I’m starting to run low on disk space on my NAS, with Time Machine and VM snapshots taking up almost half of it. So I decided to do some cleanups, and after moving some non-critical stuff to my old NAS (which I use as offline storage) I started looking at my video folder.
As it turns out, I have a fair chunk of old movie rips with H.264 encoding and 5.1 DTS audio. Those audio tracks slim down nicely into E-AC3 224KHz with minimal CPU encoding and video pass-through, but I decided to break out HandBrake on both borg and my M2 Pro and check out the status quo of H.265 hardware encoding.
Some highly unscientific testing ensued, which involved setting up HandBrake inside a Fedora LXC container that I use for ML tinkering, which has NVIDIA hardware access.
Rui CarmoH.265 NVENCH.265 VideoToolbox encoder.The first fun thing is that both transcoded 720p and 1080p over the network at rates that exceeded 200fps. The Mac even reached 300fps in sections, although to be fair I didn’t keep the Fedora session open all the time and just let it do its thing, and the difference in encoding speed might well be due to network throughput (although all machines are on gigabit Ethernet).
I didn’t have the time or patience to do some systematic benchmarking, but on either hardware this is a massive improvement over the time I last ripped a few DVDs, and drove me to poke at every original movie file I had and transcode it into sub-10GB files, complete with 5.1 audio and more than decent enough playback quality–which took only a fraction of an afternoon.
Tackling 4K content is something I didn’t really try (mostly because I had already ripped those in H.265, and I don’t own that many Blu-Rays), but running 4K iPhone footage through either NVENC or VideoToolbox without any quality tuning (and from the NAS, over gigabit Ethernet) clocked in at 70-90 fps transcoding, which is pretty good.
The second fun thing, though, is that the M2 Pro never warmed up significantly, throttled or went past 20W, whereas on borg the RTX3060 GPU alone reported 45W while transcoding (and the i7 CPU adds at least 65W on top of that).
So all in all, this was a pretty neat experiment, and I don’t think I’ll be bothered with using NVENC that much unless I buy another TV series on disc (which is what I wrote this container to handle).
This was the fun part, but in between this and other cleanups I am well on my way to get almost a full terabyte of storage back, which is a good enough outcome–although I will be budgeting for some capacity upgrades in a year or so, once 16TB drives are at a saner price point.
I’ve been following Jeff’s plight for a long while now, and it’s nice to finally see this working. I don’t think it is particularly useful by itself (the GPU power requirements are completely at odds with what the Pi is about), but I think it’s great for the ARM ecosystem in general–and the server market in particular.
For desktop or embedded/industrial use, my money is still on Apple Silicon and Rockchip-like integrated GPUs (although Intel’s N100 and various AMD APUs are doing very well in the mini-PC space).
For my birthday this year, I got three things: A corneal abrasion (definitely not fun), a new iPhone, and a new Watch. I’m going to spare you the details on the first (which is nearly healed) and focus on the other two since they’ve been quite significant upgrades, but all of them were… excessive in one way or another.
This thing looks like a lot of fun, and I like that they are taking the trouble to do hardware upgrades for older models. The new one is pricey, but it can do multi-channel USB audio (which is something a lot more devices ought to do).
I’ve been telling myself I don’t need more music gear for a year or so, but… Santa Claus, are you out there?
Wow, this is even more surprising. This Monday is going to be insane.
The Verge has a bit more to say, but not much.
Update: Well, that’s not happening anymore. Maybe. At this point, I don’t think anyone cares anymore.
Well, this was (completely) unexpected. And the rumor mill is working overtime, given OpenAI’s mixed corporate structure, ongoing deals and financial backing…
Update: Someone is trying to hit undo, in what has to be one of the weirdest turnabouts in an already unusual situation.
Announced yesterday at Ignite, these are but confirmation of the industry trend towards ARM. I don’t have anything more to say, other than the writing’s been on the wall for years now.
I caught a pretty nasty flu this week, which meant a round of feverish cough-ridden, snot-dribbling nights followed by drowsy mornings nursing a splitting headache, with occasional glimpses of clear sinuses mid-afternoon before it all began anew, like a tape loop of a bad rhythm section.
This is a bit sad. Takahē, the awesome Python-based ActivityPub server I’ve been running for almost a year now, may be sunset if a new maintainer cannot be found.
Given its approach to scalability, support for various clients and (very low) resource usage, it would be a great loss if nobody would take it up.
(I might fork it if it’s sunset and see if it’s feasible to convert it to sqlite with JSON extensions, but it would join a very long list of pending projects…)
Well, I guess I’ll be looking to sell my Xbox Series X around Christmas. Halo was fun but I never got round to finish it because I found the grind of the last few levels boring, Starfield wasn’t my cup of tea and I only played it twice, and in between Celeste, Dead Cells and a few other lightweight games I can play on the Switch (or even the Mac), I haven’t had that much use for the hardware itself other than occasionally trying new games–which, incidentally, I’ve been doing mostly via Game Streaming.
But I certainly don’t do that enough to justify the full Ultimate subscription, and given the last year has made me spend a lot less on everything (I’ve been thriftier than usual since January), the decision isn’t that hard to make.
Incidentally, it isn’t the only employee perk that’s been dropped recently, and, ironically, I don’t even have access to employee discounts in Portugal (for whatever reason–like some of my colleagues, I’ve been paying for our family Office 365 subscription 100% out of pocket for years now), so… I guess it was a lot of fun while it lasted?
Update: This is not going to happen in 2024. Still, even though I wouldn’t mind paying a discounted rate if I could actually get it here, I am going to check what I own on Steam and take a look at ChimeraOS, just in case…
Shiny. Incremental improvements, of course, and kicking off with the MacBook Pro, as usual (and, unusually, the iMac).
I’m curious to see what they do to the Mac Studio, since that is the most interesting Mac for me these days–but an Ultra version of the M3 is certain to require a bit more time.
Over the past four years I have been progressively upgrading my video conferencing setup, and I now believe it to be finally stable enough to write a short set of notes on what has been working well for me for the past two years or so.
I’ve been tracking Oxide for a few years now, and am very impressed by what they’ve put together to a degree that’s hard to express.
From supply chain to test benches, from hardware to software, from platform to networking, they’ve accomplished some pretty incredible stuff and, from a technical perspective, pretty much not just upended the status quo of the on-premises server market, but also one-upped some hyperscaler gear–and I’m tangentially involved in a fair chunk of highly custom, quite meaty hardware-related things, so yeah, they’re really good at what they are doing.
My congrats to them, and I hope they keep pushing the envelope.
The Register is a bit crass about this (I changed the title to more closely match the PR), but they do have a good set of figures and quotes.
This is (obviously) a worrisome trend. I suspect many vendors were anticipating beefy network upgrade projects that haven’t yet come to pass, and the timing of 5G licensing investments by operators was absolutely lousy.
Sure, the mainstream press is going to point out that consumers aren’t overly excited by 5G (and they’re right–both operators and vendors lack compelling use cases and keep trotting out the same things since the 3G days), but businesses have fundamentally different requirements for private (or IoT) 5G, and operators are moving away from proprietary stacks as much as possible.
I strongly suspect the economy isn’t going to be much help next year, either.
As of today, I’ve been at Microsoft for eight years, which is a sizable chunk of time. But unlike last year, I am much less guardedly optimistic.
After a summer spent pursuing minimalist computing, I got a few questions about my iPad plus Linux sidecar setup and a bunch of suggestions as to what else I could use instead of a Pi Zero 2W.
Unlike last year, I upgraded to Sonoma’s “point zero” release–and did that because it felt like a Snow Leopard-style clean-up release rather than a bunch of ground-breaking (and app-breaking) “improvements”. And so far, nothing (unforeseen) is broken, which actually kind of sums it up nicely.
This is sort of a catch-up, since although I have decided to stop publishing weekly notes I am still writing them, and there are a few things worth… well, noting.
This is interesting, if a bit disappointing because there’s still no built-in EMMC storage. Yes, PCIe support is awesome and there will be add-on boards, but…still, it would make it a lot more appealing to have something on the main board (also, the lack of USB-C display output makes it a bit of a hassle to use these days).
I have to wonder how their new silicon will compare to an RK3588 performance-wise, but the big advantages of the Raspberry Pi have always been software support and the sheer scale of their ecosystem, and I think that will be the deciding factor for most people.
I also suspect there will be a 16GB version in the future, so I’m a bit wary of pulling the trigger on the first batch of boards.
Update: Phoronix has benchmarks comparing it to an
RK3588S, and it is pretty much equivalent across the board, with minor variations due to the Rockchip having 4 more A55 “little” cores that give it a slight edge on some benchmarks. They also have graphic benchmarks that show it as 4-6 times faster than the Pi 4 for some use cases. However, the Mali GPUs in Rockchip CPUs enjoy more widespread support, so using one for anything graphically intensive might depend on when VideoCore VII support actually ships for your preferred distro. I might get one for toying with the GPU, although I’m also wary of having to put up with a tiny (likely noisy) fan…
Here I was pining over the loss of my favorite Mail.app plugin (MsgFiler) after having upgraded to macOS Sonoma when I come across this blog post on their site that points out that you can actually do a similar (but far less polished thing) by invoking the Help menu with Command-Shift-/ and typing the target folder name.
It’s pretty snappy since it’s baked in to the OS, but since I have multiple activity name/2023 folders (over 20 years of them) it’s not as slick as MsgFiler to do partial matches or typeahead find (plus it causes the application menu to bounce around all over the place).
But it works, and that’s what matters.
As someone who has used leather covers for two iPhones now (both of which are still perfectly usable and actually look better slightly worn out), the prospect of paying for a premium case that stains this easily isn’t appealing at all. I wonder why they didn’t explore actual leather substitutes instead of overcharging for this porous polyester crap.
Coming back from Summer break, I started musing about what I could do regarding preserving some of the ascetic minimalism I applied to my computing activities during that season, since I found it quite enjoyable to use less stuff.
By now most people have read MacStories’ extensive review, so here are a few things that have come to mind over the past few days running the new releases on my devices (most of which are at the very bottom of the supported hardware range).
I’m just doing to leave this here for future reference.