DV Capture problems with P4P800 Deluxe

[Brian Smith]

Howdy, I'm having an issue and wanted to see if anyone else is
experiencing this. I have the following:

Asus P4P800 Deluxe motherboard
Intel P4-2.6
512MB PC2700 RAM
ATI Radeon 9600
2x Maxtor 30GB HD's on IDE RAID controller (RAID-0)
DVD-ROM on primary IDE
DVD+-RM on secondary IDE

I have a DV camcorder attached to the onboard FireWire port, and when
I try to do capture it drops frames like mad. The capture program I'm
using (Scenalyzer Live) has a HD Write Performance test function, so I
used it. If the camcorder is turned off or unplugged from the FW port,
it says I can capture at like 380fps, 15x real time. If the camcorder
is turned on, even if it is NOT in play mode and NOT capturing video,
the write test gives me dismal results - 16fps, 0.6x real time.

Anyone know why simply plugging in the camcorder makes my RAID array's
performance drop to that of an old MFM drive? That makes no sense. I
wish I had another FireWire peripheral to see if it caused the same
effect. I do have an extra FireWire card from my previous rig, I'm
going to try it tonight and will post the results. In the meantime,
I'd love to hear from anyone else with similar issues.

 

[Paul]

Howdy, I'm having an issue and wanted to see if anyone else is
experiencing this. I have the following:

Asus P4P800 Deluxe motherboard
Intel P4-2.6
512MB PC2700 RAM
ATI Radeon 9600
2x Maxtor 30GB HD's on IDE RAID controller (RAID-0)
DVD-ROM on primary IDE
DVD+-RM on secondary IDE

I have a DV camcorder attached to the onboard FireWire port, and when
I try to do capture it drops frames like mad. The capture program I'm
using (Scenalyzer Live) has a HD Write Performance test function, so I
used it. If the camcorder is turned off or unplugged from the FW port,
it says I can capture at like 380fps, 15x real time. If the camcorder
is turned on, even if it is NOT in play mode and NOT capturing video,
the write test gives me dismal results - 16fps, 0.6x real time.

Anyone know why simply plugging in the camcorder makes my RAID array's
performance drop to that of an old MFM drive? That makes no sense. I
wish I had another FireWire peripheral to see if it caused the same
effect. I do have an extra FireWire card from my previous rig, I'm
going to try it tonight and will post the results. In the meantime,
I'd love to hear from anyone else with similar issues.

There is a Hardocp review that claims the %CPU when running the Via
RAID can be as high as 60%. What could be happening is you are
running out of processor ! Compare the %CPU being using when capturing
from Scenalyzer to the RAID array versus just capturing to an ordinary
IDE or SATA disk.

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NDg0LDM=

"From the results alone, it seems that the best RAID 0 performance
on this board is gotten by pairing SATA drives with the ICH5R
controller. The RAID 0 performance on the VIA controller is just
awful. With a 16k block size, the ICH5R based SATA array bested
the VIA arrays by more than 10 MB/s while writing data and almost
20 MB/s while reading data. Furthermore, the CPU utilization
measured while the VIA based array was in use is astoundingly
high. Typically, the CPU utilization does not go above 10%.
In the case of the VIA controller, the measured CPU utilization
was above 60%."

Sounds like the VIA RAID is a soft raid ?

Just a guess,
Paul

 

[Rick]

I have a DV camcorder attached to the onboard FireWire port, and when
I try to do capture it drops frames like mad. The capture program I'm
using (Scenalyzer Live) has a HD Write Performance test function, so I
used it. If the camcorder is turned off or unplugged from the FW port,
it says I can capture at like 380fps, 15x real time. If the camcorder
is turned on, even if it is NOT in play mode and NOT capturing video,
the write test gives me dismal results - 16fps, 0.6x real time.

Same exact problem here, same configuration too.
I solved it by disabling the onboard firewire in the bios, then,
re-installed and used the FW port on my audigy card. Things work great
now. I was dropping frames continuisly when using the on board FW.

 

[Philip Callan]

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Brian Smith wrote:
| 2x Maxtor 30GB HD's on IDE RAID controller (RAID-0)

Kill the RAID, VIA sucks.
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