[rescue] O2's

[Kurt Huhn]

> 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.
> 

AFAIK, the CPU has little to do with video capture, the A/V
module/susbsystem does most of the work here.  Bandwidth could be an
issue if you're trying to capture uncompressed video, especially if you
have a less-than-sufficient hard disk.

I've captured full-screen NTSC with no dropped frames just by twiddling
the compression ratio a little.  I also have a 10k RPM 9GB drive, and
that is probably quite helpful in stuffing data to the disk.

I only have 32MB of RAM, so I think we can rule out a lack of RAM as an
issue - depending on how you're buffering/swapping.  I also have a 500MB
swap file, and that really seems to help.

> > 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.
> 

More RAM can't hurt, but in terms of video capture it doesn't seem to
help a great deal either.  My first suggestion, as Joshua aluded to, is
to check the disk.  Get bigger/faster disk and see if that helps.

-- 
Kurt
kurt at k-huhn.com