Thanks for the info. I figured an Adaptec 3-port 1394 board based on a TI OHCI compliant 1394 controller was pretty much a standard configuration for this sort of work, but I'll try some other alternatives as well as other ports on this board.

Are there additional device settings for this card that would help the situation?

Any specific boards you recommend?

Thanks,

Michael

Most modern (even cheap) Fireware cards seem to addresss the problem. We don't recommend any brand, only changing out from the one you have.

Will do! Thanks for the advice.

Swapped the Adaptec out for another NEC-based 1394 board I had, seems to be much better so far. Thanks again for the recommendations.

this is happening to me as well, my firewire port came with my gateway laptop. I'm also using a cheap 9 dollar fry's firewire cable. Can it be the cable that is causing these drops? I'd hate to have to use a pcmcia firewire card.

It is unlikely to be the cable, particularly is M2T only captures work. CPU load based errors are either the Firewire port or lack of CPU power, with a laptop it could be either.

It's probably the card. I'm running a 2 giga core2 duo.

So the work around is to use HDVsplit to capture mt2 files without drop out, then use HDlink to convert them to avis. Is there any loss in quality or performance if I do it this way instead all with Neo HDV?

Ron, no loss of quality at all - just an extra step.