Recording device does not capture entire video recording from dv-avi, frame loss issue as well

You didn't anwer the question about the parchute icon. That is a program that is running on the background and I have never seen it before.
Best thing to do is to disable all processes that are started during booting and that you don't need.
Click Start->Run and type msconfig. One of the tabs shows all processes that are started at system boot and you can disable the ones that you don't need.

BTW: All of this should not be necessary if your systems works OK. I have an unbranded 2.4Ghz Pentium 4 with only 512MB of RAM PC and I can capture with WinDV, while having NAV running, simultaneous surf the web, type a letter or whatever I want without having dropped frames. That is what I love about WinDV: it does not take any resources unlike mahy of the capture modules built in in video editing programs.

 

Well, for the parachute, I came home yesterday to look at it and all it is is some intel monitor refresher. That's nothing really for me to be bothered about. I have looked into msconfig, but everything is shorthanded so I can't tell what's vital or what I can take out.

I captured a 62 minute dv yesterday and the dropped frames came about to be about 1628 frames....which well, at least it's better than the 3000 or so that I had to start off before I did all the disabiling and defragmenting, but that's still something that needs improvement. I have the same specs as all of you are mentioning, with a 2.4 ghz pentium 4 and 1gb ram, I was looking at the available memory yesterday during capture and it only fluctuated in the 10,000 mark, so I had about 620mb available and it never dropped below 600mb during the capture and the cpu usage was only about 17-20% the whole time.

I can try the stoik program, but it seems like there's just something wrong in general...I've tried already ms movie maker, nero vision capture, and now windv, so that's 3 different applications with similar dropped frames results. I'm probably going to just buy a different firewire card.

 

I actually don't think it is the Firewire card. My experience is that the card either works or it does not. In very rare occaions a certain combination of the chipset used in the card in a PC can cause problems, but in that case it does not work at all.

If you don't recognize the programs in the msconfig, just check out the middel column. Anything that is not Microsoft can basicaly be disabled.

In your diagnosis, you seem to focus on the CPU usage. I don't think that is the problem: I still suspect write/read operations to your hard drive. One thing to check if you have enabled DMA on your IDE channels? Check this article: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/IDE-DMA.mspx

 

hmm...I'm trying to think. Do all motherboards support firewire? Even if the package for the specs of the motherboard talks about usb support but not any info on firewire, since this is a pci card and the board has pci slots, then does that make a difference?

 

One thing, If you are running XP SP2, go to the mircosoft download page and download fix #KB885222. It fixes a problem that when SP2 is installed, the performance of the firewire system decreases badly. This fix will take care of the problem. Try please.

 

alright, i'm going to try that. I figured that since I have it set so that it automatically detects new updates and downloads automatically, unless this is new, it should have already been done