I just got my 6GB Hitachi Microdrive today, and I am in heaven. But whats with the Microdrive Mode in Betaplayer?

What is the 16000 KB buffer size do? Has anyone noticed a difference, increasing or decreasing it? If you are playing a 700 MB file should the buffer size be bigger? Is bigger buffer better!?

Microdrive starts at 10%. Okay I am really lost there. I am assuming 10% is low rotation speed when Betaplayer opens. Will increasing this be any better for high res video?

I definately have noticed that I can't get high res video to play as smoothly running the Axim at 208Mhz, with this new beautiful microdrive. Before I used a 32x Lexar SD card and high res divx's played pretty damb fast. What suggestions would any of you have that would give me to get the best video playback possible, for the lowest Mhz?

And keep in mind, I have no problem changing settings around to make it perfect, even if I have to do it for different size or res files.

The machines we own, own us.

ok lets see if I can explain it (the way I understand it) (BTW SEE POST ON MICRODRIVE BATTERY USAGE)

a microdrive doesn't really draw power unless its contents are accessed. That is if you are playing solitaire, not getting any data from your drive, the drive stays inert and takes no power (this is unlike your computer hard drive which is nearly always spinning, think of an iPod) ok so now say you need some data from the card, the electric motor has to bring the disk up to speed and THEN the needle can finally find the correct location and read the data.

When playing large video files. Beta player is used to pulling the data directly off the media. SO if you are playing on an SD card, it will buffer a bit and just keep drawing data constantly from the SD card as it takes no more power than from ram.

HOWEVER

if you are running betaplayer with a microdrive. EVERY SECOND that drive is running is taking lots of power. And since the drive can transfer data much faster than you can watch it. what beta player does is turn on the drive for a couple seconds and load a few minutes of video to memory as a "buffer".

Your video will keep running but your microdrive will be off until you get to say 10% (whatever percent you set) and the microdrive will start spinning again to fill your buffer.

For best battery life I would recommend a fairly large buffer and low restart.

hope this helped.

Thankyou very very much. Thats the kind of answer I like to get, and thats why I keep coming back to aximsite.

The machines we own, own us.

Microdrive mode is certainly great in theory, but currently it appears to do absolutely nothing in practice

I don't know if you've seen this before but there is actually an FAQ for Betaplayer that contains answers to most of the common questions people have about it.

notice that is version .5 they are talking about... current version is something like .96

I haven't had any problem with it

Actually STABLE 0.5 is the latest version. 0.96 is UNSTABLE.

mAXIMum Addiction

  

Hummm... I was thinking about other apps that stream data from my microdrive. Anyone know if GSPlayer has an equivalent "microdrive" setting? I see that it has a streaming buffer size setting, but I'm guessing that this is used with shoutcast type sources.

I'd really hate to stress my microdrive (constant spinning) and drain my battery my running while running GSPlayer (or any MP3 like player) with music stored on my microdrive..