Discrepancy between VirtualDub CPU usage and Task Manager, Lag resulting So I'm trying to capture footage from my PS2 at a low resolution (720x576 if memory serves) through Virtual Dub. I'm on Windows 7 64 with an 8-core i7, 8GB RAM, 150G SSD and an EZCap capture card. When I start to capture, Virtual Dub says CPU usage is 80 - 120%, I've messed with the settings and got this down to around 40-60% usage, meanwhile Task Manager says I'm using around 10%. Because of this or some other reason I get lag and dropped frames every half-second or so.

All I want is to be able to capture without lag with this or some other program. I've tried some other forums and people there were stumped. Can anyone help please?
EZ Cap is an extremely cheap capture device and may be dropping frames itself.  You may also want to check if things are spiking any.  Can it play back video without recording it and if so, is it still dropping frames?  If so, then it is likely a hardware problem.  If you are plugging it in to a non USB2.0 port, that could also cause problems.

I would recommend trying a low compression codec and see if that will work.  It will use lots of disk space but take a minimal amount of CPU.  You can then encode the intermediate format to a good quality high or moderate compression format to save on space.