My machine is an Athlon 1.8 (slightly underclocked--should be 1.53 but I had to run it at less). I'm trying to use an ATI TV Wonder card with bttv, and am capturing video from my VCR. My problem is this: Sometimes my capture rate is going way down. In particular, I have some multiple generation VHS tapes that, when I try to capture them, end up making me lose lots of frames. The frame loss at any particular place on the tape stays the same, but can vary over the duration of the tape--one tape consistently has a 40% loss at one spot and no loss at all at another. There's no obvious visual distinction between the two different parts of the tape. I'm using bttv 0.7.106. It doesn't matter what program I use with it--I've played in xawtv, captured using avicap, and captured using transcode. Every one of them gives the same problem. I am capturing to uncompressed YV12, and I'm not capturing sound at all. When I use avicap, it claims that all the frame loss is in the capture thread, and not in the encoder. I can't switch to bttv 0.9 series because I'm on Mandrake 9.0 and that has fubar'ed headers which won't let me compile any v4l2 application. Is this really expected behavior, that some tapes have unacceptable skipping and others capture perfectly fine? I can understand that the tape might have more noise, but should this matter if I'm capturing uncompressed? Is it a driver problem, and would upgrading my system so I can use bttv 0.9 help? Am I capturing to the wrong format? (If so, then what format should I use?)
