I have an old 1-core Athlon laptop running XP and AVG AntiVirus. I use it mainly for capturing from tape via a similarly-old HDV camcorder. The tape contains Mpeg2 in Transport-Stream (TS) format, as recorded by the camera. This capture takes place in real-time, with the tape, via FireWire (FW). The capture process must not be interrupted – otherwise packets will be lost. Losing packets is a nuisance rather than a show-stopper, presumably a benefit of the TS format, the only consequence is lost frames (unsure whether that affects overall duration or whether blank frames are substituted for lost ones).
To minimise chance of lost packets, I reduce as many possibilities of delay and interference as I can think of. The machine is disconnected from network (and WiFi is disabled). For storage target, I attach a GRaid two-disk storage device, necessarily via USB2 (the machine only has one FW port, and that is used for the camera). Additionally I Exit/Quit/Suspend a number of processes. Firstly all relevant icons in the System Tray. Secondly via application-specific Control Panels:
- AVG AntiVirus: Disable elements via AVG Uder-Interface:
- Shield
- Identity Protection
- Java
- QuickStarter: Disable via Java applet in Control Panel
- HDV Tape-Capture App (HDVSplit)
- Change its priority from the default of “High” to “RealTime”.
- {Uncertain if this is advisable, but the tape in reality is definitely real-time! Anyhow, overall it worked OK}
- Change its priority from the default of “High” to “RealTime”.