Hi, all.. I need some help..

I have an UltraTV 550 PCI tuner/capture card in a home-built box dedicated for just video capture/dvd burning. The captures I made have been OK, and I recently solved a problem with stuttering playback with a different MPEG decoder. Now I have a new problem.

I've recorded two programs using the S-Video input from my digital cable TV converter. When I play the files back, the first 10-15 minutes are fine, but slowly the resolution deterioriates to the point of blocky unwatchability. It now happens on everything I record. The audio is unaffected.

I thought perhaps playback was actually the problem, but playing the file on a completely different machine yields the same results, so I believe something is causing the recording software to drop to a lower resolution while recording (?). At least that's my best guess. In general, though, I'm stumped.

I've set the UltraTV recording software to capture at the best (HIGH) quality at the 8Mbps bitrate, which is what I've always used and has worked just fine until now. No new software, no antivirus, no ancillary anything; its an XP Pro box with 512MB of ram and a 160GB system drive with a 120 GB drive dedicated for video streaming.

Its pretty frustrating; the box now is pretty much useless for recording, because whatever it records is essentially unwatchable. Any suggestions or ideas??

-SoonerDave

Not sure on the problem but for starters, check the mpg file in Bitrate Viewer, it will show the bitrate used throughout the mpg. www.tecoltd.com