From: Daddy on
Christopher Muto wrote:
> Ron Hardin wrote:
>> Recording Limbaugh today, two Inspirons (a 1200 and a 2200) running
>> real producer (real audio's free encoders of audio) both went beserk,
>> taking 100% of the CPU at highest priority.
>>
>> Very strange. It's been working perfectly unattended for many years,
>> recording and saving noon-3pm in nicely dated files M-F every week.
>>
>> What's different about today (Friday?)
>>
>> One thing is that the last 25 bits of the "unix" time, and hence XP
>> time, rolled over to zero.
>>
>> It's very likely that real producer uses a 24 bit local time.
>>
>> The rollover happened at 17:40:16 GMT, to the minute the same as the
>> encoding time locked up in the one visible window.
>
> it is streamed in flash and windows media player format too. didn't
> know that anyone still used real player.

Just my opinion, but Real Player could have been a champion, as could
have been Rhapsody...instead Real shot themselves in the foot with a
player that had a huge footprint and trampled on users privacy.

Daddy
From: William R. Walsh on
Thank you for saying that! ;-)

William


From: William R. Walsh on
Hi!

> Recording Limbaugh today

Did you consider the source material? (cue instant rimshot) -- sorry,
couldn't resist.

;-)

In all seriousness, every account I ever heard of someone using Realproducer
suggested that it just wasn't very good software... Of course, most of those
were running on some Linux distribution.

If it's worked for you, and the regular suspects (driver updates, software
updates, Windows updates, etc) seem to check out, I wonder if there was some
anomaly in the source material that represented an "impossible problem" for
the encoder to handle and it just flew into a loop trying to make some sense
of it. Is the source something like a radio tuner? Could it have been some
experiment in copy protection?

William


From: Ron Hardin on
William R. Walsh wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> > Recording Limbaugh today
>
> Did you consider the source material? (cue instant rimshot) -- sorry,
> couldn't resist.
>
> ;-)
>
> In all seriousness, every account I ever heard of someone using Realproducer
> suggested that it just wasn't very good software... Of course, most of those
> were running on some Linux distribution.
>
> If it's worked for you, and the regular suspects (driver updates, software
> updates, Windows updates, etc) seem to check out, I wonder if there was some
> anomaly in the source material that represented an "impossible problem" for
> the encoder to handle and it just flew into a loop trying to make some sense
> of it. Is the source something like a radio tuner? Could it have been some
> experiment in copy protection?
>
> William

That it happened at the same time on two machines, one encoding 8.5kb and the other 11.5kbs,
at the exact time (to the minute) that the 32-bit one-second time rolled over its last 25
bits, suggests it has to be a simple bug.

One machine put out a diaganostic from the encoder that the system load was high and it was
dropping to a target rate of 000, which I put down retrospectively to a division that didn't
work, suggesting the bit rollover gets into the computation somehow. Say they simply use
less than the full 32 bits of the time.

The other machine doubtless put out the same thing but I couldn't get it to unblank the
screen. Real encoder was taking 100% of the cpu at some insanely high priority.

I use real audio because the low quality 8.5kbs audio is pretty good and takes less than
4mb/hr (6mb/hr for low quality but decent music at 11.5kbs); and for historical reasons now,
since I started saving real-encoded radio programs in '98.
--
rhhardin(a)mindspring.com

On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.