The Power and the Pain
Jun. 5th, 2003 10:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsWow, 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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2003-06-05 12:06 pm (UTC)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.