FFmpeg can work with a lot of different codecs for both encoding and decoding video files. It is used as a backend by video editors like Shotcut and media processing library frameworks like MLT Multimedia Framework. In this post we shall take a look at some of the most commonly used video codecs, their features… Read More »
HDR vs SDR HDR (High Dynamic Range) is the newer and more advanced version of display technology that shows more colorful and brighter pictures on displays that support it. It is much superior to its predecessor SDR. Videos in HDR format use 10-bits for storing color information and use different color transfer functions compared to… Read More »
Intel Quick Sync Video is the technology used in intel integrated gpu’s to enable hardware accelerated encoding and decoding of videos. It supports multiple codecs like H.264(avc), H.265 (hevc), MPEG-2 etc. In this quick tutorial we take a quick look at how to use this technology inside ffmpeg to encode and decode videos. Install non-free… Read More »
Iotop is an open-source and free utility Linux command used to display the statistics of disk input/output by processor/threads and print the summary which gets refreshed every second. It is quite similar to the top command, except that iotop monitors just disk i/o and not other metrics. This command is particularly useful for system administrators… Read More »
sar (System Activity Reporter) is a command line tool used to collect, report, and analyze system activity information in Linux and other Unix-based operating systems. In other words, it gathers information and provides insights on system activity, such as CPU utilization, memory usage, I/O operations, network activity, disk usage, power management, and much more, which… Read More »
In another article, we learned the basic docker commands like how to launch a container and connect to it via terminal and run commands. We saw that a basic docker image like “ubuntu” does not have commands like ifconfig, ip, and ping installed by default and we could install them with the apt command. But… Read More »
Ram Timings are an important part of the ram specifications. They look like a series of number like this: 22-22-22-52. These timing numbers indicate how fast or slow the ram would perform in conjunction with the cpu. Higher timings indicate that the ram takes more time to internal operations, and is slower. Lower timings mean… Read More »
RAM Speed (read and write) is crucial to the overall performance of the system. Having a fast cpu but slow ram can slow down a system in demanding work-loads like video editing and gaming. Ram size and speed are different factors. Ram size determines how much data can be stored in the system, whereas the… Read More »
The name of the nslookup command is an abbreviated version of “name server lookup”. nslookup sends a request to the local domain name system (DNS) server asking for information from its DNS records. In response, the DNS server returns the IP address or relevant domain information for a specific website or server. However, it can… Read More »
Multipass is a lightweight, command-line virtualization tool developed by Canonical that allows you to create and manage Ubuntu virtual machines (VM) on your local machine. It lets you run multiple isolated instances of Ubuntu for development and testing. Multipass is cross-platform, which means you can run it on macOS, Windows, and Linux. However, on Linux,… Read More »
Docker is a popular “containerization” platform that allows developers to run applications inside isolated environments called containers. Containers are similar to virtual machines, however they do not run an entire operating system (like virtualbox, qemu). In principle containers are somewhat similar to the classic that could be used to setup a completely isolated environment within… Read More »
If you check the window outerwidth on a maximised browser window, you should get the resolution width of your screen or display in general. For example when I run the following code (in console) in Firefox I get 1920px which is my resolution width: window.outerWidth 1920 On Google Chrome however, the reported dimension is different… Read More »
OpenCL is a general purpose computing api that is designed to be hardware accelerated with a supporting gpu and driver. On Linux this api is supported by all major gpu vendors including nvidia, intel and amd. In this quick tutorial we take a look at how to check if your system support opencl api (with… Read More »
Disk I/O speed is an indicator of how fast the system and read/write to the disk. Usually nvme ssds are the fastest and hard drives and external usb flash drives are the slowest. There are many commands that can be used to benchmark the performance of storage disks on linux. For e.g. sysbench, dd and… Read More »
Switch to better DNS servers Switch to better dns servers like google dns or open dns. I personally use google dns servers: 8.8.8.8 , 8.8.4.4 Right click on the network management icon on the system tray and “Configure Network Connections”. Go to IPv4 tab and enter the dns servers as shown below. You can also… Read More »
Qemu(+KVM) is a powerful virtualization solution for linux oses. KVM (Kernel based Virtual Machine) is a module built into the linux kernel that provides it virtualization capabilities. Qemu is a hardware emulator that uses kvm to provides all necessary features to create and launch virtual machines with guest operating systems. The other more commonly used… Read More »
Vulkan API is the successor of OpenGL the cross platform api standard for hardware accelerated 3D graphics. It is a cross platform alternative to DirectX which is windows specific only. All major gpu vendors including nvidia, amd and intel provide vulkan support either through their own drivers or via the Mesa graphics library. In this… Read More »
If you want to monitor the temperature of your cpu while running some intensive application you can plot the graph and see it in realtime. This is often done to benchmark the efficiency of the cooling system and the thermal performance of the cpu. In this article we take a quick look at some tools… Read More »
The decode-dimms program from i2c-tools package can be used to extract spd information from the ram modules which provides details about the module including the timings, clock speed, internal layout of the memory blocks including rank and bank count. The command can be installed with the following commands: sudo apt-get install i2c-tools sudo modprobe eeprom… Read More »
So you have downloaded an iso which could be a linux installation or live iso or a windows iso or something other operating system. Now if you are planning to burn it to an actual disk like a cd or dvd, it would be a nice idea to first check if the iso if properly… Read More »