I just thought I’d take a moment and share with you the rig I use to process and encode my video collection, which I blogged about in my earlier entry, HERE. It’s nothing fancy and probably seems quite dated to most people, but it does everything I need it to do and is as energy efficient as I can make it.
The computer is an ASUS EeeBox EB1021, which I bought sometime around 2009 or 2010 (still using tech that’s at least 12 years old shouldn’t be a surprise to you if you’re a frequent visitor). I originally bought it to replace a desktop PC that I turned into a web server. I really liked the EeePC 701 netbook, so I thought thee EeeBox was a nice netbook/desktop crossover. Over the years it’s also doubled as a media centre for our home (which is now handled by a Raspberry Pi 3 B+), a home media file server, and now a video processing centre. It has a dual core 64bit AMD processor and 8GB of RAM and HDMI video out. But what I like best about it is that it’s small, consumes very little electricity (a mere 23 Watts) and runs wonderfully with ALT-Linux as it’s OS. I’m also using Window Maker as the window manager, which leaves most of the system resources available for the video processing.
The internal SSD is only 8GB in size, but it is plenty for ALT-Linux. As storage for all of the video files, I have a mini 150GB external USB HDD and LG DVD R/W disc drive. The DVD drive is shared with the Raspberry Pi media “centre”.
The nice thing about this setup is that it takes up very little space and can sit there quietly, doing its work without having to use my “daily driver” netbook to do the grunt work. I can just load up the USB mass storage device with some MP4s from the collection, setup the DVD layout in DeVeDe, then click the “render” button and walk away. In a few hours time, I come back and burn the files to disc. Because the EeeBox only draws 23 Watts of power, the home solar power bank has no difficulty handling it’s energy requirements.
It’s not the cutting edge of home entertainment technology, but I doesn’t have to be. It does what I need it to do and it’s a great way to make use of something I already have that wasn’t doing very much otherwise. And since all of our recorded content isn’t in hi-definition in the first place, I don’t require the EeeBox to process in hi-def, either.
[tag]linux, movies[/tag]