Skipping Frames

This is another frequently-asked question on these message boards. The situation occurs when you want to transfer video from your camcorder to the computer and the video is "jittery" -- essentially, it looks like you're seeing only every couple of frames.

The first thing to do is check your results. Sometimes, the video captured just fine, but the video memory is running so low that it can't keep up. Reboot your computer, and double-click the captured video file. If you still see the video skipping frames, then you have a problem. If it plays smoothly, you were probably running too many applications when you were capturing the video.

If you do have a problem and you want to fix it, the first thing you should consider is whether your computer hardware is up to the task of capturing video. You do need some processing power (a Celeron 300mhz is a good starting point), but the real culprit will be the hard drive. Typically, anything that has lots of storage space will also be fast enough to use it, but if your hard drive is in the 2 gigabyte range or less in space, it may not be fast enough to capture video.

If you have adequate hardware, then you may not have DMA ("Direct Memory Architecture") enabled on your hard drive. Before hard drives shipped with DMA ability, the processor of the computer had to work as a switchboard to organize what data went to where and when, switching data from the physical presence on the hard drive to its position in computer memory. As you can imagine, this is a demanding task. DMA allows the hard drive to do this independently of the processor, which frees up the processor to do other things. If DMA is not enabled, the video signal will break every time the processor is called upon to perform a task other than organizing the video signal. When DMA is enabled, the hard drive will do this all by itself. So, in a nutshell, enable DMA.

This is accomplished in the Device Manager. Go to Start - Settings - Control Panel - System icon. Select the Disk Drives item, and choose properties of the hard disk drive you have listed. Under the Settings tab, check the DMA option in the options. You will need to reboot for the change to take effect. In some cases, you will need to upgrade your BIOS to enable the change (in particular the VIA motherboards). As a sidenote, Windows 2000 and XP do this very easily.