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December 23, 2005
woot
tentatively going to say that this is the end of my problems with the tv wonder elite.
(i'm at work right now and have to wait until i get home to actually try this.)
Posted by njahnke at 9:05 AM | Comments (0)
December 21, 2005
v5 est arrivé
the first thing i noticed about the new machine (well, other than the fact that it weighed thirty pounds) was that it was silent. and i don't mean quiet, i mean i couldn't even tell it was on when i was sitting three feet away from it. this is a radical change from my other computers, which all produce various levels of white, sometimes more greyish noise depending on their temperament at that particular moment. i thought that this must be why hp seems to be in love with amd - with intel you're unlikely to make a machine anyone in their right mind would ever call "quiet." (unless you're apple, anyway.)
the next thing that happened was that v4 (my old 1.1 ghz athlon) died. it was the damnedest thing - i was taking a disc out of the optical drive, and as the drive tray was retracting, it was as if the power was cut to the machine. the tray stood about two thirds of the way retracted, so i had to close it the rest of the way manually. i tried everything: plugging the machine in somewhere else, disconnecting the monitor and all the usb stuff, opening up the case and watching for dead fans, everything. no dice. it would turn on, but after two, maybe three seconds, it would go into what looked like a sleep or low power mode, with the power led still lit, yet none of the case buttons were responsive. i had to turn the power supply off to get it to turn off.
well, i thought ... v5 has no choice but to live up to the hype now!
so i dismantled both machines and transferred all my stuff over from v4 to v5. this included a floppy drive, my dvd burner, two maxtor 250 gig ata/133 disks, my old soundblaster live 5.1 and the new tv wonder elite. i was very impressed by hp's proprietary mounting system: you screw in the mounting screws on one side of the drive before you put the drive in, and then the drive slides down rails, and one of the screws is caught by a piece of green plastic that holds the drive in place. to remove the drive, you just lift up on the plastic catch and slide the drive out. because the case screws are also human-operable, this means that you can realistically do all kinds of work inside the computer without ever needing to touch a tool (except for some indoor plumbing or something to ground yourself first, of course).
i had to change the boot order in the bios (windoze kept trying to boot from v4's old c: drive and failing), but with that done, everything proceeded well. i tested out capture and dvd duplication and things looked good there, or at least as good as i expected them to ... v4's death is actually significant for at least one reason, that being that i as yet have not been able to capture pal properly using the new tv wonder elite. the problem is not that the card does not understand a pal signal; the problem is that i can't seem to change the output resolution of the card to anything other than 720x480 or (in ntsc mode) 720x240. this is unacceptable for pal, as the bottom (576 - 480) lines are cut off. i've tried asking in several places to get answers on this to no avail, but i'm still holding out for a solution lest i have to deal with returning the card and paying $200 more for a pci-x aiw (as explored in previous entries here).
luckily, i managed to capture the latest prince of persia run (pal) with v4 before it died. i'll have to rerecord and sync the audio, as the level mysteriously went up to several hundred percent higher than it was supposed to be about one third through the capture, but i'll take that over not being able to capture the run any day.
i've already packaged up the v4 motherboard and its agp aiw and addressed the box to radix, so he should get his "new" computer and capture assembly right after xmas. here's hoping it was the power supply that was bad and that i didn't just send him a dead motherboard ...
Posted by njahnke at 12:14 PM | Comments (5)
December 17, 2005
no change
just got the tv wonder elite. thought i would do some quick tests comparing it to the old aiw in v4 (my old 1.1 ghz athlon) before i get v5 (the new sda beast), which, incidentally, just shipped today, almost a week early. because the free printer i got with the computer arrived in two days (with free shipping) and now this, i am under the impression that hp is nimble, especially unbelievably so now during the height of the holiday season. then again, maybe i'm playing captain kirk to hp's scotty - they promise me a build date for the computer of 23 december, and then they ship it on the 17th. go miracle worker. anyway, here's hoping v5 comes before i leave for my parents' on the 24th; otherwise, i'll have to wait until i get back on the 27th to take it out of the box.
as for the tests, here's the old all-in-wonder and here's the new tv wonder elite. radix was able to distinguish that the gradient from black to blue on the left side of the image is smoother with the tv wonder elite, but with those filter settings on the tv wonder, it looks like i will be neither gaining nor losing any quality going to the new card. very good news, considering the plan b was $200 more expensive.
Posted by njahnke at 2:18 PM | Comments (0)
December 14, 2005
upgrade + tax
decided on the ati tv wonder elite instead of the 3x more expensive all-in-wonder. interesting about this card are two things: it supposedly has ati's latest tuner, which makes analog cable signals look like they came off of a dvd, and there are apparently mac drivers for it. perhaps i will be able to capture in os x on the new sda beast sooner rather than later.
i bought the card today from buy.com for $106.66 and the machine from hp for $1099.00 ($949.00 after rebates). full specs on the machine below:
HP Pavilion d4100e customizable Desktop PC
* - Microsoft(R) Windows(R) XP Home Edition with SP2
* - AMD Athlon(TM) 64 X2 4200+ dual-core - 2.2GHz
* - FREE UPGRADE from 512MB to 1024MB 400MHz (2x512)
* - 80GB 7200 rpm SATA Hard Drive
* - FREE UPGRADE from CD-RW to 16X DVD+/-R/RW
* - Front USB, FireWire IEEE 1394 and audio ports
* - NVIDIA GeForce 6200SE w/TurboCache 256MB support
* - Integrated 5.1 Capable Sound w/ front audio ports
* - HP Multimedia Keyboard, HP Optical Mouse
will be adding to it either two or three of my maxtor 250 gig ata/133 drives, my sony dru-710a dual layer burner, my soundblaster and the tv wonder elite. two of the maxtor 250s will form a raid 0, because i highly doubt that one of them by itself can serve the huffyuv fast enough to avoid becoming a bottleneck. (with the newly-released divx 6.1 it'll use both cores for a single job, increasing my encoding speed from amd 3400 to amd 8400.) operating systems will be windoze xp 64-bit and mac os x, as soon as they crack the release version of x86 tiger so that it runs on non-apple-blessed hardware.
Posted by njahnke at 11:32 PM | Comments (0)
December 11, 2005
the journey continues
ladies and gentlemen, it's upgrade time here at m2k2sda.
my roommate, rachel, has decided to take back her pc, which i have used for the past sixteen months or so to process all of the incoming material for the sites. i should probably give some background about how this situation arose.
when we were moving into the new apartment in august of 2004, it became clear to us that i was the one who needed the insane speed of her new pc, which she had just built with her parents' money. therefore, i traded with her, loaning her my old athlon 1.1 ghz for her athlon 64 3400+. i ended up upgrading the machine several times, giving it a second dvd writer and several 250 gig hard drives. i never really liked the thing, though, mostly because it wasn't mine, and because it had a few kooky hardware problems that i was never able to track down (it doesn't help when running the program inside a debugger stops it from crashing).
a few days ago, she announced that she had bought quake 4 and wanted her machine back to play it. i knew that my old pc is actually something like eight times slower than hers, meaning that it would take eight days to export a run that takes just over 24 hours to export now. it was time to kick my upgrade plans into high gear.
i had been saving since classes started this semester for a new "sda beast," but i had been planning on waiting until january or even later to actually buy it. i spent about an hour on the phone with my parents last night, and i was able to get them to push my graduation gift back from may to the present time, ensuring that i can buy the new machine now, and averting potential disaster as runs continue to come in at a rate that is certainly brisker than one per week.
but what should it be? dad was quick to point out that since 2004, prices on custom built brand-name units have continued to fall, but prices on individual parts (such as cpus) have not. we seem to have hit a wall where it's cheaper to buy a bare bones pc from hp or dell than to buy the exact same parts and assemble it yourself. he said that he thought it was because the "microsoft tax" the pc manufacturers pay has gone down so much, but to me the reason is irrelevant; i just wanted to know how i could get the most power for the least money.
and so i went to the hp site and customized a d4100e series pavilion, the highest powered one i saw with amd inside. (as anyone following the cpu wars knows, intel is not a good buy right now.) i selected the fastest cpu available, an amd 64 dual core 4200+. it came to about $1,100 after a buttload of rebates. i agreed to pay $400 of it, and my parents would shoulder the rest. but then i noticed something: there was no agp slot on this motherboard! my all-in-wonder capture card is agp ... so that meant either back to the drawing board or buying a new capture card.
luckily, it looks like i can get the all-in-wonder x800 xl (a pci express 16x card) for less than $150, and my parents also agreed to pay for it. because i'll be at my parents' around christmas, i decided to wait a few days to ensure that the new sda beast is not delivered during that time and has to wait in the cold for me to come home. thus, i'll have my first reports and captures from the new machine right at the end of the year. at this point i can only imagine what improvements the folks at ati have made to their all-in-wonders over the past two years.
incidentally, radix is probably the biggest winner in all of this: he gets my old 1.1 ghz athlon with motherboard and all-in-wonder. what's so special about that, you ask? well, if you weren't aware, he's currently using a 450 mhz computer ... a cd-rom drive that can't even read 700 mb discs ... and a capture device ... well, i wouldn't even call that thing a capture device. suffice to say that he's going to have a blast capturing his own awesome runs with my old hardware.
Posted by njahnke at 1:02 PM | Comments (8)