Driver does not support any RC mode compatible with selected options (supported modes: CQP)

Rendering a video with KDEnlive 22.08.1 under Ubuntu 22.04 on the Acer Nitro5 with the hardware accelerated VAAPI Intel H264 profile aborts with this error: Driver does not support any RC mode compatible with selected options (supported modes: CQP). I'm not deep enough into the KDEnlive architecture to understand what I'm doing, my superficial understanding … Continue reading Driver does not support any RC mode compatible with selected options (supported modes: CQP) →

Acer Nitro 5 power button broken in Ubuntu 20.04

After an BIOS update, the Acer Nitro 5's power button doesn't work any more under Ubuntu 20.04. The smart folks at Mint figured out [1] what's wrong, but I couldn't get their solution working and I've long given up on opening launchpad bugs just to watch them triage. Also I love a good workaround, so … Continue reading Acer Nitro 5 power button broken in Ubuntu 20.04 →

VLC performance on the Acer Nitro 5

Quick note: under Ubuntu 20.04, VLC's performance can be greatly improved for x264 codecs by changing the default setting: Tools -> Preferences -> All -> input/codecs -> Video codecs -> FFmpeg -> Hardware decoding -> VA-PI video decoder. Note: not "VA-PI video decoder (DRM)" This applies to VLC 3.0.x on Ubuntu 20.04. An annoying side … Continue reading VLC performance on the Acer Nitro 5 →

RAID + dm-integrity vs bit rot

In Building the perfect, cheap NAS I discuss bit rot which silently kills digital archives; my solution chosen back then builds on parchive which adds in a manual process redundancy to archives. This redundancy can be used to identify and correct bit rot to some extent. The issue with this approach is that it's manual … Continue reading RAID + dm-integrity vs bit rot →

Slow rsync on ext4 filesystem

On a rather hefty rsync job between two local ext4 filesystems, writing on the target (a mechanical hard drive which should be able to sustain 100 mb/s) would fluctuate strongly (between 0 mb/s and 160 mb/s) and effectively slow down to a few mb/s on average after a few minutes. While I didn't find the … Continue reading Slow rsync on ext4 filesystem →