Posts Tagged ‘video’

MKV must be the worst video container ever :(

Written by Arnan on October 24, 2008 – 2:21 pm

So i got this huge storage unit lately and am getting some movies to it. HD movies to be precise. With 5.1 sound and all that. It’s nice. But why does everyone want to put that stuff in MKV dammit. Use a real format like proper Mpeg (2 or 4) or h.264 encoded Mov. And not some dumb container which isn’t even a format by itself but just harnesses Mpeg or whatever format the movie is in. It brings only misery and frustration to the table.

So now i have to load every movie, wait almost 10 minutes for it to cache strip out all the MKV rubbish and crappy titles, names and whatever else the movie doesn’t need and save it as a proper format.

I’m sure it works fine in some players… But c’mon how many players are there? If you save it in a decent format, say Mpeg or even high quality Mov it will be much better playable and more importantly can be previewed from Explorer and Finder and doesn’t have to be cached. So it plays instantly.

Grrr!

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An amazing discovery…

Written by Arnan on September 13, 2008 – 5:56 pm

So here i was again. Installed a new harddisk, SATAII, in my server and went on with installing Ubuntu, since that still is a bit the distro of choice for some reason. I keep coming back to it…

Anyway, installed the whole thing. Ran updates and all seemed fine. Were it not that i can not log in in the regular Gnome session. I have to use the failsafe one. Which obviously omits some packages.
Further investigation shows me that my videocard is problematic due to a bug in Xorg (the app that handles visual output and basically governs the desktop). Ultrabummer! The video card is onboard and i thought it would be well suited for server use… And it would be if Xorg would support the thing.
This very well explains why Fedora kept screwing up after updates… Since Xorg was updated too. *sigh*.

So i have 4 options at the moment:
1. Install the *actual* server version of Ubuntu which does not use a desktop and with that go back in time 20 years with terminal.

or

2. Install the server version of ubuntu and somehow make Gnome work with it on some basic level comparable with the failsafe mode from Ubuntu.

or

3. Find another working PCI / PCI-express video card and use that for my desktop installation.

or

4. Use Windows. Which in my idea is no real option since i want a proper and secure webserver (with a system of which i know how it works) that has SSH and more of those things. In my experience it does not run well (if at all) on Windows.

My goal was to install a small server with a desktop and not use terminal at all, or limit it to an absolute minimum if possible. I’m not too fond of terminal/shell since i find it limiting, chaotic and inefficient. However, it works well otherwise. I’m spoiled with mice, colors, admin apps and remote desktop.

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