Is the soundblaster 16 a bottleneck? \ VOGONS

Is the soundblaster 16 a bottleneck?

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First post, by emosun

Posted on 2018-09-21, 00:46

emosun Offline

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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

The attachment codec.jpg is no longer available

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 1 of 4, by noobineer

Posted on 2018-09-21, 00:56

noobineer Offline

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

Reply 2 of 4, by emosun

Posted on 2018-09-21, 01:10

emosun Offline

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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

Posted on 2018-09-21, 02:43

bakemono Offline

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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.

GBAJAM 2024 submission on itch: https://90soft90.itch.io/wreckage

Reply 4 of 4, by emosun

Posted on 2018-09-21, 03:50

emosun Offline

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Posts: 554
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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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