dyne:bolic Video Recording with the Pinnacle DC10+ (Zoran)

This is a page in progresss. I'm setting up a computer to be a part-time video digitizer, using the dyne:bolic Linux CD.

System: Compaq SR1620NX (MSI mobo with ATI XPress 200 chipset)
Video card: Pinnacle DC10+ (formerly Miro), uses the Zoran chipset and driver.
OS: dyne:bolic live cd.

I'm using dyne because I was unable to find a copy of Pinnacle Studio 8 on the internet. Studio 8 is the package that has an XP-compatible driver for the DC10+. They were selling Studio 10. dyne:bolic looked like an alternative.

First, install the video card in the first free PCI slot. I've had problems with this card in later slots for some reason. Probably some IRQ conflicts.

To view some video use the xawtv tool.

If the video shows up gray, you may need to right click on the video window, and then switch the TV norm to NTSC.

You can also save this into your ~/.xawtv file as:

(You must have a dyne:bolic "nest" home directory to do this. If you're on another linux, don't worry about a nest.)

To record video, use the lavrec utility.

First cd /home/luther, the mount point for your nest. Don't work in /root, which is the nominal $HOME.

Try this command:
lavrec -a 0 -d 2 -g 640x480 -q 100 -i n test.avi

-a 0 means no audio recording. -d 2 means "decimation" of 2, meaning remove every other column or row of pixels, resulting in a 1/4 frame recording. (For some reason, I can't record at full size.) -g 640x480 is a default DC10+ size. -i n means record from NTSC Composite (the default).

Then, use the avidemux2 app to view the video (the file's in /home/luther).

You might want to close xawtv while you do this, because if you don't it'll flicker.

There's another app pia that can also preview the video, but it seems to squash the video when you use a decimation of 1.

This following command will record the whole frame. The quality may suffer a bit, with glitchyness.

lavrec -a 0 -d 1 -g 640x480 -q 90 -i n test.avi

Space

Because dyne:bolic doesn't give you real write access to the big hard disk, you'll need some kind of external storage for more space. It will have to be formatted as a VFAT disk, because nobody still trusts the NTFS driver's read-write performance.

I used an external drive box based around a USB/FireWire-ATA adapter by Prolific.

The problem crops up when you try to write to disk. USB2 doesn't seem to be fast enough to handle recording to disk. Lots of frames are lost. I tried the FireWire port. A little sleuthing in /proc revealed that the FireWire was being connected via USB2. I guess that's OK, but the overall latency seemed to kill things. (I'll try a FireWire card eventually.)

I tried, later, to enlarge the nest to 600 MB, hoping to record more frames. No such luck. The recordig froze after 1.2 seconds, and resumed several seconds later, losing several hundred frames.

A Second Hard Drive

I added a second hard drive, and now, recording to it works great. No dropped frames. The hard drive was formatted as FAT32, but with a 64K block instead of the default 4K block. Supposedly, a larger block results in less fragmentation and seeking on the drive. I tend to think it just forces longer writes, and less communication overhead. For every 64k of data, there's only one block dumped rather than sixteen.

The hard drive showed up at /mnt/hd2.

Note: I had to add the second disk because my main disk was a NTFS drive, and dyne won't write to NTFS. It might be possible to record to your main disk if it is FAT32.

Sound

Had a hard time adjusting the levels for the sound. The vid cam has a line level output, and you have to adjust your line level input to work right. Start up the dyne control panel, and fire up the Soundcard utility. This will put the ALSA system between you and your card. Then, fire up audacity and start recording from yoir source. Keep the levels low.

Then, quit audacity and use lavrec to make a video. The following line will record a "YouTube" size video with 8-bit sound:

lavrec -d 2 -a 8 -R l -U blas.avi