March 30, 2009

There were 2 posts published on March 30, 2009 (this is page 1 of 1).

Amazon does it better

amazonI decided to retire my old laser printer when it wore out its latest toner cartridge and the thought of paying $80 to order another cartridge didn’t appeal. I bought a popular Brother model from Amazon Thursday evening, not expecting to see it until today.

Instead, it arrived on my front porch Saturday morning at 9 AM – and that’s with Amazon’s free shipping. I’m still blown away at how I can order a printer with a few clicks, pay 30% less than at the local warehouse club, pay no shipping on a 26 pound shipment, and 36 hours later it’s in my hands.

Amazon runs one tight ship, my friends. They beat all I’ve ever seen.

Myth and speed

Ever since I upgraded to an HD capture card in my MythTV backend, I’ve noticed a wide variation in the playback speeds of the recordings it makes. Some play back at normal speed while others play back far too slowly or quickly. It’s frustrating.

I was going to blame MythTV for this craziness until I remembered the dvb-utils application azap. This little app tunes the HD card and dumps the output to a pipe, thus it provides a way of testing the card (and driver) outside of Myth. I’ve never used it before but it seems to be the perfect test tool. It turns out the streams produced by the driver and card exhibit the same synchronization issues I’ve seen in Myth itself. That means Myth isn’t to blame.

But what is? My card or its driver? I suppose the next step is to somehow get Windows running on my server long enough to test the card using the Windows driver. If that works, I know Linux or the Linux driver is to blame.

The investigation continues…