How I Transcoded 11TB of Media Under A Week

The answer to the question "how did I transcode 11TB of media in under a week" will not shock you. In fact, there's really only one answer: I threw a disgusting amount of compute power at the problem. Now, I know what you're thinking. Throw enough computer at something and it will break, but the design used to solve a problem is just as important as the power you have behind it. If you don't use the power correctly, then you don't truly have power.

Some FFMPEG Commands I Find Useful

This post is more for me than for you. I've been working with FFMPEG and AVCONV quite a bit recently, and I've had to reuse these commands quite a bit over that time. I'm putting them here so I don't lose them, and I also hope that someone finds them useful at some point in the future.  So, without further ado, here are some FFMPEG things I do a lot.

Generating Colorful Random Backgrounds in the Browser

This is a short one because I was working on too many things at once and I wasn't able to get any of them done. So i figured I'd talk about a small thing I made a while back for some of my web pages. It's a random blurred color generator that creates random backgrounds every time it's rendered. I'll take you through my process of how I started with a prototype on the server side and slowly made my way to the final client side product.

Virtual Reality Using Your Computer as a Controller

I've been playing around with ThreeJS more and more now and I'm still not getting the hang of it. But I still enjoy using it even though I'm struggling through the darkness. I wanted to do something with its VR capabilities, but I also didn't want to pay an arm and a leg to get a decent VR headset. So I did the next best thing. I broke out my cardboard and played around with it. The results weren't Vive quality for sure, but for $15, it's exceptional what you can do with it. Unfortunately, it's hard to control something like this without a controller like the Vive. So I did something like Oculus did - made the computer the controller - but I did it without wires.

Render Farm - 3D Edition!

A few months ago I wrote a simple render farm in PHP using imagemagick. But it could only deal with very simple animations in 2D space. What if we could deal with complex scenes in 3D space? And, what if instead of using hacky HTTP transactions to move data back and forth, we used Socket.io to form a true protocol? Well, that's exactly what we're going to do here.

Building a Basic Render Farm

Parallel computing is really neat. Obviously, it's important in science where you can break computational tasks into smaller parts and distribute the work among many discrete systems. But for rendering, it's incredibly important. Take Pixar, for example. They have a massive rendering farm and yet it sometimes takes them more than a day to render a single frame because of the complexity of the scene (hundreds of lights, shadows, etc.) This project clearly won't reach those levels, it's just to show that it can be done fairly easily to tween images across another using ImageMagick on multiple computers.