Problem capturing DV video from Samsung camcorder

1) Took your suggestion and downloaded DV. Same thing happened.

2) Tried uninstalling/reinstalling the Fire Wire card driver, the DV camcorder driver, and the video card driver (by the way, graphics card is ATI Radeon Express 200). Also tried reducting all graphics acceleration. Now I have something different; whenever I reboot the computer, it re-recognizes the DV camcorder and goes into Windows Movie Maker right away, but 1-5 seconds into capturing it crashes.

3) It was a combined USB 2.0 (2 slots) and Fire Wire (2 slots) card made by Belkin. Never had trouble with it before, but who knows?

4) Computer is eMachines T3504 (my home computer, since a lot of times I'm writing about work computers in these forums). 3.2 GHz Celeron, and I upgraded to 768 MB RAM. 100 GB HD with about 60GB free. Just did a defrag on it for extra measure. Previous computer had much lower specs (Compaq with 2.4 GHz Pentium and 512MB RAM) and capture was fine.

Any thoughts?

The cause is not in your post. Also no real lead on which item could be broke. If this was my machine I'd install the latest motherboard chipset driver package for a start.

Bob

OK, thanks. I tried updating the motherboard chipset drivers and still have the same problem. Also reseated the FireWire card in a different slot. Also tried changing the positions of the 2 RAM chips. Still have the same problem: Crashes about 1-5 seconds after video capture starts. Any thoughts?

I missed that. That's a sign of overheating or a machine that needs repair.

I'll reread your first post again.

Bob

But about you "trying" to update the motherboard drivers. You didn't write you were successful. Tell me how you went about this.

For me I look up the chipset of my system, go to that maker's web site and get their latest.

What method did you use?

Bob

It doesn't "crash" per se it just stops capturing. I can still exit Windows Movie Maker.

I probably did go about it wrong. I went on eMachine's website for my model and updated the BIOS.

Belkin is usually ok. Now try a cheap 10 buck firewire card from geeks.com

Bob

I tried bringing home a Dazzle DVC 90 from work to see if using USB 2.0 instead of fire wire would work. It captured fine, but I only got audio and no picture. I looked at some reviews on the Dazzle and noticed that most of the negative ones (and they were more negative than positive) had my graphics card (somewhat inaccurate since it is integrated).

Any thoughts on that?

I've used firewire on too many machines. When it fails it's something in the machine's hardware or software. I haven't had it be the video card yet.

The Dazzle failure is interesting but could be as simple as the video signal wasn't connected or other issues. It's not in your post why that failed.

Try firewire on another machine.

Bob

I do still think it's hardware or software as well because of one other thing I tried but forgot to mention.

I had it do a special startup with everything disabled except plug n play (so that it would recognize the camcorder). Doing this I could actually get Windows Movie Maker to capture for about 10-20 seconds before it would stop. I also before that tried removing Nero and AVG Anti-Virus, but it wasn't that (don't worry, the Anti-Virus is back).

As for the Dazzle, I didn't get any errors, it would just capture audio and the video would be blank. I had checked and all the wiring, etc. was correct. I know that doesn't make sense but I found quite a few reviews that complained about this happening.