Here are the bands I’m interested in listening more to as Lolla gets closer. Bands marked with an asterisk are those that I know I already want to see (sadly, I’m sure there will be conflicts!)
Continue reading Lollapalooza 2017 Playlists (favorites)Lollapalooza 2017 playlists
I’ve been lucky enough to go to Lollapalooza for the past 5 years. I really like to do my homework before I go so I know who I want to see. There are always tons of bands I’ve never heard of, and every year, some of them end up being my favorites at the show.
So I build Spotify playlists of every band at Lolla, using recent setlists from setlist.fm whenever it is available. A lot of work goes into this, and I’d like for people to have the chance to use these playlists.
Continue reading Lollapalooza 2017 playlistsAWS Adventures, part 2 – high-availability FTP service
In our AWS migration, we found it necessary to run an FTP server. Yeah, I know — “FTP? In the 20-teens?”. Look, I get it — nobody wants to run an FTP server in this day and age. But it is still a convenient way for partner companies to transfer data to us via automation. This isn’t highly sensitive data; our main concern is keeping the FTP server isolated from our other services so that any vulnerabilities there don’t propagate to more critical systems.
At any rate, we found it surprisingly challenging to build a highly available FTP service in AWS.
Continue reading AWS Adventures, part 2 – high-availability FTP serviceAWS: hedging against AZ failure
After a lot of reading about AWS and the failures that have happened over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that to be truly resilient against complete AZ failure, you need to have enough capacity running in both AZs to handle the entire load of your application.
Continue reading AWS: hedging against AZ failureKodi and RC6 bug on Intel NUC (Celeron 847)
Recently, I tried to upgrade my old OpenELEC 3.2.4 system to LibreELEC 8, which ships with Kodi 17. Things did not go well.
Continue reading Kodi and RC6 bug on Intel NUC (Celeron 847)AWS Adventures, part 1 – Snowball
We are in the middle of a massive migration to the AWS cloud. While we are excited by the prospects of ditching a lot of our hardware responsibilities, you can’t make a change this big without some pain.
So far, Snowball has been the biggest source of frustration.
Continue reading AWS Adventures, part 1 – SnowballMigrating away from Picasa 3
I’ve used Picasa for over 10 years to manage my family’s photo library. We have about 50,000 images in there with 22,000 tags, stars, album memberships, etc. Now that Picasa will no longer be supported by Google, I had to find a replacement. And it really hasn’t been easy. I thought I’d share my strategy for anybody who might be in a similar situation.
Continue reading Migrating away from Picasa 3Benchmarking QuickSync on Broadwell and Skylake
We’re in the process of building out some new Linux-based video encoders, and we want to output to a LOT of different destinations: live streams, archived versions on disk, high-quality versions for future editing, JPEG stills, etc.
QuickSync is a great way to get more out of our processors by offloading the encoding to the GPU. To figure out what architecture to invest in, we ran some tests with a Broadwell processor, the Core i7 5775C (3.3 GHz), and a Skylake processor, the Core i7-6700K (4.0 GHz).
Continue reading Benchmarking QuickSync on Broadwell and SkylakeBuilding FFMPEG with support for Decklink Capture and QuickSync encoding (Skylake edition)
NOTE: this document covers Intel’s Media Server Studio 2017. If you want to use Media Server Studio 2016 with an older processor, see this article.
With the release of Media Server Studio 2017, Intel provides Linux with the ability to leverage QuickSync on Skylake processors. This is a welcome development, as Skylake’s graphics capabilities are significantly better than previous generations of Core processors.
This article outlines how we built ffmpeg to capture video from a Blackmagic Design DeckLink mini and encode it using Intel’s QuickSync technology (h264_qsv).
Continue reading Building FFMPEG with support for Decklink Capture and QuickSync encoding (Skylake edition)Building FFMPEG with support for DeckLink capture and h264_qsv encoding
NOTE: this document covers Intel’s Media Server Studio 2016. If you want to use Media Server Studio 2017 with a Skylake processor, see this article.
ffmpeg has come a long way since the pre-1.0 days. With its elaborate system of routing filter outputs, its ability to capture video from video cards, and support for GPU-based encoding, it has become quite the powerhouse in the video world.
This article outlines how we built ffmpeg to capture video from a Blackmagic Design DeckLink mini and encode it using Intel’s QuickSync technology (h264_qsv).
Continue reading Building FFMPEG with support for DeckLink capture and h264_qsv encoding