Bug Pretty Certainly Suspected

Recording Limbaugh today, two Inspirons (a 1200 and a 2200)
running real producer (real audio's free encoders of audio)
both went beserk, taking 100% of the CPU at highest priority.

Very strange. It's been working perfectly unattended for many
years, recording and saving noon-3pm in nicely dated files M-F
every week.

What's different about today (Friday?)

One thing is that the last 25 bits of the "unix" time, and
hence XP time, rolled over to zero.

It's very likely that real producer uses a 24 bit local time.

The rollover happened at 17:40:16 GMT, to the minute the same
as the encoding time locked up in the one visible window.
--


On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.

On 5/28/2010 5:55 PM, Ron Hardin wrote:
Recording Limbaugh today, two Inspirons (a 1200 and a 2200)
running real producer (real audio's free encoders of audio)
both went beserk, taking 100% of the CPU at highest priority.

Very strange. It's been working perfectly unattended for many
years, recording and saving noon-3pm in nicely dated files M-F
every week.

What's different about today (Friday?)

One thing is that the last 25 bits of the "unix" time, and
hence XP time, rolled over to zero.

It's very likely that real producer uses a 24 bit local time.

The rollover happened at 17:40:16 GMT, to the minute the same
as the encoding time locked up in the one visible window.

Some people go berserk when they hear Limbaugh. I doubt that computers
are immune to him... Ben Myers

Ron Hardin wrote:
Recording Limbaugh today, two Inspirons (a 1200 and a 2200)
running real producer (real audio's free encoders of audio)
both went beserk, taking 100% of the CPU at highest priority.

Very strange. It's been working perfectly unattended for many
years, recording and saving noon-3pm in nicely dated files M-F
every week.

What's different about today (Friday?)

One thing is that the last 25 bits of the "unix" time, and
hence XP time, rolled over to zero.

It's very likely that real producer uses a 24 bit local time.

The rollover happened at 17:40:16 GMT, to the minute the same
as the encoding time locked up in the one visible window.

Must be the liberal media.

Daddy

Glen Beck got into your system, his tears shorted out something.


"Ron Hardin" wrote in message
...
Recording Limbaugh today, two Inspirons (a 1200 and a 2200)
running real producer (real audio's free encoders of audio)
both went beserk, taking 100% of the CPU at highest priority.

Very strange. It's been working perfectly unattended for many
years, recording and saving noon-3pm in nicely dated files M-F
every week.

What's different about today (Friday?)

One thing is that the last 25 bits of the "unix" time, and
hence XP time, rolled over to zero.

It's very likely that real producer uses a 24 bit local time.

The rollover happened at 17:40:16 GMT, to the minute the same
as the encoding time locked up in the one visible window.
--


On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.

Ron Hardin wrote:
Recording Limbaugh today, two Inspirons (a 1200 and a 2200)
running real producer (real audio's free encoders of audio)
both went beserk, taking 100% of the CPU at highest priority.

Very strange. It's been working perfectly unattended for many
years, recording and saving noon-3pm in nicely dated files M-F
every week.

What's different about today (Friday?)

One thing is that the last 25 bits of the "unix" time, and
hence XP time, rolled over to zero.

It's very likely that real producer uses a 24 bit local time.

The rollover happened at 17:40:16 GMT, to the minute the same
as the encoding time locked up in the one visible window.

it is streamed in flash and windows media player format too. didn't
know that anyone still used real player.

Christopher Muto wrote:
Ron Hardin wrote:
Recording Limbaugh today, two Inspirons (a 1200 and a 2200) running
real producer (real audio's free encoders of audio) both went beserk,
taking 100% of the CPU at highest priority.

Very strange. It's been working perfectly unattended for many years,
recording and saving noon-3pm in nicely dated files M-F every week.

What's different about today (Friday?)

One thing is that the last 25 bits of the "unix" time, and hence XP
time, rolled over to zero.

It's very likely that real producer uses a 24 bit local time.

The rollover happened at 17:40:16 GMT, to the minute the same as the
encoding time locked up in the one visible window.

it is streamed in flash and windows media player format too. didn't
know that anyone still used real player.

Just my opinion, but Real Player could have been a champion, as could
have been Rhapsody...instead Real shot themselves in the foot with a
player that had a huge footprint and trampled on users privacy.

Daddy

Thank you for saying that! ;-)

William

Hi!

Recording Limbaugh today

Did you consider the source material? (cue instant rimshot) -- sorry,
couldn't resist.

;-)

In all seriousness, every account I ever heard of someone using Realproducer
suggested that it just wasn't very good software... Of course, most of those
were running on some Linux distribution.

If it's worked for you, and the regular suspects (driver updates, software
updates, Windows updates, etc) seem to check out, I wonder if there was some
anomaly in the source material that represented an "impossible problem" for
the encoder to handle and it just flew into a loop trying to make some sense
of it. Is the source something like a radio tuner? Could it have been some
experiment in copy protection?

William

William R. Walsh wrote:

Hi!

Recording Limbaugh today

Did you consider the source material? (cue instant rimshot) -- sorry,
couldn't resist.

;-)

In all seriousness, every account I ever heard of someone using Realproducer
suggested that it just wasn't very good software... Of course, most of those
were running on some Linux distribution.

If it's worked for you, and the regular suspects (driver updates, software
updates, Windows updates, etc) seem to check out, I wonder if there was some
anomaly in the source material that represented an "impossible problem" for
the encoder to handle and it just flew into a loop trying to make some sense
of it. Is the source something like a radio tuner? Could it have been some
experiment in copy protection?

William

That it happened at the same time on two machines, one encoding 8.5kb and the other 11.5kbs,
at the exact time (to the minute) that the 32-bit one-second time rolled over its last 25
bits, suggests it has to be a simple bug.

One machine put out a diaganostic from the encoder that the system load was high and it was
dropping to a target rate of 000, which I put down retrospectively to a division that didn't
work, suggesting the bit rollover gets into the computation somehow. Say they simply use
less than the full 32 bits of the time.

The other machine doubtless put out the same thing but I couldn't get it to unblank the
screen. Real encoder was taking 100% of the cpu at some insanely high priority.

I use real audio because the low quality 8.5kbs audio is pretty good and takes less than
4mb/hr (6mb/hr for low quality but decent music at 11.5kbs); and for historical reasons now,
since I started saving real-encoded radio programs in '98.
--


On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.