H
Harry Putnam
Has anyone here ever been able to run canopus DVStorm2 card with an
K8V mobo (VIA K8T800 chipset)
K8V mobo (VIA K8T800 chipset)
P
Paul
Harry Putnam <[email protected]> said:
I take it that means you didn't get it to work.
Have you tried disabling as many peripherals on the
motherboard as you can ? Maybe if enough of the other
crap is out of the way, the resources the card needs
will be available.
What are the current symptoms when you use the card ?
Is it a particular operation that causes a failure,
or just general use ?
Paul
H
Harry Putnam
Yes, and jumping around in different slots. Jumping slots is somewhat
limited since the DVStorm2 card is very long. There are only maybe 3
slots where it will fit without interfering with something.
A particular operation... but before we get into diagnostics:
First let me say that I've walked through a number of tests with
Canopus Tech dept. (The DVStorm2 is a canopus product). They already
had been aware of a problem with the K8T800 chip and the DVStorm2
chip.
Not to mention a general problem with newer athlons.
On the Canopus forums, I got several people helping me try different
things. One of them had a similar setup but a different mobo. No one
had heard of a known running setup with DVSTorm2 and K8T800 chip.
As to symptom:
After installing DVStorm2 card. When I start Edius (Canopus NLE
(non-linear video editing) tool, all goes well until I try to play a
clip on the timeline. At that point I get a full blown crash where
even video disappears or one where nothing works but video remains
visible. In either case no further progress is possible.
Oddly enough I can pull the timeline cursor around with mouse and scan
thru the clip... But cannot play it.
One thing I was told to check was .. (ack can't think of the technical
terminology now) but it is the timing adjustment that sets wait period
between resource calls. (Done in Bios) Needs to be set to 64 and
when checked it was so set.
After trying the tests suggested by Canopus tech and fellow users
(Including several ways to do what you mentioned)
there was a general consensus that I was the victim of a known
incompatability.
Canopus were willing to refund my purchase, but I decided to keep the
DVStorm2 and build a known working setup around it. I was needing a
second editing station anyway.
My post here was one last attempt to make sure there wasn't someone
out there who has gotten the two to work together.
P
Paul
Harry Putnam <[email protected]> said:
I guess playing the clip means simultaneous disk access, plus DMA
transfers to various cards. Does playing the clip go to the 1394
port on the DVStorm2 ? I would have thought playing a clip would
tend to just use disk, processor, and video card. But maybe Canopus
does decoding on the DVStorm2, in which case data would go in and
out of the DVStorm2 while playing.
That "64" setting was probably the PCI Latency Timer. When there
are issues of fairness on the bus (where a real time card cannot
get data when it is needed, due to a greedy storage device doing
bursts), sometimes reducing that setting makes a difference. A
high PCI Latency Timer setting is used by performance freaks who
like a high RAID array benchmark, but doing so can cause fairness
issues for other hardware. Typically the sound card would be a
victim of a high PCI Latency Timer setting. On older chipsets,
where PCI was used to connect Northbridge to Southbridge, and to
PCI peripherals, if you use a really low setting, the desktop
slows to a crawl - I don't know if modern chipsets still exhibit
those symptoms or not. That is the other extreme with the Latency
Timer.
In your rec.video.desktop posting, you mention that Device Manager
only has one entry for the DVStorm2. You would think if the
card has a Firewire port on it, that there would be a PCI bridge
on the DVStorm2, that connects multiple PCI devices to the
PCI edge card connector. It seems a little strange that other
devices don't show up in Device Manager.
I don't know if you've tried this experiment, but I'd try loading
the clip onto your PATA drive, instead of SATA, on the off-chance
that the PATA connection to the chipset bus doesn't use PCI.
(Maybe it is bridged to the bus between Northbridge and
Southbridge via a different path than the PCI bus.)
Another experiment you could try, is loading the clip on another
computer, and pulling the disk data through Ethernet. That would
eliminate the disk ports from interfering with bus traffic, but
introduce the Ethernet as a source of interference.
Canopus tech support must know what aspects of theit card are
demanding. I.e. Whether it has strict real time requirements,
needs access to the bus every x microseconds and so on. A
PCI card should have some provision to detect a data underrun
when it is doing something real time, in which case an error
dialog should show up indicating that the bandwidth balance isn't
sufficient. (A Nebula Digitv card someone was posting about here,
had a hot key you could press while watching TV, that would
indicate the degree of bus loading, as a debugging tool for
customer problems with the product.)
There was one other problem like this posted a while back,
where a certain Via Firewire chip and possible a Via RAID
chip, would result in dropped frames during 1394 capture. If
the disk target for the capture was a single PATA drive, the
frame loss disappeared. It could be that there is a similar
problem involved here, and it is either unfairness on the
PCI bus, or a driver staying too long at interrupt level,
preventing another interrupting piece of hardware from
getting service in a timely manner. With enough experiments,
you may nail down the offending party.
I would start with a stripped down machine, just the DVStorm2
and onboard audio, for example. Put the DVStorm2 in slot 4,
where it has its own hardware interrupt signal (or so the
manual claims). Place clip on PATA IDE drive and play the
clip from there.
Good luck,
Paul
H
Harry Putnam
About which port... You can set that to ohci 1394 or dvstorm. In fact
it only happens when storm is selected. I'm not sure what all happens
inside the card but its main calling card is a realtime output. In to
edit/out to monitor in realtime.
Yup
[...] Snipped informative discussion
Yeah that puzzled me too. But I've since learned that is normal from
other users.
What is a `PATA' drive?
I thought about getting around it all by just installing the DVStorm
on an accessable Intel Celeron. Using the gigabit ethernet tools,
doing the editing on the Athlon(the problem machine). I'm told it can
work but would be a whole new way of setting stuff up. And to tell
the truth, I hate those beatings my wife gives me when I mess up her
computer (The celeron)
.[...]
Thanks for an informative response. I'm afraid the necessary
sophistication for further testing is missing here...
I've pretty much given up unless I hear from someone who knows this
can work. Hence the post here. Its taking too much time away from
getting other work done.
I'm having a box built around the DVStorm
Intel 3.4ghz (478 socket)
2Gb ram
Asus P4C800E-Deluxe (Very popular with DVStorm users
But will still have lots of editing power on the athlon too. I
suspect I'll get the two onboard gigabit ethernet capabilities into
play too.
The athlon has no problems with Premiere Pro and onboard 1394 capture/
editing etc. and with a 1/2 dozen Adobe pkgs its still formidable as
editing station. (Not heavy professional work)