The Power and the Pain

[elfs]

Wow, when Omaha gets cool she gets way cool. While the initial frustrations with the now motherboard she bought for my computer were substantial, it is now a power tool of great proportion. Last night while hacking around in my junk box I found a card and said, "Hey, what's this?"

It's an IEEE1394 interface card. I'm not sure where it came from. I remember Shaterri gave me a handful of cards once upon a time when he was cleaning out his closets in preparation for moving down to California. I managed to find the cable for our old video camera too. After installing the card and rebuilding my kernel (a serious pain in the neck task because neither the sound nor the video card drivers are in the build, meaning I have to install them by hand at the end of every major rebuild), I plugged it all together and watched as I transferred down seven minutes of Kouryou-chan when she was just a few months old.

Seven minutes of film at double television resolution requires nine gigabytes of diskspace!

Here's hoping that after running it through the mpeg compression routines it's a lot smaller! It would be neat to have VCD collections of our family albums; there are plenty of DVD players out there that understand the VCD format.

Except (and here's the "pain" part)-- my CD-R/W, which was so faithful under the old system, has burned three coasters in a row. I'm getting distraught. I'm hoping that it was a combination of the disk type (a cheap pheno brand) and the fact that I was foolishly running X and lots of other things during the burn. I mean, I had to bail out of X when I had a P2-266 to get a reliable burn, but I'm running an Athlon/2700 now!

It's an old 2x burner, a Yamaha brand that Y doesn't even supply the drivers for anymore. I'm hoping it hasn't died on me. The other (more terrifying) possibility is that with all of the cards in the box, including the GForce4, and five drives, I'm straining the 350 watt power supply into unreliable territory.

I started a burn before I left for work this morning-- Maxcell disks, inittab 3, no X. If that doesn't work, I'll try one last time with the speed dropped to 1x. After that... *sigh*. Dunno.

---

The initimitable technoshaman asked us what music we like that nobody would suspect us of liking. Okay, well, I'm going to confess: Lawrence Welk. Yes, that's right, ladies and gentlemen, right here on our stage, with the champagne bubbles and the elegant dancers and the too-right tuxedo. My uncle used to watch it for hours and for some reason the world of Welk was so different from where I was living that it had a mysterious, compelling quality to it.

Comments

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

The problem is probably buffer underruns. No matter how fast your system is, if its busy for long enough for the burner to run out of buffer, and it's an old drive without BurnProof or some similar tech, it's going to burn a coaster. It's possible that adding the low latency and such patches to your kernel would help. On the other hand, a burner with BurnProof will never have this problem, and can be gotten for about $40. (all new drives come with some such tech, it's just a matter of making sure it'll work with cdrecord/cdrdao).

Oh, and having run such a system (more drives, actually, unless you mean 5 hard drives) on a 300W P/S, I can say that you're probably not straining it.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Err, I've a 4x HP burner on my Duron 1GhZ, and it burns VERY reliably.... never drops below 95% buffer, etc. This smells like either a P/S or a drive problem...

Five drives and a GeForce 4 Hawg? Ummm, yeah.

Just a tidbit, don't know if it has anything to do with anything... make sure your CPU fan is plugged into a 12V Molex, rather than into the motherboard. Unless the fan is a Stock AMD, that much power off the M/B bus can make the whole thing unstable. Taking it directly from the 12V's fixes the issue; you can get adapters with the "yellow" strobe wire that'll plug into the M/B so you can monitor the speed...

but CPU speed itself shouldn't be a problem. We used to burn at 8X (in runlevel 3) on a P-400 four years ago. An AMD 2700 shouldn't even breathe hard burning *24x*, much less two.

As for Welk... used to watch him in my salad days, before I got into serious rock... as a kid I always wondered how he did that thing with his finger and mouth to imitate the champagne cork... :)

I betcha, being Norwegian and fond of the polka, he's rather popular amongst the older set in places like Ballard and Poulsbo...

Good night, sleep tight, and pleasant dreams to you
Here's a wish, and a prayer, that ev'ry dream comes true...

heh. That's been a long time. :)

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid that I can't rule out the possibility that the drive is getting old and tired. As I've heard it, the laser on many drives runs close to its power limit while writing, close enough that the life is reduced.

It's certainly worth checking the other details, and don't forget that ribbon cable, but that is an old drive, your machine should be able to cope easily with feeding enough data, and a modern faster CD-R drive makes a big difference.

As for video data, VCD runs at lower resolution than DVD, and the MPEG compression combines with that to make the data rate similar to an audio CD. It is possible to put DVD data and file-system on a CD, but many DVD players can't spin a CD fast enough to play data that fast.

If you want to use DVD-quality data and compression a CD should hold nine minutes of video for archiving.

Incidentally, VCD can store and play back still photos at about twice the resolution of video, but if you want dissolves, wipes, and other fancy transitions you can only do those by treating the photos as video, at the lower resolution.

[sillydragon.livejournal.com]

I'd suspect it's not buffer under-runs. I do 2x burns with an old Acer CD-RW drive on a 633Mhz P3 while running X and a bunch of other stuff and haven't burnt a coaster yet (well, one, but that was my own fault). I'd be inclined to suspect either the powersupply, or cheesy media. Why is the powersupply such a terrifying thing? They're readily available...?

It's very unlikely it's the power supply...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

That is, assuming the power supply is ACTUALLY a 400-watt supply.

If it's a generic, no-name PS, insert an o between the other two letters, and multiply the number on the side by 80% for safety.

I know, I swapped from a 350 to a 450 when I got a dual-Athlon 1.4Ghz machine, and ended up swapping the 450 for... a name-brand 450. The 350 had been name-brand as well, and I actually had the chance to test them with a meter. The name-brand 350 put out almost as much wattage as the generic 450 did. The generic 450 turned out to have a peak rating on the generic, not a constant rating like the name-brand 450.

But, for PS requirements... I have 3 HD's, a DVD drive, and a CD-RW drive, along with a medium-power 3D card running off my 450 without problem, on a dual-1.4Ghz Athlon system, so a 450 would likely be moderate overkill for your system, but don't discount the power supply.

My honest bet though? Old drive, no burn-proof, so having an Athlon 2700 or a Pentium/MMX 200 doesn't matter. It's purely if your machine can give it the data when it wants it, where it wants it, Right Now. Even having it on a cable with another drive if they're both IDE could mess up a drive without burn-proof, even if said IDE drive is completely idle the entire time. I've had that happen personally before, wrong combination of drive, burner, and motherboard. :-P

Might just need to get a newer CD-RW drive. And don't be afraid to get one of the bulky external drives, they're just USB or IEEE1394 adapters with an internal drive mounted in them, and I've found they can often be cheaper than the exact same model of internal drive.