I have an Windows 98 SE AMD Athlon system using a Tyan motherboard.
Installed components: ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon, 1394 Firewire card,
10/100 NIC, Soundblaster Live.

Problem: When I capture video using the firewire card I get
intermittent purple blocks in the video. Also, sometimes when I use
the PC, my mouse hangs temporarily. I believe the two symptoms are
from the same problem - hardware conflict. There are no obvious
conflicts, and in fact one time I got everything working fine (by
removing and reinstalling the cards).

Question: Is there any software that can pinpoint why a system will
hang intermittently? Do I have to play Russian Roulette with the cards
(remove and rearrange)? Should I turn off PNP and manually adjust
setting for each card (not sure if this is possible)?

I would like a magic bullet that will cure my system. Or even a good
way to diagnose it. Or maybe even some general troubleshooting steps.
(I thought could diagnose any problem, but this one has humbled me.)

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Clarification of Question by madderhatter-ga on 27 Jun 2002 10:51 PDT

Forgot to mention this...

I can capture Digital Video using the 1394 Firewire card directly to
my internal hard drive. The blocky video problem occurs when I try to
capture directly to my external firewire drive. (The drive works on
other PC's)

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Clarification of Question by madderhatter-ga on 28 Jun 2002 09:13 PDT

Some more info:

1Ghz AMD Athlon
384MB RAM
ATA-100 EIDE Controller
Seagate 40(?) GIG 7200RPM HD
IBM Deskstar 120GXP 80 GB Ultra ATA/100 7200 RPM HD
ADS 3 Port FireWire Card
Granite Digital FireVue FireWire case 400Mbit/sec... 40MB/sec
sustained
Western Digital 60 GB ATA/100 7200 RMD HD (EXTERNAL)

Everything is pretty fast - it is not a question of dropping frames. I
had it working fine for a week. I thought I had fixed it by updating
the BIOS, but I think during the BIOS update, the IRQs were reassigned
to the proper locations. I ended up inadvertantly reassigning the IRQs
at a later date and I was back to square one.

Russian Roulette it is!  Best bet is to strip the system down to the
bare essentials with a clean OS load.  Start with video and FireWire
card.  Add in your network card.  Add in your sound card.  So on and
so on.  See which point it blows up.

Since you can capture to an IDE drive successfully, it simply may be
that the firewire card doesn't like to do simultaneous read and write
operations.  Not all FireWire cards are made alike.

Check the FM for the card, check the drivers for the card, etc.

Good luck!

One question what resoluting and codec do you use during capture? Do
you have the same problem then you capture using the lowest available
resolution?

Hi,

You don't say how fast your computer is, or what sort of Firewire
drive you are using, but it sounds like you are getting dropped frames
on your capture.  This is probably being caused by your firewire drive
not being fast enough.
This thread on google discusses capturing to a firewire drive:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF8&safe=off&threadm=Tp8z8.3206%24iB4.8727%40nntpserver.swip.net&rnum=3&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dvideo%2Bcapture%2Bfirewire%2Bhard%2Bdrive%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF8%26safe%3Doff%26selm%3DTp8z8.3206%2524iB4.8727%2540nntpserver.swip.net%26rnum%3D3
It is possible, but I have also seen advice against it.  Certainly for
the best capture results, speed counts and a SCSI or EIDE disk drive
is the best.

You'll probably find that your PCI latency is set to 32, go into the
BIOS, and change your PCI latency timer to 64.
This should cure your problem

the firewire does not have tha much bandwidth to share, and ur video
camera cannot slow down , it goes at a constant speed, 2 high resource
devices wont work together.
do this
copy the file onto ur IDE drive first, and than transfer the file from
ur IDE to ur firewire drive.
or use software, that compresses the video file on the fly making much
much smaller file size to transfer out on the firewire HDD

Ok, Here is my suggestion:

First - Look in your hardware manager (right click mycomputer,
properties, device manager), look what conflicts you have, they are
shown by yellow and black circles with exclamation points. Find out
the IRQs for these devices. Then open your CMOS setup and set the PNP
mode for these IRQs to "LEGACY ISA". This will cause the OS to
re-arrange the dynamically allocated IRQs. You might have to repeat
this process until you no longer have any conflicts!

Stephen Martindale