Nov '09 30

BD ripping

by Brin in Computer | Comments Off on BD ripping

Good thread on Wirlpool about BD ripping, plus Clown_BD description also check out ToNMT UI and its update for ripping out a ts.

Some info on BD the NMT Formus about 1080p using Handbrake and  720p using Handbrake and some good info on the Handbrake Forum. and another guide on Blu-Ray ripping.

The PCH doesnt like more than 5 Reference Frames for DVD and 4 for BD, and only 3 B-Frames (not sure if this is for both DVD / BD) as per this post and how to calculate it here based on the x264 doco. While this good encoding guide, suggest that the pch can handle Pyramidal B-Frames.

I also found this guide on the different x264 options and what they can be used for, and some that are considered more up to date here and here.

Found another good guide here, i’ve found ripping subs is an issue, so i thought i outline my process below

  • Rip with ClownBD or ToNMT or RipBot264 (not sure which is better, i think ClownBD as it extracts all components) Convert and DTS/Core to AC3-448 due to problems with Audio.
  • use SubRip to OCR the Forced subs, save as .srt
  • use BDSup2Sub to save the Forced sub’s to idx/sub (vobsub). Looks like there is a bug in the PCH, and you need to convert the subtitles down to a smaller size (PAL), ( Probably worth keeping all sup/idx/sub/srt files)
  • Use Chapter Grabber to load the Chapters from the ClownBD extract and rename them then save them to xml.
  • Convert M2ts to MKV using Handbrake
  • Use MKVMerge-GUI to add in the Subs and Chapters and merge into one mkv. (Some details on the Wiki)
  • If you want to Backup to DVD the original BLueRay, then use tsMuxeR-GUI and Split when re-muxing from the de-muxed sources.
Nov '09 17

NetFlow logging

by Brin in Computer, Linux | Comments Off on NetFlow logging

Found a Good site listing Free NetFlow tools, and some comments on wirlpool.

Oct '09 25

Blender and CG animation rigging

by Brin in Computer, Film | Comments Off on Blender and CG animation rigging

I’ve been playing around with Blender to generate a Lego shorts, some links to rigging that may be helpfull:

Oct '09 19

Blender and stop motion animation

by Brin in Computer, Family, Film | Comments Off on Blender and stop motion animation

Blender is powerful 3D modeling application that is Open source, Although the GUI does take some getting use to, here is a basic tutorial to get you started as well as the normal Blender  Tutorials.

I’ve been playing around with “Stop Motion” animation with the kids, and found a few tutorials on how to use Blender for Stop motion and Video Sequencing. There is also some nice stuff on Animateclay, Brickfilms and BlenderGuru. Here’s how you can render Lego from LeoCAD in Blender, plus some tutorials on the basics of LeoCAD.

There are a number of good sites for Blender:

Oct '09 19

Durian – An Open Movie

by Brin in Computer, Film | Comments Off on Durian – An Open Movie

Good to see Blender are planning another free open source movie, Durian. From the looks of the Specs, its going to be impressive, cant wait to see what they come up with.

Sep '09 21

Grow (expand) a md raid drive (to LVM or not)

by Brin in Computer, Linux | Comments Off on Grow (expand) a md raid drive (to LVM or not)

I’m thinking of changing my File system around again, going from simple LVM devices to a raid-0 drive with LVM on it, to get better throughput due to stripping. There are some good comments on this blog and some more info in the raid how-to on growing (mdadm –grow).

UPDATE: After considering if i should use native LVM with striping instead of raid-0, Stacy found this post that compares the 2, and raid-0 is still the way to go

NOTE: If you want to see what drive maps to what volume, use -m on pvdisplay, vgdisplay and lvdisplay, also you can use pvs -o +pe_start to see where the lv will start.

Aug '09 23

Git Merge conflicts

by Brin in Computer | Comments Off on Git Merge conflicts

I can never remember how to keep the local version of a file when a git merge has a conflict. Following this blog. To keep OUR copy of the file index.html after a git merge
git reset -- index.html
git checkout ORIG_HEAD -- index.html
git commit -a

Aug '09 23

Ext3/4 performance

by Brin in Computer, Linux | Comments Off on Ext3/4 performance

I’ve converted my /home partition to EXT4, and running my root partition as EXT3. While EXT4 looks good, for some reason i’m getting bad write performance on RAID1, compared to a normal JBOD disk, which i would expect to be the same. I found an article about boosting performance of Ext3/4 and another with some perfomance tips, include reserved space. I think I’ll update to using writeback and noatime on home, as per this Forum.

Some interesting test results. I’m not sure if the low bandwidth on my ext (root) partition is influencing the results?
EXT3 - 2097152000 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 66.2435 s, 31.7 MB/s. Deletion time - real 0m1.205s
EXT4 - 2097152000 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 27.885 s, 75.2 MB/s. Deletion time - real 0m0.575s
JFS - 2097152000 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 28.7924 s, 72.8 MB/s. Deletion time - real 0m0.273s

Need to re-do the tests with a larger file, all on the same disk, so bandwidth isnt an issue.