Date: Fri, 05 Jan 2007 22:45:01 +0000
From: "Matthew Hanson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: RE: [LIB] Margi DVD-to-Go card works!
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From: "Michael Heathcote" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
A few more discoveries today. If you are playing a movie on batteries only,
you may find that you have no audio.
<clip>
If anyone finds
a 'get around' for this audio issue on full power mode only let me know...
Michael... I found 2 options about disabling power saving in DVD-To-Go's
settings that were set 'on' by default. I diisabled those two opitions (not
sure the difference between them), and was able to configure my own custom
settings for when the system in powered by batteries. Seems ot work fine so
far. I set the LCD brightness to the lowest setting, CPU speed to the 1/4
point which seems to have the most affect when playing video.
I also only had one tiny hitch getting the card working in W2K. For some
reason after installing the drivers, my W2K popped up the 'New hardware
found' window when the card was inserted. I could have unpacked the drivers
from the zipped archive, and pointed the direction to it. But I unstalled
the Margi drivers, unpacked the full driver/program archive to a folder,
inserted the card, and then pointed the system's 'New hardware found' popup
to that folder. First the drivers were installed, the system beeped
acknowledging the card's insertion, and then the software installation
window popped up for installing the DVD-To-Go playe.
The driver/software package has an audio glitch in W2K which is documented
in the program's readme. For some reason in W2K, it can't output audio
through any notebook's internal circuitry. The recommended work-around is
to connect an audio adapter cable from the output RCA jacks on card's dongle
to the notebook's audio input. Problem there is that the 100/110 libs only
have a microphone input jack. But a pair of headhones connected to the
dongle works pretty well, as does connecting the output to a PC's external
audio system. The signal on my test DVD ISO was pretty weak through the
headphones, but listenable. Powered headphones might be nice when using
W2K.
While W2K is incrediably slow for most purposes, one thing it does far
better than W98 is to almost double the 10/100 ethernet file transfer speed
with its 32 bit OS over the W98 16 bit OS. I've been really frustrated
since my USB2 PC card died. At one point I thought it was transferring
large files from the PC to the Lib faster than the 10/100 ethernet
connection. But at some point I noticed that was only in W98. I found the
PC/WXP to Lib110/W2K ethernet transfer rate to average the same as when
doing transfers via the USB2 to USB2 SIGG Superlink cable. I've got to
>something< set up that transfers these big files faster than what I've got
going now. I wonder if USB2/Gigabit adapters are available, as I have both
in my 2 main PCs.
Have you checked the data transfer rate from your PCMCIA external HDD to the
Libby's HDD Michael? I'll bet it's faster than my USB2 external HDD to the
Lib's HDD via a USB2 PC card.
One last thing about the Margi in W98SE. When I was first testing DVD
playback from the ISO files DVDShrink created, the system was really
struggling. Video played pretty well, but the audio would drop out here and
there. It took me a while to realize that I had run the free space on the
W98 partition down to only about 125MB. W98's virtual memory was out of
space and choking. After deleting around 800MB of IE and W98 temp files
that had accumulated, the DVD-To-Go software worked >flawlessly<.
I also managed to shrink the size of the original 4.35GB 'Dances With
Wolves' DVD file set set down to 1.72GB with DVDShrink by:
* Putting a small 7kb graphic file in place place of all video content in
the 'Dances With Wolves' DVD VOB sets that wasn't part of the main movie
with.
* Deselecting all audio but the movie's main 5 channel AC3 Dolby audio
channel.
* Deslecting all but the English subtitles.
* Setting compression to 'Custom', and dropping the percentage rate it down
as far as it would go, which was about 47%.
I can see no loss quality of the video playback on the tiny Libretto's
screen. It looks near flawless!
Matt
_________________________________________________________________
From photos to predictions, The MSN Entertainment Guide to Golden Globes has
it all. http://tv.msn.com/tv/globes2007/?icid=nctagline1
