Comments

JackHughs wrote on 2/20/2003, 5:53 PM
Francis,

What activity is being performed? Is your external monitor connected to your DV deck (VTR with D/A converter?)?

JackHughs
JJKizak wrote on 2/20/2003, 6:50 PM
I believe it depends on the card and how the ports are set up. My
understanding is each port has to have an adequate power source. I have
to unplug one gadget and plug in another for proper operation on the
Audigy ports. It says you can plug in 62 pieces of equipment but thats
crap. Try it with one plugged in only and if it works you know as much as
I do.

JJK
FrancisB wrote on 2/21/2003, 8:28 AM
Yes... the video is beeing displayed on to monitor via DV deck.

Again, the video does not drop out (play and then go black) when the file is playing from C or D drive but it DOES drop out when playing from E drive (firewire drive plugged into same firewire card as DV deck)

Thanks
mikkie wrote on 2/21/2003, 8:39 AM
When you have a firewire card plugged into the pci bus on your motherboard, like anything else on the pci bus you can run into a wall where the slot or the bus itself cannot handle more data flow.
JackHughs wrote on 2/21/2003, 9:35 AM
OK, Here's my best guess. Perhaps others with a better technical background will add to the discussion.

The Firewire controller is connected to the PCI bus. Data can flow from the PCI bus to the Firewire bus and data can flow from the Firewire bus to the PCI bus. The catch is that data cannot simultaneously flow in both directions while the application you describe requires an uninterrupted data flow from storage device to VTR.

One of Firewire's many virtues is peer-to-peer data transfer. In a perfect implementation data would flow from a device connected to one port on the Firewire bus directly to another device connected to another port on the Firewire bus. An example of this type of implementation is the ability to copy directly from one Firewire enabled camcorder to another.

I think your implementation is of the less than perfect type where data is forced to flow both to and from the PCI bus. The easiest solution to this problem is to print-to-tape from your "D" drive as you know it will work. The more adventurous (albeit costly and time consuming) course of action would be to buy another Firewire card, connect the hard drive to one controller and the VTR to the other and see if it solves the problem.

JackHughs
JJKizak wrote on 2/21/2003, 12:33 PM
One other problem may be IRQ assignments. If your 1394 is sharring the
video card IRQ you may have to do the APCI disable caper which is very involved
and has been discussed on previous threads.
CyberPuppy wrote on 2/22/2003, 3:03 PM
I'd recommend reading the knowledgebase article 1418. There is a section in there about the PCI bus allocation. I was having a problem with dropped frames on capture and the problem stemmed from the PCI bus that was allocating resources to my 1394 card was also allocating resources to my video card. 'Slot jockeying' my 1394 card to a different PCI slot fixed the problem. In most instances, daisy-chaining your devices like you are isn't recommended. Firewire drives are great for portability and transfers, but I never use them for my active project source material, or for my capture hard-drive. Some people never have problems, but I always did.