P4C800-E Deluxe - Capturing Video Through the M/B's Firewire Port(s)

[Paul]

Hi GSeals

This seems a new twist to the problem - as you have reached the stage of
swapping slots for your Soundcard - this is advance of myself - maybe
someone with more knowledge than myself could comment specifically?

Certainly your setup should work - for capturing DV, you don't need a
dedicated capture card unless you want to capture in mpeg2 (I think this is
correct) you only need one if you want professional quality and/or you want
to capture analogue footage.

My system was set up for NLE and therefore I feel miffed enough to have
started this thread in the first instance. I have been sent all around the
houses looking for a solution and the IRQ conflict seems the best reason so
far for the problem. I have also got a BSOD problem which I have traced to
an IRQ conflict between the Lan and my modem - this is in slot 2 - so I
think the reason for this is the same.

When I get my new gear later this week (USB modem and Pinnacle DV500 Capture
Card) I will rethink my installation.

In the meantime I'm a little confused as you say "I took the advise and
moved my soundcard from slot 4, and the onboard ports work again. However,
I can not capture video with my DV camcorder using a firewire connection,
either by the onboard ports or a stand alone pci card"

Either the Firewire ports work or they don't lol - which is it? - why do you
say they work, when they cannot capture DV?

Paul

 

[Tim]

Hi there,

Well I don't want to blow the PCI theory out of the water but removed my
Audigy 2 card completely and have nothing in PCI 4 slot just a USB PCI card
in PCI 3 and Modem in PCI 5 nothing in PCI 1,2 or 4 and still the onboard
Firewire port is dropping frames lots of them.

No raid in operation only IDE on the promise raid controller so what is
going on.

Now about to remove everything from all PCI ports to see what happens.

Are we all running ATI graphics cards by any chance?

Tim.

 

[Philip Callan]

Hi there,

Well I don't want to blow the PCI theory out of the water but removed my
Audigy 2 card completely and have nothing in PCI 4 slot just a USB PCI card
in PCI 3 and Modem in PCI 5 nothing in PCI 1,2 or 4 and still the onboard
Firewire port is dropping frames lots of them.

No raid in operation only IDE on the promise raid controller so what is
going on.

Okay, what do you mean by this? Are your drives on the IDE_RAID port? or
IDE1?
I have 'promise controller' DISABLED in bios, if I'm not running raid on ide
or sata,
why do I need a controller.

I have a Radeon 9600, and a Audigy2, that is all the cards in my system, and
the onboard
firewire captures FLAWLESSLY (Preimere 6.0) with 0 dropped frames.

What speed HD are you running?

I have a 2.8C /1024MB DDR400/120G Seagate SATA drive.

I'm not saying this problem doesnt exist, but the 3-4 people I've seen
talking about it, 2/4 seem
to think its the motherboard, and from a person who owns this board, and
built the whole rig by
hand, i dont think its the board, something else is the bottleneck.

 

[Tim]

Hi there,

I am running SATA drives but in non raid configurations using the Promise
SATA controller in IDE mode.

My 2 IDE ports have a Plextor Premium on IDE 1 and Pioneer DVD 106D on IDE
2.

Having removed all PCI cards the onboard Firewire port works fine.

Put my modem in PCI 5 and PCI USB card in PCI 3 but did not connect anything
to the PCI USB card again all worked fine no problems with the onboard
Firewire port.

However then connected USB devices to the PCI USB card and hey presto
problems begin with the onboard Firewire port dropping frames.

So it looks like it is something to do with the PCI USB card (Belkin, Lucent
chip) now about to try another PCI USB card and see what happens.

Tried a VIA chipset PCI USB card same problems so for me it seems to be down
to USB PCI cards.

I now have all my USB devices plugged into the MB USB ports and my onboard
Firewire port is working fine no dropped frames no problems.

Only have a modem card on PCI 5 no other PCI slots are in use at the moment.

So that's my problem resolved but why does this onboard Firewire port play
up when I attach a PCI USB card to PCI slots 2,3 or 4?

Any suggestions?

Tim.

Hi there,

Well I don't want to blow the PCI theory out of the water but removed my
Audigy 2 card completely and have nothing in PCI 4 slot just a USB PCI card
in PCI 3 and Modem in PCI 5 nothing in PCI 1,2 or 4 and still the onboard
Firewire port is dropping frames lots of them.

No raid in operation only IDE on the promise raid controller so what is
going on.

Now about to remove everything from all PCI ports to see what happens.

Are we all running ATI graphics cards by any chance?

Tim.

 

[GSeals]

Here is some clarification to my previous post.

First the onboard firewire port. When I first built the system I was
using the onboard audio instead of a stand alone card. All PCI slots
were unused at that time. For extra storage I am using an external
firewire hard drive. The external drive worked fine connected to the
onboard firewire port. I purchased an M-Audio Revolution 7.1 audio
card and installed it in pci slot 4. Several days later I noticed the
firewire hard drive was not being recoginized by Windows XP, but
didn't associate that problem with the pci slot. I took an extra
firewire card I had laying around, installed it, and the external
drive worked again, so I just forgot about trying to use the onboard
firewire. Last night, after I moved the audio card to another pci
slot, the external hard drive once again works when connected to the
onboard port. That is why it worked, didn't, then worked again.
Sorry for the confusion. That said, I can disconnect the external
hard drive from the firewire port, connect the camera, and nothing
happens. The camera also isn't recognized when connected to an add in
firewire card. That led to my original question of can I capture DV
with my current setup.

The camera is not new. I was using it to capture DV in an older
system using an AIW 8500 DV. It was based on an Intel P4 PEBT MB,
which is extrememly vanilla. I gave that system to my son to take
to college when I built my new Asus P4P800 deluxe. The AIW 8500 has a
built in firewire port, my new AIW 9800 Pro has no port. That is why
I wanted to know if the AIW 9800 supported DV capture. ATI says the
AIW 9800 Pro 128 does not support digital capture, only analog. Could
this be the reason I can't get the DV set up? I haven't tried a
stand alone capture device yet, mainly because of the answer I got
back from ATI.

I guess I could always give my son the 9800 and take back the
8500.....nah. If that's the solution, I'll keep capturing with the
analog inputs.

Thanks again, you guys are great.

GSeals

 

[DanO]

The video card has absolutely NOTHING to do with DV capture via Firewire
(except in the case of your old 8500, but only because it was your Firewire
port!)

You do not need anything special from a video card to perform DV capture.
It is totally a function of your DV Camcorder, the OS/capture program, and
the firewire port.

Try checking the cable you are using. The camcorder may be broken as well.
Try it on another PC with the same cable.

 

[Asleep]

Well I don't want to blow the PCI theory out of the water but removed my
Audigy 2 card completely and have nothing in PCI 4 slot just a USB PCI card
in PCI 3 and Modem in PCI 5 nothing in PCI 1,2 or 4 and still the onboard
Firewire port is dropping frames lots of them.

I've been watching this thread with interest. Lots of neat
suggestions, but to my knowledge no one has suggested or tried what
seeems to be the obvious first thing to check.

Have you examined/replaced the connector/wire to the onboard fireport?
Maybe it's a flaky connection/connector/cable. You say it worked until
you installed a soundcard in your PC. Maybe you bumped the cable when
you were installing the card? Maybe you damaged it? Maybe it just went
bad on its own?

If everything worked perfectly until you got into your case & now it
doesn't, this is where I'd look closely.

 

[Paul]

Hi again - thanks for all your input. Maybe I'm wrong but I still think
it's an IRQ conflict of some sort - hands up - lol! Too many people are
having dropped frames using the onboard ports for it to be a cable error -
remember when you capture from an external port it seems there are no
problems.

By the week end I will be in a better position to test this theory

Paul


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[David Waters]

I have experienced a similar problem for six weeks now.

I have a P4C800-Deluxe with 3.0GHz P4, 1GB PC3200 Crucial RAM, one Maxtor
120GB drive with 8MB buffer and two Seagate 120GB SATA drives, also with 8MB
buffer. Hyperthrading is enabled, and memory is running at 800MHz FSB.

I have tried almost every permutation I can think of. OS and programs on a
SATA drive with video content stored on IDE drive. Then tried the data on
the other SATA drive. OS/Programs on IDE (tried both the IDE on the Intel
chip and on Promise controller), with content on SATA. Now I have
OS/Programs on The Maxtor IDE drive on Intel, and the two SATA drives
configured as RAID0 on Promise.

I tested each configuration thoroughly with SiSoft Sandra before trying to
capture video, and every test produced the expected results. Sequential
reads and sequential writes of the RAID0 pair are producing results of
approximately 90 MB/s. Only about 4 to 6 MB/s is required for video! I
defrag the disks before every test, and before every attempt to capture.

The system consistently drops about 12% of all frames. I try to capture a
clip of exactly 60 seconds duration, and I am left with only about 53
seconds on the disc.

During capture, Task Manager shows CPU utilisation is about 10%.

I have tried both the onboard firewire port (using both VIA and standard MS
OHCI drivers), and a Pinnacle Studio 8 card (with onboard firewire disabled
in the BIOS).

Pinnacle Edition 5.0, 5.1, Liquid Edition 5.5 and Moviemaker all experience
the same problem.

Soundcard is SBLive Platinum in slot 5 (not sharing IRQ, as there is nothing
in slot 1). Video is Crucial Radeon 9700 Pro with Catalyst 3.8 drivers.
Edition is fussy about the video card because it uses the GPU to assist with
rendering. OS is Windows XP Home with all updates applied.

Pinnacle, to their credit, have continued to try to help me to identify the
problem throughout the last six weeks, but we are no closer to a resolution.

As a last resort I am thinking of buying an Audigy 2 soundcard, and using
its firewire port. I have discovered that if I disable the SBlive through
device manager, clips are recorded perfectly! As mentioned earlier, it is
not sharing an IRQ with anything.

Regards

David

 

[Tim]

Hi there,

Well I have taken every thing out of all PCI ports bar PCI 5 which has my
modem in.

Reinstalled XP Pro all updates latest drivers and would you believe it the
onboard Firewire port is dropping some
frames but just stops responding randomly (connection lost) is the error
message I get through Adobe Premier Pro when capturing.

So I put my Audigy 2 in just to use the Firewire port didn't load the sound
card drivers just to use the Audigy firewire port and all is fine a few
dropped frames but no random stopping (connection lost).

This has to point to the onboard Firewire port having some problem but what
I notice it is a VIA chip so I wonder if it is VIA?

Guess I'll just have to buy a separate PCI Firewire card.

Any pointers anyone?

Tim.

 

[Paul]

Yes, it looks as if it's all down to a problem with either the Via
Controller (yes it is a Via IEE Controller) or something else on the M/B
that's causing this. Needless to say Asus have not yet responded to my
detailed account of the problem - it's been 4 days now!

Tim when I use the onboard ports, I get serious dropped frames, accompanied
by jerky/stuttering playback and usually a message stating that the
timecode could not be found, culminating in a capture abort, usually within
30 secs of the start of the capture.

Using my Audigy2 ZS's port, capture is absolutely faultless and perfect in
every way - Strange isn't it?

Paul


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[Tim]

Hi there,

Sure is I just get dropped frames but not many of them for me it is the lost
connection that is infuriating use my Audigy 2 no problems.

Let me know what Asus have to say.

Tim.

 

[johnwall]

Paul,

I did see your comment on the IRQ conflict, but this didn't apply to
me due to the fact that I had no additional cards plugged in (Video
was the only "extra" on my system and that's obviously in the AGP
slot).

I did add a PCI firewire card and have been able to capture my video
just fine. It appears to be some kind of conflict, but it's unclear
what exactly the conflict is. I would propose two systems.

1) the Promise RAID controller. THis sounds like it may be common
to folks who are unable to use Firewire to capture Video.

2) I'm using an ATI video card (AIW 9800). If others are also
using the ATI card, that may be the culprit.

Since I have worked around the problem for ~$25, I am unlikely to work
on debugging anymore. I'll continue to be annoyed at the fact that I
don't have a front panel firewire connection, but it's available in
the back, so no big deal.

Cheers,

SK

 

[Ted Miller]

Just found this thread and wanted to comiserate.

I have a similar config to yours, P4C800 Deluxe, 3.0GHz P4 Hyperthreaded,
1GB PC800 RAM, 2 Seagate SATA drives. No RAID. Video is MSI Nvidia GeForce
FX5200. Running XP Pro SP1 with all recent patches etc.

Earlier tonight I started to try to transfer 1 one hour DV tape from my Sony
DCR-PC9 connected to the on-board 1394 port, using MovieMaker 2. It would
get anywhere from 30 seconds to 20 minutes into the capture before the
camera would just sorta drop off the 1394 bus for an instant, causing
MovieMaker to abort the capture and claim the device was disconnected, or
kinda hang there for a bit doing nothing and then hang, or other random
behavior. Tried Pinnacle 8 and experienced similar behavior, tons of dropped
frames before just crapping out similarly to MovieMaker.

This is the first time I was doing anything serious with DV editing and it
was real frustrating, not exactly off to a good start!

Then I remembered that last month I had tried to attach an ATA/100 disk
through a FireWire conversion kit box to this port and, during benchmarks
that did large sustained transfers, had suspiciously similar problems. All
of a sudden Windows would just throw up a dialog claiming that the disk was
gone.

Went into the other room and grabbed an old Pyro DV board and tossed it into
the box.

Flawless DV operation, have captured 4 1-hour tapes without incident so far.
Will try the disk too, but I'm guessing it will work just fine now.

Now I am loving this -- this machine rocks! The capture is done to one of
the SATA drives with less than 10% CPU usage, it seems very robust, no need
to stop using the machine while it's off capturing or sending back out to
tape.

My machine is loaded up with boards and cards but frankly I really don't
care what's going on there, if I have to start shifting cards around and
worrying about IRQs again, something is just plain broken. And something is
definitely amiss with the om-board 1394 on this m/b.

 

[Z Man]

Just want to add my agreement with your Firewire situations. The onboard
Firewire is not reliable, and is dangerous (I am going to post a separate
thread on the dangers). I had to install a Firewire card and disable onboard
Firewire. I am very disappointed regarding the onboard Firewire, as it was a
selling point in purchasing this motherboard. Nonetheless, I am quite happy
with my new system.

 

[Ted Miller]

Just a quick follow-up: the disk that previously crapped out, disconnected
randomly, dropped data, etc when connected to the on-board 1394, works
perfectly with the Pyro DV add-in card.

 

[Steve Sr.]

Have any of you reported this problem directly to Asus? This sounds
most likely like a software issue either in BIOS or VIA 1394 driver.
Unless, of course, Asus did something really stupid in the hardware
design that created resource conflicts that can't be gotten around.

Any chance this might be caused by improper handling of data when a
hard drive goes away when it does a thermal calibration? Hard drives
designed for digital video have different calibration algorithms which
guarantee a sustained transfer rate.

At any rate if enough people scream about it to Asus it might
eventually get fixed.

My $.01

Steve

 

[Ted Miller]

Maybe, but an HD thermal calibration wouldn't explain the similar problems
with camcorders.

 

[Guest]

Same problem here. Dropped frames left and right. Luckly I have a firewire port
on my sound card that works without a problem. Seems to me anything associated
with VIA is screwed up right out of the box. Pity Asus elected to go with them
for anything on this board.

 

[Bernard Mataigne]

Hi,

I have kind of same problem. Here is what I have done so far.

Connect my DV cam (Sony) to FireWire port to capture some video. No results.
Try the other port. no result either. I always got a message: no device
detect or an other device is using....

Send a message to ASUS about what seems to be a problem (I am still waiting
for an answer 2 weeks later...).

Post a message here 2 weeks ago. No answer...

Bought a FireWire cars (PCI) on the suggestion of members of the Ulead MSP
newsgroup. Install it. Try to transfert. No results.

So, I take back my old computer (gave it to my girlfriend). I am sure it
was working OK. And it was not used at here place. Connect my DV to it: same
thing happended. Got a message that another device was using the port or
that there is no device.

To my, there is only one explanation: the ASUS board fried something in my
DV cam.

I will test that this week on a computer that is working for the transfert
of video by a FireWire card to see if I'm right.

What do you think?

Thanks

Bernard