Raspberry Pi Handbrake Encode Times

As a test I encoded a test video in 3 different environments to see what would happen.  Video was a test 45 minute standard definition DVD rip.

Not surprisingly the MacBook pro won hands down.  All systems were reading and writing to my NAS storage via NFS or Samba.  The Macbook Pro core i7 incidentally was connected via Wifi. Copying the video to the local SD drive would most likely have made it even quicker!  The ESXI VM was competing with another five active VM's on my test server.

The Raspberry Pi still managed a respectable 195 minutes, which for the low power, cool running device it is and given the architecture is still pretty impressive.

Handbrake would have been doing the encode purely in CPU and not using the Pi's GPU either.

Given these timing I can see no reason why the Pi cannot make a nice little network attached encoding unit which can file watch for files to covert on the network and crunch away quietly.

Compile and install Handbrake on a Raspberry Pi

All our DVD's and films are stored digitally on our media centre setup in our house.  ITunes on a virtual machine looking at the main NAS store and an Apple TV 3 is the device of choice for viewing these.

I had a a set of AVI's to convert  and I wondered if I could utilise the raspberry pi I currently have connected to the network, rather than using a virtual machine on my test vm stack or pulling them down to my laptop for conversion.   I use a Handbrake preset as a reliable way of doing conversions  so my intention is to replicate this on the pi.

These instructions work to install Handbrake 0.98 on the pi.  No pre built packages currently exist so you need to compile from source code.  Im interested in using the command line version here, not sure if this will work for the X windows front end.  But I just want something which can run efficiently at the command line.

First Download Handbrake Source Code:

This can be got from:

http://handbrake.fr/rotation.php?file=HandBrake-0.9.8.tar.bz2

Extract source tar:

 tar -xjf handbrake.tar.bz2

Download and Install Dependancies:

There are a lot of dependancies, but ive managed to get it down to the following.

sudo apt-get install subversion yasm build-essential autoconf libtool zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev libfribidi-dev intltool libglib2.0-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev libgtk2.0-dev libgudev-1.0-dev libwebkit-dev libnotify-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev

Configure and Compile:

In the extracted directory:

sudo ./configure

Change to the build directory and build.

cd ./build

sudo make

Install HandBrake:

sudo make install

Run Handbrake Command Line:

You can run handrake from:

/usr/local/bin/HandBrakeCLI 

I will post later some timings to see how a HandBrake encode on the pi compares to other platforms for speed.

Installing VMware tools on debian

So whenever I install a new debian install onto ESXI the first thing is too install vmware tools.   After finding many versions of how to do it this is a simple list of the steps needed. The following works for ESXI 5.0 but should be the same in other flavours of VMware.

Firstly select install VMware Tools in vSphere Client.

Next mount the vmware tools image as a CD:

cd /mnt

mkdir cd

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cd/

I always copy VMware tools out of the install CD:

cp VMwareTools-8.6.5-621624.tar.gz /tmp/

Next extract the tar:

cd /tmp/

tar -xf VMwareTools-8.6.5-621624.tar.gz 

Make sure necessary kernel headers and gcc are installed:

 apt-get update

 apt-get install gcc linux-headers-$(uname -r)

Finally change to the install directory and run install:

 cd vmware-tools-distrib/

 ./vmware-install.pl