United States of America
I'm going to assume you guys(?) are running MP 0.1.3 since .2 doesn't officially support SW cards anymore. Some people had good results with FFDSHOW, but many don't so I would recommend not using it (I didn't use it).
I posted these along time ago:
http://nolanparty.com/mediaportal.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=40337#40337
and
http://nolanparty.com/mediaportal.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=41105#41105
You can see my system specs in my sig. Whenever my CPU went above 50% I was subject to occasional freezes, and even if it was lower CPU usage, if I opened another file, or started another program that would cause a skip. I don't have MP on a dedicated machine so being able to do other things while recording is imperative. With a HW card I can watch, record, etc without worrying about skips or synch issues.
The long sotry short in those posts above is:
-Audio should be PCM (this is crucial)
-use constant quality (not bitrate)
-disable any features that take up extra CPU cycles like bi-directional encoding, resizing, cropping, etc.
-Use Fastest setting. In DivX6 they changed the terminology so its called something different now (i don't have in front of me), this sacrifices a bit of quality for more speed which equals less CPU usage.
-Don't use FFDShow
-This will give larger size, but you can always go back and encode again later to shrink more.
Try these out and let me know how it works. We can tweak your settings a little more specific if need be.
I posted these along time ago:
http://nolanparty.com/mediaportal.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=40337#40337
and
http://nolanparty.com/mediaportal.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=41105#41105
You can see my system specs in my sig. Whenever my CPU went above 50% I was subject to occasional freezes, and even if it was lower CPU usage, if I opened another file, or started another program that would cause a skip. I don't have MP on a dedicated machine so being able to do other things while recording is imperative. With a HW card I can watch, record, etc without worrying about skips or synch issues.
The long sotry short in those posts above is:
-Audio should be PCM (this is crucial)
-use constant quality (not bitrate)
-disable any features that take up extra CPU cycles like bi-directional encoding, resizing, cropping, etc.
-Use Fastest setting. In DivX6 they changed the terminology so its called something different now (i don't have in front of me), this sacrifices a bit of quality for more speed which equals less CPU usage.
-Don't use FFDShow
-This will give larger size, but you can always go back and encode again later to shrink more.
Try these out and let me know how it works. We can tweak your settings a little more specific if need be.