CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

[racerxnet]

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Oliverg,

Quit your whining. From a technical perspective and programming at the kernel level, you do not know squat. Hard drive speeds are measured to have peak read/write and sustained read write as well. Just the same as firewire and USB. I did many measured read/write and bios mods on the Promise and 3ware raid cards several years ago. Always looking for more sustained speed for my NLE rig. Newer firewire speeds have the capability of providing 1080 output without a problem.

I have over 15 years experience in programming, both at the kernel level and user level. So don't think I do not understand the limitations of throughput. You go read your fanboy site, I'll keep writing code.

[oliverg]

racernetx - lol - you obviously don't know 'squat', I've actually gone through this exercise and witnessed these issues first hand with about 10 clients this year alone - even aratax agreed with my main points! - everything he wrote is SPOT on in his last post. Its all about maintaining the integrity of a high bandwidth bitstream without interuption - SATA/PATA/RAID is a far more optimal method. USB/FW devices are toys.

Anyway, if you want to dream your dreams, go right ahead - use FW/USB and suffer from substandard HTPC performance! All you people that think you can use a toy interface for your toy htpcs are living in cloud cuckoo land - go and actually TRY it before you come here and spout your theoretical bull$hit.

Perhaps you should learn something about how hardware works in the real world?

[racerxnet]

Hey Oliverg,

Would you like a little cheese with that whine??

I've written more device drivers than you will ever know. This at a level you will not be able to understand from a hardware perspective. Enough said to a 13 year old fanboy with limited knowledge.

[oliverg]

hey racernetx - grow up - see definition of wanker above

if i had such limited knowledge, why did aratax end up agreeing with me?

[oliverg]

[QUOTE=racerxnet]Hi Oliver,

I thought I might provide an engineers perspective on software/hardware design and limitations to expect. When you are looking at throughput design, one has to understand what you are trying to accomplish. In this case it is to play back HD content from a external drive. Whether it is USB 2.0 or firewire 800 and above, one should test the read state of the drive for the intended use. In this case as stated, we are concerned about the max bitrate that Blue Ray and HD-DVD are capable of. I believe it is 50 MB and 35 respectively. Neither formats will have a (constant bit rate)CBR. Any novice Videophile who does NLE work will know this and will use VBR to encode the disk. This happens with HD content as well.

Once we have an understanding of the throughput, we can determine the proper device for sustained delivery of the media. In this case firewire 800 has a peak of 90 MB/s. As stated it will not always be capable of this in the real world, but neither does the disk require 50MB (BlueRay) constantly. Keeping the figures in mind and you see that Firewwire 800 approaches ATA 133 and surpasses it with firewire 1600 and above. When I hacked and wrote software drivers for software raid, the throughput was actually slower than firewire 800. I have better than $100,000 dollars in audio and video equipment and have used firewire extensively for film transfer and viewing on my CRT blend via my HTPC. Is it my choice always? No. Only when viewing the final output before burning to disk. Does it stutter? No.

Times have changed since then and technology will always find a better and faster way to do things. Some times it works, sometimes not. I am not writing this to convince you or any others for that matter. What does matter is that the technical engineering and standards are developed for a purpose. And it does apply to all that we use, whether it is an appliance or HTPC. I was involved in the hacking of the Apex DVD players with OFFA and the ESS based chipset. Soldered on a SDI output on the Apex as well for shits and giggles. They (SDI module) can be bought from Moomie for a reasonable price. Oh well, external drives will continue to move forward in speed.

Many have stated that a software blend on a HTPC could not be done. It has been done with VLC and I have since wrote a blend program for a single card application and a cluster which is scalable. I am running 2 8500's for the blend with 2 Nvidia 3000G cards. Pictures are posted on this site.

I wish you luck and I have no more time to present the facts and engineering. It has been done and will continue to be done with external drives and NAS boxes. Try to be a little more open minded in responding to others when you post. A closed mind will never learn very much.

Best of luck and most important is to have fun

MAK[/QUOTE]

Racerxnet, my mind is hardly closed. I have seen first hand the inadequacies of USB - instead of accusing me of being a 13 year old fanboy with no experience, try to take a more open view yourself. You obviously have never tried what we were discussing in the thread or you would have seen the same issues - without doubt - they are well documented.

Telling me that I'm whining when I'm merely trying to discuss some issues openly merely suggests to me that you are the very thing you accused me of being.

There's a reason why USB isn't used as a form of primary drive storage - from an engineering/manufacturing perspective, the cotrollers are much simpler and cheaper.

Also, we weren't talking about the later versions of FW/USB - the issue in particular was Phil's HTPC - which is only USB2. In any case, the consensus is clear, if a choice had to be made between USB/FW or sata/pata/raid the people that know what they are doing would choose the later. You are just arguing for the sake of it.

I am well aware of the peak bandwidth requirements of BR etc but there is a lot more going on behind the scenes (events which cause jitter and interuption to the bitstream - especially if something causes CPU utilization to peak out) If you really understand the structure of PC architecture you wouldn't be arguing from a just a software perspective and mouthing off as to how I don't know what I'm doing. A dedicated appliance only has to do one thing - a PC has many forms of low and high level overheads (software and hardware) and they can interfere with particular types of devices - more so to USB/FW and less so to SATA/PATA.

Why do you think no-one puts a paging file on a USB drive?

[Axatax]

[madpoet]

Funny... I have been bleeding edge HTPC for years. I guarantee I was light years ahead of most of you last year when I wrote the hacked together guide for doing BD and HD DVD playback on the same machine, back when it was REALLY hard to do I think I was possibly the first person to actually do it. And I still wouldn't piss and moan at each other like you all are doing.

I use FW800 enclosures all the time for archived MPEG2, HD DVD, and BD images. Works fine. You guys go right ahead and get all crazy if you want to, but I'll just keep using my "toy" solution on my "toy" HTPC.

[racerxnet]

The last post from OliverG regarding this matter was sent privately at AVS which he copied and posted here. It was done this way to keep the noise level down to a minimum. Unfortunately, Oliver could not give up his position when confronted with the facts, and certainly looks like a child when posting private messages never intended to be open. Not running around to other forums and pasting private messages.

It was Phil who was looking for a solution, as we all are for our ideas. This is what the forum is about, solutions to a dilemma. Others have stated their successful results with USB and Firewire. If it does not work, it is knowledge gained for all. I would rather fail 100 times and be successful once at times. I have gained 100 times the knowledge from those failures.

To Oliverg:

I am sorry this turned out this way. I have no hard feelings towards you.
All are friends.

MAK


P.S. Madpoet,

Bleeding edge is a 1960's 1100 cubic inch Abrams army tank motor mounted in a pulling tractor. V8 - 4 valves per cylinder - all aluminum. Runs like sh*t though.

[drice1234]

cheap htpc

[oliverg]

[turbospeed]

i think this article could prove to be interesting.
http://www.hardware.info/en-UK/articles/am9nY2pqZA/ATI_and_nVidia_crush_highend_DVD_players/

[Mark_A_W]

Except DVD players are about as useful these days as a Beta Video machine.

[james69]

you obviously havent seen my player... it passes all the tests with flying colors

there are still a lot of people out there using dvd players ...... a lot more than people using beta tape players

if your statement were true mark_a_w then how do you explain the sales of dvd players and discs on amazon??? compared to other formats which number in the thousands there are millions of sales of dvd players and dvds themselves each week

[oliverg]

What's your player James69?