Media

Hardware and Linux Distribution Differences This post covers a bunch of areas of media decoding and encoding that I’ve discovered over a number of years using Debian-based distributions like Xubuntu, and Linux Mint. Primarily I’ll cover some of the differences between Xubuntu and Linux Mint, how various hardware (CPUs and graphics cards) encode video, and some of the “gotchas” when it comes to different methods as they apply to Handbrake (software) and MakeMKV. ...

It lives, it dies! Our new TrueNAS server is up, and all the hardware is working, but not without some hiccups on the way. After taking a lot longer to build than expect, I was so happy the other evening when I posted about the successful Power On Self Test (POST), and the new RAM (32GB) being properly detected. Exhausted at the end of the day I left the drives disconnected and the video card out. ...

Most of the hardware is assembled The past few weeks have been extremely busy, so I knew last night would probably be the only time I would get this week to work on the NAS. I’m glad I started building the NAS last night as it took much longer than anticipated. I finally finished the build at 10pm last night (and it’s still not quite complete). Fig 1. I used an Intel Core i3-7100 CPU for lower power consumption ...

Moving more to a low-power solution Several months back I replaced the motherboard in the KODI media centre PC that sits in our living room. For many years our media centre has been rocking a Gigabyte motherboard with a second generation Core i7-2600 CPU. The Core i7-2600 came out in Q4 of 2010, making it almost 14 years old at the time I’m writing this. Still, it’s not a bad CPU. For several years it was the system I was compressing our movie collection on as the A8-5600K 4 core APU that was in my workstation (at the time) had about half the performance of the i7-2600. But about six months ago I replaced the CPU and motherboard with a still old, but more modern solution, a MSI motherboard and an Intel Core i3-7100. ...

Migrating the KODI entertainment system On May 5th I mentioned that we’re Running out of space on our media center. In the comments of that post I followed up outlining a plan to buy another 8TB drive (for a total of 3 x 8TB drives) in order to do a RAID Z1 (for 16TB of space). But in order to do that I would need to reformat the drives, which means I also needed a plan to back up our media center data. I hinted at that solution in the comments too: 4 x 3TB drives in a RAID Z1 – which would give me 9TB of space (1 x 3TB is the spare), just enough to back up all the data. ...

OBS is awesome! Open Broadcasting Software, also known as OBS Studio, is an awesome piece of free and open source software that lets you capture audio and video from a wide variety of sources: screen capture, webcam, audio capture from the system, from an external source, from static images, slide shows, etc. It’s been awhile since I’ve used OBS to capture the desktop of one of the systems at work, an ASUS M51AC desktop with an i7-4770 CPU, 16GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD. I installed OBS 30.0.1 and started to record a video of the desktop, using the webcam microphone for audio. After a bit of tweaking, adjusting Xubuntu’s microphone sensitivity, I managed to get audio recording correctly so audio levels did not “clip” (go into the red) in OBS. ...