tamilsweet – Freelance Web Developer

I was searching for a way to burn few .MKV files to DVD disc as most DVD players doesn’t support MKV files directly.
After a bit of search, I found DVDFlick.

DVDFlick – Short Review

DVDFlick is an Open Source Windows Application to burn DVD. It supports various video/audio formats and looks pretty good with load of nice features.

I tested the application by trying to burn a 2.1GB .mkv video(Blu-Ray – 720p x264) downloaded from torrents. My Sony DVD player failed to play the video as .mkv from USB and hence I decided to burn it to DVD.
I used DVDFlick and I let all the configurations remain default and it showed that the final output will be about 3.9GB and 46fps. I decided to just try out without doing any changes to configuration as it was the first time I’m using this application.
It was very slow to start with about 10min for 1% of video decoding and due to workload I just forgot about this. After several hours I remembered about this and checked the PC, by this time the burning was completed and it had took about 3hr 46min. Yes, it takes quite a bit of time as it has to decode the video and audio and then encode them to DVD format.
Also, don’t forget to leave free space for temporary file, by default DVDFlick stores the decoded file under My Documents. For this 2.1GB file it needed about 10GB free space.

Now the important part, the quality of video and sound!!??
Believe me it was excellent as it was before in the .mkv format. I thought of trying some other application if this didn’t go well and after using DVDFilck, I don’t think one will think about other options.

Merits:

• Supports all standard video formats, almost all available formats
• Allows us to configure all the output options
• Open Source, means FREE. No shareware/freeware version, No signup, No trial version.

De-merits:

• Slow, but we certainly can live with this.

This blog is running in a linode vps instance. I subscribed for plan Linode 360 last month and setup this site myself. The steps to setup the server can be found in previous article – Linode VPS setup. I feel like setting up everything just few days back but actually a month has gone by. Time is running so fast!

So far the server is running smoothly without any problem except a particular instance. For the first few of days there was nearly no activity in the server. After two days, I got couple of alert mails from linode.

Linode Alert – disk io rate – tamilsweet (linode20561)
Your Linode, tamilsweet, has exceeded the notification threshold (300) for disk io rate by averaging 450.13 for the last 2 hours.

Linode Alert – CPU Usage – tamilsweet (linode20561)
Your Linode, tamilsweet, has exceeded the notification threshold (40) for CPU Usage by averaging 99.7% for the last 2 hours.

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Yesterday, I went to the Animation movie “Monsters Vs Aliens” with my Friends in Sathyam Cinemas, Chennai.

Monsters vs Aliens - 3D Animation Movie Poster

Monsters Vs Aliens is a 3D Animated movie and you get to wear 3D glass to view it. The movie was slightly boring in the first half. Susan (the tall girl in the poster in the right) is hit by a meteor and turns into a monster. She’s then taken to secret government prison or lab(strangely quite big to keep it secret ) headed by General Monger, where she meets 4 other monsters Dr. Cockroach – scientist with cockroach head, BOB – brainless jelly with only one eye, Missing Link – crocodile like creature and Insectosarus – a huge insect(hence not in this poster), that becomes a butterfly in the climax. Susan turned huge absorbing a substance called quantonium and Gallaxhar, an alien is in search of it and sends a giant robot to extract the substance from susan.

The giant robot lands in US. US president(comedian of this movie) comes to talk with the robot and plays the Crazy frog tune . The robot gets annoyed and destroys everything and the huge US military couldn’t do anything. The General suggests to use Monsters to fight against the Aliens. The monsters fight sucessfully against the robot and Gallaxhar decides to come to earth to complete the misson.
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