen]

Wrong, 100Mb Ethernet is plenty and you could capture a stream while playing 2 others over the same network if it is working properly.

USB2 and Firewire are 400Mbps or more and are completely unnecessary for a stream of 20Mbps MAX, and more like 14Mbps if you are only capturing the HD stream.

Even a 10 year old hard disk can write 20mbps or more. I was getting over three times that out of a singe IDE drive back in the late 1990’s

Most wireless networks are useless.

[TBAR]

When capturing HD, it seems it cannot - 'keep up' and the resulting files have chunks missing / stutter etc.

Here's the thing- this machine is purely accessed via remote desktop and hence has a crappy/slow video card (really don't need one at all I suppose?)

So how do you know "resulting files have chunks missing / stutter etc" these problems would appear during playback?

How are you playing the file (application, network, file transfer) and what is the spec of the system?

[Homer_J_Fong]

So how do you know "resulting files have chunks missing / stutter etc" these problems would appear during playback?

How are you playing the file (application, network, file transfer) and what is the spec of the system?

Well video redo and all other apps are all the same on playback - Video redo finds MANY missing blocks etc etc too.

I am playing them back on a PIV 3 Ghz machine, no probs there.

There must be a bottleneck somewhere, it's not the hard disk (I can copy to and from the disk at good speed) the CPU only shows low load while capturing too.

I am using winfast DTV but even web scheduler and the resulting TS files are the same.

No AV, no firewall and most windows services disabled.

Maybe even though I have very strong indicated signal there is an issue that only comes to ligt on HD capture? I'm pretty sure I can view HD no worries on this box too, (Although as I access it via remote desktop I can't really tell, must hook a screen up to it and check)

Keith

[led]

Well video redo and all other apps are all the same on playback - Video redo finds MANY missing blocks etc etc too.

I am playing them back on a PIV 3 Ghz machine, no probs there.

There must be a bottleneck somewhere, it's not the hard disk (I can copy to and from the disk at good speed) the CPU only shows low load while capturing too.

I am using winfast DTV but even web scheduler and the resulting TS files are the same.

No AV, no firewall and most windows services disabled.

Maybe even though I have very strong indicated signal there is an issue that only comes to ligt on HD capture? I'm pretty sure I can view HD no worries on this box too, (Although as I access it via remote desktop I can't really tell, must hook a screen up to it and check)

Keith

Homer

Just a though. I had a similar problem a while back when transferring DV into my hard disk - Missing and stuttering video. My problem turned out to be hard disk related. Somehow, the disk I was capturing to had changed transfer mode from UDMA 5 (ATA-100) that allows fast transfer to something slower (UDMA 2 or 1 or something). I don't recal the specific mode (I'm not that techy with pcs) but changing it back to UDMA 5 solved the problem. The UDMA mode can be set in the bios.

led