DV Download has become jittery

gloucester · Post by **gloucester** » Sun Sep 03, 2006 10:41 pm

I have used VS8 for over a year with no problems, creating several DVDs from downloaded DV footage. All of a sudden, this weekend, I find that viewing the download has become incredibly jittery and playback of any such file suffers similarly. Watching a file created through Winamp also shows that it has not been captured correctly.

I have a Dell Inspiron 9300 running XP, Pentium 1.8 MHz, 80GB (50% spare), 512MB and this machine has been powerful enough before.

I download from a Canon MV 350i through firewire.

I have defragged my Dell 3 times, cleaned up the disk. I have reinstalled VS8 twice. I haven't done any upgrades to my machine of late. (knowingly). Antivirus is McAfee.

Any thoughts or ideas much appreciated.

Post by **Ken Berry** » Sun Sep 03, 2006 10:57 pm

The only thing I can think of is that somehow or other you may have switched the DV Ecoder from Type 1 (which your computer can handle) to Type 2 (which it might be a bit underpowered to capture correctly). In the VS Capture page, click on the Options icon and see what Type is set for your DV, and if necessary, change it to Type 1. Symptoms of a computer which does not have sufficient grunt to capture Type 2 correctly include jittery video and/or audio...

Trevor Andrew · Post by **Trevor Andrew** » Mon Sep 04, 2006 9:45 am

Hi
In addition to Kens reply, are you seeing any Drop Frames during capture.
This is normally off by default.
Drop Frame Counter

Documents & Settings
All Users
Application Data
Ulead Systems
Video Studio 8

Open

UVS.INI

INFORMATION

Change Show Drop Frame Counter from =0 to =1
Save the changes.

Trevor

gloucester · Post by **gloucester** » Mon Sep 04, 2006 7:47 pm

Thanks for the ideas so far.

It was recording in Type 2 but switching to Type 1 still has the same problem but perhaps marginally better.

On the Drop Frames, I am leaving that one for the minute....

I am thinking that it may be something on the PC because when I play previously downloaded clips through winamp or mediaplayer, I get the same problem. Namely the clip plays for a fraction of a second and then jitters for a bit and continues the cycle. The same clip plays on an alternative machine (IBM) perfectly well.

I have done the disk clean up and defragging. I have now followed with the adware/spyware checking. Next port of call I think is either additional memory or system rebuild which is somewhat beyond what I think needs to be done but que sera!

Any final thoughts on what may cause a PC to slow down on video playback?

Post by **Ken Berry** » Mon Sep 04, 2006 10:39 pm

Do you have DMA enabled on your hard drive?

heinz-oz · Post by **heinz-oz** » Tue Sep 05, 2006 12:53 am

Can you describe "jittery" a bit more clearly? Do you see square/rectangular blocks in your picture that seem to wobble and not belong to that particular frame or out of place? Does the same show on the camera display?

If that is the case, run a cleaning tape through the camcorder.

gloucester · Post by **gloucester** » Tue Sep 05, 2006 5:04 pm

I have checked and DMA is enabled on the hard drive.

My description of Jittery playback (of a type DV2 piece that once has worked and still works OK on an alternative machine) is that it plays OK for about half a second and then the video freezes frame and the sound stutters for half a second and this cycle then repeats itself for the whole clip. Occasionally, the film will play OK for a second.

I am going to review any microsoft updates over the last month to see if anything was added that may be using up machine resource.

Any more thoughts gladly appreciated. If I can get the playback to be alright, I believe that the capture will take care of itself.

gloucester · Post by **gloucester** » Wed Sep 06, 2006 8:26 pm

Success - problem fixed - and Ken you were on the right track.

Although I have DMA enabled, my machine would only run in PIO mode because it had dropped down to that mode and PIO mode is enabled by default in the following situations:
...
For repeated DMA errors. Windows XP will turn off DMA mode for a device after encountering certain errors during data transfer operations. If more that six DMA transfer timeouts occur, Windows will turn off DMA and use only PIO mode on that device.

In this case, the user cannot turn on DMA for this device. The only option for the user who wants to enable DMA mode is to uninstall and reinstall the device.

Windows XP downgrades the Ultra DMA transfer mode after receiving more than six CRC errors. Whenever possible, the operating system will step down one UDMA mode at a time (from UDMA mode 4 to UDMA mode 3, and so on).

-----------------------------------

So assuming there is no underlying problem, I have reset the DMA transfer mode by deleting the primary IDE channel key (0004 on my machine) from the registry and updating the IDE driver which reinstalls the key as it should be.

I found all the details on the following page:

http://winhlp.com/WxDMA.htm

And bingo back in action with Type 2 DV video.

Thanks for all the help.