david <[email protected]> writes:
> intrepid, and I'm trying to run Kino. I'm getting a lot of flickering
> (dropped frames?) and the Kino site suggests setting dma mode to 1
> using this command:
Yeah, that is the advice, but it isn't the actual problem on anything in
the last few years: you can't turn off DMA mode with libata devices.
[...]
> how to stop Kino capture from flickering?
Kino should tell you if it drops frames; you should be certain if that
is the actual problem first.
However, back when I was doing DV capture using the command line tools
with the same back-end as Kino I found the same problem: dropped frames.
In my case there were two things that helped. One was using XFS, which
handled the larger writes much more nicely than ext3 and reduced frame
drops significantly.
The other thing was to convince Linux to flush data to disk more
smoothly: it would bunch up I/O no matter how I fiddled the VM tunables
resulting in dropped frames when the burst was too long.
So, I solved it with the pleasant sledgehammer of:
while sleep 1; do sync; done
Ugly, but zero frame drops: it forced I/O out of the kernel much sooner
and smoothed the write rate enough that the problem went away.
I don't know if there is a nicer strategy, but that one worked for me.
Regards,
Daniel
Plus, inexpensive. :)
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