sda capture blog

the software is $80 us, but i'm using their free 14-day trial right now (a wise business decision on their part, to offer said trial -- who in their right mind would purchase such expensive software without definitive proof beforehand that it does what they want?). running windoze on my macbook before was never very productive, and mostly consisted of me playing civilization iv. i had virtually no space left on the cramped internal drive for it, and my 250 gig external drive is formatted hfs+, so windoze couldn't even read it. of course, with a virtual machine, the "drive" is just a file, making the host machine's filesystem irrelevant.

this situation (sda annexing the macbook) became necessary when i realized how vastly superior -- and therefore essential -- the mvbob() deinterlacing filter was to its alternatives. with v5 completely tied up making huffyuv new master files of the large amount of d1 f1 runs that have come in recently, i simply needed more cpu power to work on actually encoding those files v5 was creating, lest i find myself still working on the same runs two weeks later, while others continue to flood in.

the setup isn't perfect. for one thing, the parallels "network adapter" seen by windoze xp is only 10 megabaud. this means that the huffyuv compression is just not sufficient to get the d1 f1 file over the network from v5 fast enough to saturate the macbook's cpu. however, i'm seeing about 80% average cpu use on the macbook with d1 encodes, so that's really no big problem. also, because the machine can encode mq and lq (d4) stuff more quickly than the d1 hq and iq, the cpu use goes down for those jobs, the fans spin down, and the machine gets a network-bottleneck-supplied respite from the heat. i believe that this is important, because the model of macbook i own has been shown to have a heat problem coming from a thermal paste application oversight on apple's part. i would fix the paste, but i would void my applecare warranty.

here's a screenshot for your viewing pleasure. note that one of the two "c" drives mounted on the os x desktop is in fact the virtual machine's c: "drive" (as broadcast via smb). transferring files back and forth is made quite easy in this way.