[rescue] O2's

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Sat, Jun 15, 2002 at 12:47:22PM +1000, Robert Rose wrote:
> Well my R5k O2 (180MHz SC, 320Mb RAM) seems to drop frames too at 
> fullscreen PAL resolution; half-size appears to be fine though.

What compression ratio?  What sort of disk system do you use?  How
much are you buffering to ram?  What applications?  What codec?

I have no PAL O2 experience, but it should just work the same as NTSC.
 
> I don't know if it's a lack of RAM (it's probably still pretty cheap) or 
> the 180MHz CPU.  Just for laughs I rang SGI for a price on an upgrade, a 
> remanufactured 300MHz R5k (might have been R5200, the telesales girl didn't 
> know) is $AUS4500 which is exactly nine times what I paid for the O2 and 
> there is no credit for the trade-in of the old CPU.  Needless to say I 
> didn't order one, anyone know if they're significantly cheaper elsewhere, 
> or are they unobtanium?

Yeah, it is pretty bad.  This is the major downside to SGIs versus
Macs when it comes to business.
 
> Any speculation on whether additional RAM is the solution to dropped 
> frames?  Josh? I could probably fund an additional 256Mb or so from the 
> sale of my Octane if it will help.

You shouldn't be suffering from dropped frames it what you have so far
discribed.  Most likely the cause is software short comings [1] or disk
short comings.  Potentially hardware failure.  The ICE chip will do
compression ratios such that no matter what the disk it won't drop
frames, so try using a slightly higher compression ratio.

Many people have no trouble what so ever with dropped frames, and when
you buy a real time video system for the O2, it is based on an R5k and
it doesn't use proprietary add ons, unlike similar systems for PCs and
Macs. 

Until I get my own O2 instead of relying on the reports of others and
the experience on the school O2 (which could capture video fine
despite having only 64megs of ram and a crappy disk, you just needed
to crank the compression ratio), I can't help you any more than to say
that it is possible, and you shouldn't need to buy anything to make it
work.  The people in usenet might be more helpfull.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd

[1] Depending on the software used, RAM might help.