[ExtractStream] Random SplitStream Thoughts...

[Roger Merchberger]

--- Josh Harding <theamigo42@y...> wrote:
> --- Roger Merchberger <zmerch7@y...> wrote:
> > Boy - now doesn't that *just* *plain* *suck*. You'd think there
> could
> > be an environment variable that'd give installed memory & amount
> > used, or somesuch...
> 
> That wouldn't really be very helpful. Say you check and find that
> the
> system has 16M of real RAM free. You malloc() all 16M. Then, 6
> microseconds later, another program malloc()s 8M. Something's
> going to swap.

Well, for the way I plan on modifying SplitStream, I'll be able to
dynamically allocate from 128K to 12.8Meg - most folks who would have
a problem with <16Meg allocation, usually use their computer for
single tasks anyway, and if the program could somehow *know* that it
would start hammering the swap, it would be nice if it could
"throttle" it's memory usage... Without knowing if there's plenty of
RAM available, it'll happily chew up swap & slow the whole process
down slower than if it wouldn't have used more than the original
128K.

'Course, it would also be nice if word processors wouldn't hog a
coupla-hundred Megs for the stupid ^*%&^#$%@$ paperclip...

So much for the good old days... "Swap file? What's that? 64K is
enough for me..." ;-) Guess I'll harken back to my days of youth,
when one could tell Basic09 how much ram (in K) to use... I'm
reworking the command line args again anyway, I'll just stick in a
parameter for max. # of tystreams blocks to use at a time, and if the
user specifies too much, sux 2 B him/her...

> I'm still a little confused as to why everyone splits a tyStream
> into
> separate a/v files and then merges them back. It seems to only
> introduce sync problems. Granted, I've only done a couple shows,
> but
> using TyConvert (on Win32) seems to work well for me... just need
> to
> use PowerDVD to watch.

Because 1) there's a certain amount of audio offset inherent in the
tystream. (On my system, usually somewhere between 50 and 150ms, but
sometimes as much as 350ms) and SS tells you how much, and 2) most
folks that split 'em, don't just stick 'em back together... they
transcode them to a different format. I transcode the video to an
SVCD to play them on my DVD player that can play SVCD's. The
transcoding software has the ability to adjust the audio offset;
usually my SVCD's have <15ms audio offset.

Besides, personally, I've never seen where splitting the stream
changed the audio offset in the middle of the stream, unless the
stream itself was broken, and no tool that I know of would fix that -
short of finding where the difference in sync happened, and
realigning the sync by hand...

(that, and personally I *hate* watching video on my PC. My office
chair is highly uncomfortable, and I'd much rather be upstairs in my
LaZ-boy tipping a cold one & watching in comfort.)
That's allz I know... ;-)
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

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