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Tales of Extraordinary Interest

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Posts tagged with "Video"

Basement Progress

Tuesday, 24. July 2007, 22:09:17

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I've got some old receivers that I snagged from storage hooked up and driving my Klipsch 4.1 speakers. I've just got them in stereo, one set on each receiver. No sub yet, but I'm not too concerned about sound, just sources cus this is a Video Lab, not an Audiophile pit.

I've got an old IBM laptop down here connected to a DELL monitor for now. I also brought my SMP Pentium3 2U server machine down here, but I haven't hooked it up yet. I have an old Athlon XP in tower down here as well, but it has no hard drives right now =). They're all in the 2U.

I found an old Pentium4 board with Processor that I bought from a friend a while back. Might get that set up, too. Might put it in the tower and replace the AthlonXP 2500+ Barton and consolidate all the SDRAM to one machine. It wouldn't be too bad for cranking on some video encodes. Might be a good "controller" machine for the lab, too. I've got Remote protocols throughout the house, so I can control encodes on QuadZ80 from anywhere right now. Working out pretty well, but I'll soon need to run some Cat5 down here and get a Gigabit Ethernet network set up. Wireless is not cutting it for LAN transfers, and once I start moving big video chunks around, it's going to be painful without some gigabit love!

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Basement Lab

Sunday, 22. July 2007, 16:36:44

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Oh yeh, speaking of video...

I'm turning my Basement into a lab of sorts. I'm putting a bunch of junk down there, but one of the main purposes I want the junk to serve is the purpose of "Dirt-Cheap Video Lab." I have an idea to build a video lab for next to nothing or free from hand-me-downs and repurposed junk. So, if anyone has any contributions they'd like to send my way, feel free =).

I'll be collecting video equipment (VCRs, CRTs, anything I can get really), computers, shelving, racks, desks, speakers, stereo equipment, TVs, Keyboards, Mice, Disc Drives, etc. I'm going to try to get as much or the equipment as possible for free either through donations or through stuff I already have or even dumpster diving (yay! excuse to go dumpster diving!). Other stuff I may buy second hand from CraigsList, Garage Sales, or Goodwill. But, I've set a pretty hard limit on what I want to spend ($0), and I'm not willing to spend more than $100 for any single component in the joint. At least not yet. I also plan on doing some stuff for $ in the lab once it's built to contribute to the lab's upgrades. I want to start a video service web site and start with offering cheap conversions of VHS->DVD, CDs->electronic music, etc. and then move up from there. Any money made in the Video Lab will go back into the Video Lab. I'll probably use one of my domains for the site, and I'll be sure to let readers of my blog know when and if it goes up. It'll also give me a chance to sling some java web programming for fun and practice for some other java projects I have going on. Overall, I'm really excited and looking forward to it. Who knows? If it picks up, maybe I can quit my day job and go back to school for my PhD for a while :wizard:

I'm going to pick up some equipment that I have in storage today, and I'll probably be cleaning up and setting things up for much of the day today. My goal is to at least get one work/general computer area set up today. I've already got a couch and an area rug down there, and I did a lot of cleaning last weekend. It's very chillin and very quiet down there. Part of me wants to move my main systems from upstairs to down in the basement because of the environment. It's a lot cooler down there, too. It's bloody hot in my room because of our shitty house A/C.

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Updates

Sunday, 22. July 2007, 16:27:18

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Man, I suck at keeping a blog =). I think blogs are kind of dying off in general on the internet. Now that people have more friends because of the internet, and now that people have more friends on the internet no one can keep up with all of their friends' blogs anyway!

There's been a lot going on. I've been exploring my passion for video again. I've been doing lots of encodes, experimenting with filters, different frame rates, that sort of nonsense. I realize the speed of my quad core when encoding h.264 content with x264 multi-threaded. Man! I encoded some video on the t43p Pentium M and there was no comparison. It takes hours versus minutes, and days versus hours for some stuff. Someone has wired up and tooled an x264 client/server distributed version that I need to check out soon. Also, I'm thinking about building an Intel quad or eight core system now. I'm not sure which yet. The processors are so cheap now, and the motherboards are far from shabby (and far from expensive at around $100 for a really decent board from any of the board makers!). Though, I'll probably buy an Intel made MicroATX G965 board because I've been wanting an Intel board since I saw their failure analysis lab and dealt with some of their engineers directly. What a great facility, and what a badass company.

Anyway, I'll post some benchmarks or something about some real-world video stuff on my Quad-core Opteron at some point, and when I get the quad-core Intel system built, I'll post some benchmarks on that, too. It will be interesting to compare the two :D

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