[anderswk]

Hi,

first post

I noticed that my O2 hangs every time I try to record a compressed 640x480 movie using Media Recorder. Uncompressed 640x480 works fine and lower resolution compressed also work fine.

(edited)
Ok, it seems to crash whenever I use SGI JPEG and QuickTime JPEG A compression. I guess those are the HW accelerated codecs?

Has anyone else experienced this? I'm on 6.5.22 btw.

Thanks,
Anders

[gijoe77]

I haven't played with recording on the o2 in a long time, but it basically always sucked for everyone, freezing and dropped frames galore. You really need pro-gear (i.e Time based corrector or TBC) to reliably capture stuff with an o2, but its not all doom and gloom - people had much better results using command line vs Media recorder. Here are some old notes someone posted a while ago that I saved:

Code:

Someday this week a nightmare came true: I had to capture VHS stuff
using the O2. Since I no longer have a TBC, everyone who ever tried this
can imagine my horror.

However, I found a little trick to achieve a reasonable result. Note:
this worked with my setup (O2, consumer grade VHS recorder and a Sony
color corrector), maybe I was just lucky ;)


Anyway, here we go:

You need to have the video already running (this is important), so
rewind a bit.
Just before firing up dmrecord (I never use mediarecorder), have the
video panel/video input panel open. Turn off "VTR Mode", watch the
crappy image for a couple of seconds an then turn "VTR Mode" back on.
Run dmrecord and capture.

Results for my task: 12 drop frames for a total of 16622 frames. Not too
bad me thinks. Leaving "VTR Mode" on all the time just pushing play and
capturing gave me drop frame hell after maybe 20 seconds.

I got similar results with other video tapes I tried, even when there
were some fast low key/high key cuts - which usually won't work at all.


Maybe this just worked for me, maybe this is the way the O2's internal
TBC works, maybe I just had luck with my setup - anyway I'd be
interested in other people's results.

Ah yes, my dmrecord commandline looks like this:

02# dmrecord -p video,device=mvp,comp=jpeg,engine=ice,quality=95 -p
audio -I 75 -O 75 file.mv

I know capturing full PAL resolution makes no sense for VHS, but I was
too lazy to change the script ;)

[anderswk]

Thanks for the suggestion. I gave it a try, but it also locks up the machine.

I guess I just have a faulty ICE in my O2 :(

[55cancri]

You say that you record from camera, not VCR. Do you mean the digital O2-camera?
How much RAM does your O2 have? It should not be lower then 256MB for recording, I think.

I also tried to record from a Consumer grade VCR and of course it was crap ... also recording from consoles is difficult. N64 only showed a black screen and the PS2 dropped frames when switching scenes.

[gijoe77]

<QUOTE author="anderswk" post_id="2669" time="1534759331" user_id="329">

Thanks for the suggestion. I gave it a try, but it also locks up the machine.

I guess I just have a faulty ICE in my O2 :(

sounds like have the same kind of o2 everyone else has hah!

Another problem is disk speed - IMO having a fast dedicated external HDD (or even better 2 disk raid with external SCSI and PCI SCSI card) should help with capturing

<QUOTE author="55cancri" post_id="2674" time="1534766514" user_id="247">

I also tried to record from a Consumer grade VCR and of course it was crap ... also recording from consoles is difficult. N64 only showed a black screen and the PS2 dropped frames when switching scenes.

I recall It was noted by a bunch of people the o2 had a really hard time with level changes, i.e. video is dark and has flashing lights or quick cuts from very dark to very white, drop city galore

[anderswk]

<QUOTE author="55cancri" post_id="2674" time="1534766514" user_id="247">

You say that you record from camera, not VCR. Do you mean the digital O2-camera?
How much RAM does your O2 have? It should not be lower then 256MB for recording, I think.

I also tried to record from a Consumer grade VCR and of course it was crap ... also recording from consoles is difficult. N64 only showed a black screen and the PS2 dropped frames when switching scenes.

Yes, from the O2 cam. I have 1GB RAM, so that shouldn't be an issue.

Are there any other programs apart from dmrecord and mediarecorder that uses ICE hardware compression?

[radiance]

Hey,

There is a troubleshooting page at the AV center from stanford where they state that if the O2 they use locks up when trying to digitize video with HW JPEG compression, it's due to the AV card not being seated properly (bad connections) and they recommend to remove it and reinsert it propperly...

Here is the link to the page, read the troubleshooting section at the end:

<URL url="https://graphics.stanford.edu/lab/video/Tutorials/capture.html"><LINK_TEXT text="https://graphics.stanford.edu/lab/video ... pture.html">https://graphics.stanford.edu/lab/video/Tutorials/capture.html</LINK_TEXT>

and

<URL url="https://graphics.stanford.edu/lab/video/Equipment/moviola.html"><LINK_TEXT text="https://graphics.stanford.edu/lab/video ... viola.html">https://graphics.stanford.edu/lab/video/Equipment/moviola.html</LINK_TEXT>

Good luck!
Terrence

[rooprob]

Apparently these things were professionally used for many years, however all my attempts have been to the contrary /sarcasm. Basically put: O2s hang all too easily with video:

* immediately pressing the Camera's picture button (pretty much always)
* usually with non-TBC corrected VHS stream, including the output of a ZX Spectrum
* hardly ever when receiving TBC input - tried with 256, 512 and 1GB of RAM. Full PAL capture. No dropped frames. Yay!

Doesn't seem to matter whether I use MediaRecorder or dmrecorder. I bought a second AV card (newer rev) which made no difference.

Apparently
* 6.3 was more forgiving to lower quality nonTBC inputs - haven't tried this.
* 6.5 doesn't really fix anything, other than making inputs more sensitive to TBC

My theory - or what I like to think is happening:
You may know the ICE and the CPU are basically two separate CPU units between a third - CRIME - and are all able to DMA to each other via RAM. Something goofs up during a ICE process, and control doesn't transfer correctly back to the main CPU, giving you the impression that the system is hung. On one occasion I must have had audio set to Monitor - the sound was still streaming out of my source, though the mouse/keyboard/screen had all "locked up". Something was still alive... but a powercycle was required.

Ultra-frustrating and completely saps my patience now I'm used to ubiquitus stability and practically instant on computing. I tried to take on the yak shave of a Linux/*BSD implementation, as the IRIX one is hidden behind the dmedia library abstraction, but that's a road to pain.

I may try some of the tips shown above, in case there is some hope.

[anderswk]

So I managed to get my O2 to capture MJPEG compressed video without any system freezes.

Apparently the reason my system froze was memory related.  I had eight sticks of 128MB, where two were an older type, maybe the RAM the system originally came with, and the remaining six were newer Kingston modules.  After removing the two old sticks, the problems with the O2 hanging went away.

So it seems, at least in my case, that the problem was that the memory modules were not identical.

[gijoe77]

very interesting - I'll have to make a note of that