The Video Parasite
Building the machine Installing software/hardware Testing
Installing an OS and Software
Status: I have a stable install of Window XP on a 2GB Sandisk extreme III CF card.
Well, the OS installation was a bit trickery. The original plan
was to use one of my 80X 2GB Lexar or my 133X 4GB Kingston CF that
I use in my digital camera. I read some guides out there (there
is a lot of conflicting information) for research and went ahead with
the experiment. The first step is creating an Nlite install disk, then installing drivers and software, then finally testing and stability.
When I first started to create an Nlite XP installation disk the array
of choices was quite daunting and in the end it took 3 revisions before
I could nail down a solid installation disk. There are obvious
things that needed to go, and then there were things that I ended up
just leaving there because I think some component of them was starting
to affect stability. I decided to take out Internet Explorer but
leave in windows media player. I could spend weeks inserting and
taking out individual features with testing in between to optimize the
OS a little more. I have plenty of room left on my 2GB CF card
and a stable build, so I am just going to leave it the way it is. Here is the latest Nlite setup file I am using.
Then I went about the business of installing drivers. Most of
them came off of the DG45FC install disk, then there was the
touchscreen driver, Intensity driver, and that's about it.
Software wise the plan was to use the Blackmagic Media express
program to do all the capture (it's a nice little program.
Unfortunately Media Express only gives you two compression
options: None, and Blackmagic MJPEG. There isn't even a quality
setting on the mjpeg mode. It would be really nice to up the
quality of the compression so that it could make a 15MB/s video stream
or a 60-90MB/s video at much higher quality. Since there is the
hard limitation in Media Express I also decided to try out the Cineform
trial and see how that went. I am really impressed with the
quality of the cineform codec. Very good quality and file size.
Their site is very confusing to me and trying to navigate it to
the right place and compare (or even figure out) what product is what
is a little too much work. Once I had the Cineform trial
installed on the Core2 Duo 3GHz version of the parasite it was able to
capture video very easily. The video preview screen doesn't quite
fit on the small screen and I would love to throw a waveform monitor or
vectorscope up on the screen, and a little more feedback from the
HDLink program like recorded time and data rate etc would have been
nice. As a dedicated video capture station with the cineform
codec and HDlink installed the parasite does a nice little job
producing video, but that's all.
Booting off the CF card was a challenge too.
Turns out that not all CF cards like to be booted. My
research on the Internet didn't turn up anything tangible on what makes
a card bootable, so I just had to try a variety of cards. None of
my CF cards worked so I started borrowing from friends, the first
Sandisk Extreme III card I tried worked great, so I went down to the
store and bought a 2GB one to load up the OS. My Nlite XP install
went great on the Sandisk and finally allowed me to run without a HDD.
Stability of the OS seems solid right now. I have read reports of
CF card XP installs dieing after a few weeks when some of the
Read/Write sectors in the card get burnt out from too much activity.
This is just something that is going to take some time to see if
it all works out.
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