2016 — 23 April: Saturday
Time clearly passes.1 Confirmation of that came when I hauled in a suspect disk for questioning last night. I took apart the enclosure for investigative probing and discovered the 500GB Seagate drive therein was now over a decade old. Lord knows which long-defunct PC it had first spun in. But since it had not responded well to treatment it's joined others on the discard pile.
Meanwhile...
... in the wee small hours of the night Hedwig flew in bearing the missing piece of the magic spell I had been trying to invoke yesterday evening. This was after failing to be able to play a new video file I have that is encoded with super-duper HEVC.
I already know that my current level of VLC cannot handle HEVC video — and I've been dubious about upgrading that since I don't wish to screw up what is, after all, my default player which I use daily. My game plan was to use "Handbrake" to transmigrate the soul of this troublesome file to something that my Oppo Blu-ray player can live with, when sucking it from the NAS for playback on the Kuro plasma screen. Oops. I hadn't yet installed Handbrake in all the many months since first lurching into the arms of Linux. No problemo. Just fire up the Software Manager, type "handbrake" in the search field, click on the "Install" button. Job done?
Well, not quite. The version of "Handbrake" in the Mint repository is too old to handle2 HEVC files. I can fix that. There's surely a PPA knocking around with a more recent build. Mrs Google will know where to find it. She did.
A sorry litany...
... of errors, I fear, as I stepped off the Righteous Path of Upgrade no less than three times in four steps! I didn't actually perform the "purge", but merely used "Uninstall" from the GUI s/w manager (fail #1 at step #1). And then I didn't perform the update (fail #2 at step #3) because the instructions on the PPA page forgot3 to remind me to do that. Which explains the slightly paradoxical message (fail #3 at step #4) I got about the package I wanted not being there, but being needed by other stuff.
So, for my future reference:
1. $ sudo apt-get purge handbrake 2. $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stebbins/handbrake-releases 3. $ sudo apt-get update 4. $ sudo apt-get install handbrake-gtk
I have about 15 minutes left before I'd have to rename "breakfast" as "brunch". More emails intervened, plus a set of packages. 'Twas ever thus. And it's a lovely sunny still-just-about morning out there. "Feed me, Seymour!"
I finally caved...
... and splashed out 99p on 10 minutes of Disco Delight:
Not heard for four years! And, I'm pretty sure last time I looked it had yet to be re-issued.
Tara Jaff...
... is a Kurdish harp player who had the brilliant idea of playing her native music on a Celtic harp, accompanied by the Kurdish version of a tambour. Amazing sound:
It took a bit of tracking down. And is quite unlike the Disco stuff :-)
My video "jiggery pokery"...
... is averaging 200 hi-def frames per second on BB Mk III (a 4-core 4GHz Intel Core i7-4790K). This is using an SSD. Four and a half years ago, I was running Handbrake on BlackBeast Mk I (an AMD 6-core) handling standard definition NTSC DVDs, reading from an optical drive, and writing to spinning rust. Not a scientific comparison. Still, I've certainly found a way of driving up CPU usage:
It just popped up a window saying "Put down that cocktail! Your Handbrake queue is done!" I shall see how Skylark (a 4-core 4GHz Intel Core i7-6700K) manages on the same task.
Hedwig flapped past...
... dropping off another incantation. This one adds a plug-in to VLC that enables it to play HEVC files locally, just in case I wish to. I waved my magic wand, chanted the necessary spells into a terminal window...
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:strukturag/libde265 sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install vlc-plugin-libde265
... then opened the HEVC file with VLC and watched it play perfectly. Neat.
In another life...
... I might just have become a physicist. (Not so much "The Road" as the "Drunkard's Walk" not taken, heh?) Interesting essay. (I recall dear Mama being strangely upset to read the plot synopsis of that Frederik Pohl novel, though I still don't understand what upset her.)