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Is the soundblaster 16 a bottleneck?

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First post, by emosun

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486 dx-40
8mb
stealth 32 vlb
sound blaster 16
512mb cf card
win 95

For the last year or so i have perfected encoding video to run on this machine using .mov and cinepak and windows media player.

the machine plays these videos very well and could easily put something like a sega cd to shame (not too hard to do 🤣)

however , when adding audio to the files..... it taxes the machine heavily despite not increasing the overall bitrate. The bitrate stays the same , but just the presence of audio will basically make the video go from a smooth 15fps (animation) down to 4 or 5.

I have a feeling it might be the soundblaster 16 causing the lag , the audio is only 8000hz , and i was able to play audio only mov files back at 32000hz , but i'm thinking the card might not be able to keep up as after a 22 minute video plays the audio becomes desynced after a while with no way to correct it.

here's the codec info

codec.jpg
Filename
codec.jpg
File size
28.74 KiB
Views
415 views
File license
Fair use/fair dealing exception

maybe someone with some soundblaster 16 experience knows if the card maybe isn't a period correct card and i shouldn't be expecting so much from it.

Reply 2 of 4, by emosun

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noobineer wrote:

Have you tried using a 44.1khz sampling rate? Maybe windows is upsampling the audio from 8khz to 44.1khz.

I don't seem to have 44.1 as an option

I have "IMA 4:1" at 8 , 16 , 32 , 48 , 96000 hz

Reply 3 of 4, by bakemono

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I don't think the SB16 is any kind of bottleneck at a low sampling rate like 8KHz. Try using uncompressed PCM instead of ADPCM.

again another retro game on itch: https://90soft90.itch.io/shmup-salad

Reply 4 of 4, by emosun

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bakemono wrote:

I don't think the SB16 is any kind of bottleneck at a low sampling rate like 8KHz. Try using uncompressed PCM instead of ADPCM.

ok i just tried uncompressed audio

it had various bitrate options with only 8 bit being what the machine seems to be able to decode. if i select 16 bit quicktime will simply not play any audio while windows media will play the video with an error saying it couldn't download a decoder for the audio. However the machine is able to play the video and uncompressed audio if i use 8bit at 16000hz , but the audio is very static filled

this however made me realize an error i was making

In the video settings i was selecting an option to limit the bitrate to 1000kbps which is the absolute lowest the slider can go. however when i unselected this option , the video bitrate can go much lower when the render is left to it's own devices. the video quality per frame gets a bit more muddy.

this has resulted though in allowing me to use this video setting with the ima 4:1 audio at 16000hz which sounds much better than the uncompressed 16000hz , the video now doesn't show as many dropped frames in the statistics panel on windows media player

so thats cool. 🤣

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