[TriLUG] Troubleshooting dropped frames with firewire and dvgrab

[T. Bryan]

For the archives....

I finally got back to this project, and I think that I've found a working 
solution.  I had considered using this issue as an excuse to buy a Mac Mini, 
but I just couldn't stand to give up on getting this working since I thought 
that it *should* work.  :)

On Sunday 20 August 2006 11:18, T. Bryan wrote:
> So, I finally bout a firewire card for my main Linux machine.  I'd like to
> download the video from my camcorder and burn some DVDs.  I've done some
> reading, so I have a pretty good idea of the process, but I'm running into
> a problem with dropped frames.

While DMA was enabled (checked it with hdparm), I think that the main issue 
was that 32-bit I/O and multi-sector I/O were both disabled.  Just making 
that change fixed most of my problems.  I was still seeing dropped frames 
from time to time, but it was much less of a problem.  Today, I rearranged my 
storage a bit....

> My machine is older, but it's not ancient.
> AMD Athlon 1 GHz
> 768 MB RAM
> Drives:
> The video is being stored to /dev/hda.
> /dev/hda 160 GB IDE, dmesg says UDMA(100)
> /dev/hdc 8 GB IDE, dmesg says UDMA(33)

I used to have swap on /dev/hdc.  I moved it /dev/hda, and now I can use 
/dev/hdc as a dedicated drive for capture from the firewire card.  I pulled 
about 30 minutes of video this afternoon without a single dropped frame.  

Now I just need to figure out how to create DVD menus.

---Tom