SGI: Video

Octane Impact Compression

scottE
From Homer, not so close to super Indian Food
Who joined July 14, 2003, 12:20 p.m.

Wrote the following at Jan. 20, 2014, 12:46 p.m...

So, it seems there's an at least an occasional issue with using an Octane compression board on a system with more than a certain amount a RAM (one GB?); the system it's installed in currently has 2 GB. (Though sometimes it works, sometimes it just stops everything.)

Since it's not possible to just turn off banks o' DIMMs (per viewtopic.php?f=3&t=16728287 ), is it possible to constrain how much ram is available to a command (dmrecord &c.) invoked from the shell? Or does this just not matter?

(Why not just physically remove the RAM? It's a pain. And I really have nowhere safe to put it. And I think I really need to squeeze all of the toys into one single physical box, simplify my life into that, and call it good. Right now, I've got capabilities spread between basically two boxes, and I'd like to consolidate. If possible.)

Scott Elyard cgfx.us
:Octane2:

Sarcosuchus_imperator :Octane:

Liopleurodon :Indigo2:

Carcharodon :Indy:

Helicoprion :Indigo:

Paradoxides

vishnu
Donor
From Minneapolis, Minnesota USA
Who joined March 18, 2007, 3:25 p.m.

Wrote the following at Jan. 20, 2014, 9:16 p.m...

How are you using dmrecord? What command line options? Like, if you're recording 30 seconds of video you should be able to easily see how much RAM it's grabbing by running top in a terminal window, at a fast refresh rate. Make sure top is only showing processes running under your user ID to make it easier to see what dmrecord is doing.

Project:
Temporarily lost at sea...
Plan:
World domination! Or something...

recondas
Moderator
From NC - USA
Who joined June 6, 2004, 5:55 p.m.

Wrote the following at Jan. 21, 2014, 5:11 a.m...

scottE wrote: So, it seems there's an at least an occasional issue with using an Octane compression board on a system with more than a certain amount a RAM (one GB?); the system it's installed in currently has 2 GB. (Though sometimes it works, sometimes it just stops everything.)

From the information in this thread it sounded like the issue with the OCO and RAM came down to the size, type or brand of memory installed.

In that thread bigD wrote: I finally got around to playing with this more, and this morning I gave it a workout using dmrecord. It *generally* works just fine, but still seemingly crashes at random intervals. I'll play a clip back perfectly one time, but the system will go down if I immediately try to play it again.

All I had installed were two 1GB Dataram sticks, so I removed those and took my system down to 1.25GB using the various 256MB and 128MB sticks I still have laying around. And lo and behold, I can't get the system to crash anymore. I've recorded gigs of video, played it back over and over again, tried different compression settings and methods, and everything just works. ::knock on wood::

So it appears that at least in my case, the compression option doesn't like the 1GB sticks of Dataram memory. Perhaps it just doesn't like higher capacity memory at all - I dunno. That might be what lead people to think that it wouldn't work with more than 2GB installed - you'd need 1GB or 512MB sticks to accomplish that (I don't have any 512MB modules to test with).

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