MAC gurus: how do i write more than 2 gig over LAN to windows drive?

[Mug Funky]

yo. i'm having a bit of difficulty and can't find any mac stuff except pathetic fanboy drooling on google.

i'm trying to capture uncompressed NTSC with a decklink card (in a mac, alas), onto a 3 TB RAID controlled by a brand new Xserve.

put simply, i get no framedrops (impressive!), but the sodding thing wont write any more than 2 gigs, but continues to capture into nowhere for 50 minutes... this means 50 minutes wasted for a 1:30 file

the tech guy here made a mac share of this drive, but although it benchmarks to 90 MB/s (compared to 45 on the NTFS), it'll only capture for 20 sec before dropping frames like crazy. so there's no filesize limit, but there's an unnecessary speed limit which prevents me from doing my capture.

does anyone have some kind of solution to either:

(a) fix the 2 gig barrier, or
(b) make the sodding fekking stupid mac drive perform as fast as it says it does.

i'm really stressing over this one - i can't stand high-spec machines that don't frigging work at all even though there's no good reason for it. my usual solution would be to get in a blind, red-mist rage and trash the thing, but i can't afford to replace it.

thanks in advance (and thanks for allowing me to vent...)

[Joe Fenton]

I can assume the target is HFS+ format? HFS+ allows files to be 2^63 in size.

Have you checked for an upgrade on the software?

[Mug Funky]

the software theoretically is brand new - we just got the xserve a few weeks ago (heavy things...). i'm not administering this system, so i don't know details, but i would assume it's a HFS filesystem. but this strikes me as the kind of basic, obvious problem that will never get fixed in a software update, and possibly never get fixed at all.

most of the capturing done here is not feature length, and is done through firewire 800. these discs are all pretty much full now.

i'm considering dropping the decklink card into a PC and doing it that way, but i'm not the only person who wants to capture stuff (the designers are mac people, the authors are all PC people... makes things a little difficult sometimes).

perhaps another decklink card in a PC is the best option? i don't think my boss wants to spend money on new equipment, but if i can get a good looking movie out of this mac it'd go quite far in convincing this guy to get a new high-spec PC for capping/IVTC/encoding.

[Joe Fenton]

HFS is not HFS+. You might want to double-check just to make sure somebody didn't tick the wrong box when the system was first set up. I've seen stupider mistakes before. HFS+ will handle 2^63 size files, but HFS only handles 2G-1.

Things have gotten much better, but sometime it's still a pain to mix Macs and PCs. MS wills it so. They go out of their way to change things on every revision and even service packs to kill cross compatibility. The Samba people will give you an earful on that issue. :D

If the software is brand new, it could be a new bug. You might check if there is older software still online. Sometimes, you have to degrade the system to get it working until the new bug gets fixed. This is particularly true of video cards, but I've seen it on video grabbers as well. Not all updates are better than the previous code.

Do the Decklink people have a forum? If so, you might want to ask there about this.

[Mug Funky]

hmm. it must be HFS+ because i copied a 5.6 gig m2v on to benchmark the speed (that file went at 90 MB/s, which is more than enough for a drop-free capture).

i'll go look for a decklink forum, but i'm afraid all they'll say is "why do you want to get the files on a PC? macs are teh best!!!!!1". in my experience the blanket answer for mac based tech support is "get more RAM". i'll try it anyway.

[Joe Fenton]

Why DO you want to get the files on a PC? ;) :D Just kidding!

Hmm - some frame grabbing software has the ability to break the grabbed stream into pieces as it's grabbing. Commonly, you tell it to write 1G files so that it works on more limited filesystems. Check if Decklink has that.