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One of the side effects of the RAID-mode oops incident has been having to re-rip and encode my Blu-rays and DVDs. At this point, most of the anime collection is basically done, but movies are in the “As needed” case because of the time/effort.

Recently, I was in the mood both, for watching Pacific Rim and taking a look at one of my original reference videos from back when I setup my previous AVC/x264 presets in HandBrake. I.e., Prometheus. In the years since then, I shifted over to an HEVC/x265 and slowly started to adopt it. Most discs since then have been anime or few and far in-between, so not as large a sample set.

So, naturally, this was the preset I chose when ripping Pacific Rim. However, I found myself disappointed in the video quality. Fortunately, I still enjoyed it greatly–as one of my favorite films and one that I haven’t seriously watched in a few years.

In particular, the opening sequence and numerous cases of darker scenes exhibited artifacts. Now, my original AVC preset wasn’t perfect but it wasn’t that bad either. Taking the first chapter, I decided to do a bunch of experiments, focused on the parts most prone to artifacts. The logo’s background fire effect, the star field, and the breach, followed by the more general video quality of the next 5~6 minutes of the opening.

EncoderQualitySize (MB)Bitrate (Mbit/s)TimeComments
Blu-rayN/A38,32022.8N/AReference Blu-ray ripped with MKV.
x264RF 201,01014.806:05Reference AVC.
Limited artifacts
x265RF 18949.113.813:11Like reference AVC
RF 2079411.511:39Close to AVC reference.
Not as good as RF 18.
RF 22688.19.806:56Reference HEVC
Too many artifacts.
Video ToolboxCQ 801,78025.701:08Close to AVC reference.
(not as good)
CQ 701,08015.701:08Close to AVC reference.
(not as good)
CQ 22448.96.501:07Like a mid 2000s video game
(only better)
CQ 18453.26.301:07Like a mid 2000s video game
(really)
CQ 104246.101:07Like a mid 2000s video game
(too close for comfort)

The AVC and HEVC reference referred to above, are my presets. For x264, high profile level 4.1 was used with the “medium” preset. For x265 auto was used for both profile/level, with the “fast” preset. The only adjustment for the experiments were the Constant Quality, which for those encoders is a logarithmic scale where higher numbers are worse quality.

For Video Toolbox, I couldn’t find any documentation about the scale but the tests obviously show higher numbers are higher quality. In each case, the “medium” preset was used.

Based on what I found, I’m kind of disappointed with the x265 cases. Perhaps it’s time to experiment with kicking it to the medium preset or enabling a deblocking filter to compensate. For the most part though, the quality is there sufficiently if comparable bitrates are thrown at it. The downside of course is that basically doubles the encoding time from x264.

The Video Toolbox case is more impressive, but also not so useful. I believe the M2’s encoder is a lot better than the ‘Bridge and early ‘Lake era Intel encoders. But in much the same way, they just don’t serve my purposes. To make my M2 achieve good enough quality for streaming, the file sizes balloon to near the original Blu-ray–so may as well not bother transcoding in that case. But still, we’re talking about a speed of 190~200 fps encoding versus about 30-40 fps encoding. I think it’s better suited for video editing than streaming video from my server to my TV.

The difference though is considerable. At the uber quality levels, it’s still subpar for Netflix/YouTube quality at this point, versus a Blu-ray reference.

Partly though, I’m tempted to revert back to using x264 and partly tempted to just leave it at Blu-ray. I didn’t really change from AVC to HEVC to save on disk space, so much as I did it because the more modern codec was now widely available on most of my hardware. The kind of perspective that AVC is still fine, but I assume devices will hold onto HEVC support longer once AVC becomes to new MPEG-2 :D.

There’s also the option to just stick with MakeMKVs output. My entire Blu-ray collection probably represents about 4 TB to 5 TB of data at this point, and ahem, it’s an 8 TB storage array with 6 TB free. My storage concerns were pretty much solved two sets of hard drives ago, back when my server’s storage was made up of 3 TB drives rather than 8s. The playback concerns, well, much like HEVC capable devices becoming the norm, most of my devices have less concern with Blu-ray quality bitrates at this point.

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Upside of testing surround sound with Godzilla Minus One: it’s got everything from dialogue to roars and explosions.

Downside: “I must not turn an entire wall into a projector screen just to enjoy TV…”

😂

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The amusing nature of memory consumption and the modern web. Going by Activity Monitor’s memory page as a measure, wikipedia is pretty darn memory efficient at a couple hundred megs–for a website that’s about 95% content aside from the CMS, I’d call that’s pretty good. For sake of a value, one of the random pages loaded were around 180 – 200 MB.

By contrast my own website (also mostly content aside from the CMS) and Google’s home page, burn around 400-500 MB. Which to me, feels excessive, but to be fair, part of why I started to believe in whole-lotta-memory designs was in the 2010s when I realized 2 GB was not enough to surf the web anymore, unless you loved trashing hard drives. Most content-heavy rather than ad heavy websites, fit that description as well.

Now for comparison? A few common news sites that you’ll see just about any compute nerd visit: around 1.5 – 2 GB for basically any article and easily reaching 3 – 4 GB in activity monitor. Largely depending on the amount of ads, and whether or not it’s a website that endeavors to load the content first. So basically, the modern websites consume so much RAM that we should be charging websites for the resources their advertising consumes rather than supporting them by not running ad blockers 😜

Ya know, if you just throw enough videos modern web advertising may be to computer memory usage what the pop up ad was to the 1990s web browsing experience. Seriously, web ads were Really A Lot Worse Back Then ™ when actual pop up windows were allowed.

At this point, I think the only thing that consumes more RAM than the modern web is working with high resolution graphics and artificial intelligence with loads of parameters, lol.

Takikomi Gohan

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Experiments in the kitchen of late have generally revolved around Japanese food and techniques, specifically applications for dashi broth and miso paste.

Tonight’s dinner plan was pretty much a take on takikomi gohan, based on wondering what rice cooked in dashi would taste like. Honestly, I can say that there is only one problem with this entire concept—it smells awesome while the rice is cooking!

Like really, not only was the food delicious and uncomplicated to make…but it felt like driving with delicious food riding shotgun,you know where it smells so good that it’s almost a form of torture having to wait for it 😂.

Yes, I think it’s safe to say that the experiment was yummy 😋

The simple pleasures of coffee

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Today, I decided on a pleasure I haven’t been partaking of lately: freshly ground coffee. For the last few months, I’ve mainly ran the pour over with pre-ground coffee. One of the things I like about my Chemex, is I can actually use regular ol’ ground coffee out of the store and still get decent results. Grinding is optional, unlike my French press.

This morning on the other hand: beans, grinder, and the sweet, sweet joy of fresh coffee. Also, a Peruvian blend that I’ve never tried before 😀.

I personally find it calming to grind and brew coffee, but I also find that I so rarely do since swapping from the French press to the pour over as my main brewing method. The key reason that I swapped over was the convenience of the pour-over’s filters, it’s a lot easier than making sure none of the grounds go down the drain. Clean up is a breeze. Yet, ironically I also consider cleaning the coffee grinder part of the personal therapy of making coffee. It’s just a darn inconvenient part, when you really want some coffee in the morning, lol.

Well, that makes me feel better

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Today, I decided on a little test that’s been on the back burner for a while. See, being on the shorter side, my slacks don’t really go with my shoes as well as they do my boots. It’s also a bother to roll up the pants legs and keep them from unrolling if I’m out for a while. Meanwhile my house shorts aren’t suitable for my typical on-the-go load, thus the experiment: belted cargo shorts. The perfect combo for comfy shoes and still having the usual stuff in my pockets.

As I was getting dressed and putting my socks on, a thought occurred to me. Women can be quite attractive in knee length socks and a skirt. My hairy legs with shorts and boot length socks on the other hand, I imagine would make someone cringe as not the Zettai Ryōiki that they desire to see 😅. Being more of a boots and trousers type, I haven’t really worn shorts as outside wear since circa high school, but it’s an efficient solution for times where I want to where my shoes rather than gear up in boots just for a quick errand.

To the woman at Publix who complicated my Vibram Furoshikis, thanks, you really made my day a little brighter!

Resident Evil Village – 1980s Live-Action Movie

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On one hand, I pretty much decided to watch this clip because, “I’m damn tired of seeing this as I scroll by.” That really summarizes how I feel about most of the AI generated yada-yada that pops up whenever I visit YouTube.

On the other hand, it both kind of makes me wish that someone would make a good horror movie adaptation of Resident Evil Village, and makes me want to play the game again….

While I can’t say that RE7 really did it for me, so much as I was glad for more of a return to the game’s roots, I really did enjoy Village. Discounting remakes, Village was probably the best resident evil game since RE4.

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Reading “BOFH: The USB stick always comes back – until it doesn’t,” I’m quite sure I’ve known a few sticks that meet this description.

I still remember the pain and suffering that was the performance of USB sticks, back when I had to do some installation framework goodness for an embedded system. The whole live bootable stick was taking about 2 1/2 hours to load per test, so eventually I reached for the pair of USB sticks I was carrying at the time. One of those $10 sticks reduced the I/O wait time down to about 35 minutes, making for a much faster development cycle; so much so that production bought a bundle of those for use in the lab.

And then there was that other $10 stick, which I never realized was so drastically slower than the first. That sucker was so damn slow that it was “Free to good home USB stick, just don’t bring it back!” and of course, I met that stick more than a few times over the years.

Ya know, I should’ve just used the soldiering iron 🔥

MGS Delta: Snake Eater

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At last, the date is announced!

Pretty much, if they can pull off Not Screwing Up, I’m likely to be happy. MGS 3: Snake Eater was one of the most influential games of my teenaged years, and much of its aging owes to the dated controls and limited video output modes of a PlayStation 2. Knowing about Delta, is the main reason I haven’t been playing the recent PC release of the original, that and wanting to dig into the first MGS.

Please, Konami, don’t screw this up 🙂