DVGRAB/XDVPLAY testing

[Mark K. <mk...@co...>]

Arne,
   In a private message from James Goodwin, we were talking about Windows
platforms and testing. It made me think that maybe there is a better way to
do some of this. I'm thinking that it make sense to build up a small library
(small in number of files, not necessarily number of MBytes) of video clips
for people to try out on various platforms for test purposes? Each clip
would be maybe 30-60MB. We would want to have some standard clips that have
been run under Windows to test under Linux, and some that we generate under
Linux that folks could test under Windows.
 
   My Windows box here at work is an NT 4.0, SP 5, 300MHz Pentium II Compaq.
I don't think this platform necessarily makes much difference if it works or
not. There is a lot of software that doesn't run well on NT. It's just one
datapoint.
 
   James was pointing out, and I agree, that Win 2K or Win 98SE would be far
more typical of the best drivers and codecs for this sort of data.
Unfortunately I don't have one of those platforms here at work.
 
   One the other hand, I do have high-speed connections at both work and
home, and personally wouldn't mind downloading specific clips to do some
short tests. I'll bet there are others out there who could do the same
thing. If we could build up a small group of folks who could cover each of
the individual platforms, and a library of current video clips, then we
could probably test this stuff better, faster and much more comprehensively.
 
   Additionally it would give us all access to both NTSC and PAL data which
isn't easy for all of us to get.
 
   I'm talking to my IT folks to see if we could donate a GB or so of disk
space for something like this, but if you or someone else has space
available, we could do it there. 
 
   I have suspicions that something like this must exist out on the web
somewhere, but buried under the avalanche of XXX stuff I ran into today I
wouldn't know how to find it.
 
   Comments?
 
Mark