dvgrab-0.81 testing results

[Bernhard S. <bs...@gm...>]

Hallo Arne,

I've played with your new dvgrab-0.81 and tested the resulting AVI under
Win98 and w2k.

My system: Athlon 700, 192MB ram, Maxtor 60GB EIDE HD, ExSys 6500,
Sony TRV310E (Pal)

w2k:
Type-1 playes with media player but it has a lot of problems playing it realtime.
AVIs recorded under Windows I can play realtime without any jumps in the playback
in 352x288 (or whatever resolution the CoDec really uses, but it's quarter Pal res.).

The dvgrab AVI often jump within the first playback. Playing back it more times (so
the short 300 frames AVI is in the cache) it plays correctly. So it looks like the
format is a bit different to the "expected" format.

Type-2 even plays with the media player (without sound of course) but also with
some jumps in the first playback. The properties say it has a length of 13.6 but it
only has 12 seconds (300 frames). And also the sound type is told to be 44.1 KHz
with 16 bit and mono! The original was 48 KHz, 16 bit and stereo.

Copying the Type-2 AVI with VirtualDub (with direct stream copy) the file gets
shorter (43246 KB to 43327 KB) and now has the correct length (12 sec.).

Sending back the files to camera using DVIO I had success with the original Type-1
AVI and the VDub-copied one. Playing the dvgrab-Type2 AVI it stops within the
playback and skips some frames to get back into sync.

win98SE:
playing files with media player is no problem. And even playing back them to the
camera is neither a problem with Type 1 nor with Type 2.

So for me it looks like either a problem with my system under w2k (HD performance)
or a problem with the DV codecs. I've installed the Adaptec DV-CoDec under w2k
but haven't done this under win98SE.

Using benchmark tools to get the HD performance I get the same results under w2k
and win98 (over 9MB/s for read and write) so normally this shouldn't be a problem.
And w2k tells me that it's using DMA access for the HD and the benchmark tells me
that the CPU load is between 2% and 6% depending on the HD used. This is equal
for w2k and win98.

BTW I'm using the original ms-dv driver under w2k and win98se with the upgrade for
win98se from MS (243174up.exe). w2k also has an installed ulead video studio 3
version.

Greetings
	Bernhard