Category Archives: Linux

I’ve been working on a port of a large application from qooxdoo version 0.6.5 to version 1.2.  It’s been arduous, and a big part of the pain has been that from qooxdoo 0.7 to 0.8, a number of widgets that we relied on heavily were removed: ListView, Gallery, and GalleryList.  The ListView can be replaced […]

I’ve always been an AMD guy.  I’ve often thought that the bang for the buck was better with AMD-based systems.  That’s probably still true, as there’s quite a premium to pay for an Intel Core i7 processor versus the AMD Phenom II processors.  But when it comes to real-time video encoding, you need to pack […]

In my previous article, I discussed good ffmpeg options for encoding MPEG-2 video.  This worked great when encoding relatively low quality clips, like the 3 Mbps example in my article.  When you want to encode much higher quality (like full 1920×1080 HD video at 20 Mbps or more), you start to run into some performance […]

If you’re like me, you don’t like to do hundreds of tiny updates to live servers.  We batch up our RHEL updates so that we perform them every couple of months (or whenever a serious security issue crops up).  When you take this approach, you may end up with hundreds of packages requiring updates.  Just […]

So I wanted some geeky gift tags for some Christmas gifts for my development team.  I couldn’t find quite what I was looking for, so I offer these to you.

I’ve done some significant experimentation with different options for encoding MPEG-2 video from a live video source with ffmpeg.  The objective was to create video that was approximately 3 Mbps at a “decent” resolution; this video would be manually edited and then converted to Web quality.  By “decent”, I mean a high enough resolution so […]

I recently found a really nice benchmarking suite for linux called Phoronix Test Suite.  It has a wide range of tests designed to exercise your CPU, memory, and disk I/O with both synthetic and application benchmarks.  It was perfect for a project I’m working on — we’re testing and building video encoding systems.  Phoronix contains […]

We’ve been doing some experimentation with ffmpeg to encode video for live streaming and for recording to files for on-demand playback.  While I’ve been impressed by the capabilities of ffmpeg, I’ve found that its command-line processing is quite daunting.  Here I provide a set of command-line options along with commentary on what is going on.

We’ve been strong proponents of using CentOS kickstart to manage our production server environments.  We like to use highly customized kickstart CDs that have just the packages we want, plus a hefty postinstall script that sets up all sorts of things for our environment.  We also like to use sandboxed environments for our developers.  Wouldn’t […]

When we replaced our NetApp filer cluster with a RHEL-based NFS cluster, we ran into a few surprises.