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.

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.

A little panic peeped in! And the fact that I haven’t setup any security, flashed a second. I logged into the server immediately and checked the last login details to see if someone else gained access to the server. I just used the unix command last. Everything looked fine and logs only from my system – All IPs from BSNL, my BroadBand provider. Then I scrolled back my thoughts and recalled what I did earlier.

I had installed e107 – content management system. I wrote a WordPress plugin and the client needed e107 plugin with same features. So, I downloaded the e107 and installed it and it took about 15 mins. I reviewed few of the existing e107 plugins. This happened couple of hours before I got those alert mails.

I checked the CPU usage using top and MySQL was consuming nearly 100% CPU.  Since, the server was idle with nearly no traffic, I just restarted the MySQL server and that brought down the CPU usage to normal. So, its obviously some issue with e107 script and I didn’t had much time or any purpose to find the issue with the script. I haven’t uninstalled the script yet and it still can be found @ http://www.tamilg.in/demo/e107/

Baring this small instance the server is running smoothly. This Linode VPS instance currently have two live sites, obviously this site – http://www.tamilg.in/ and a fresh blog of my friend Gayathri – http://www.gayathri-frenzy.com/

The traffic is not huge enough to really find the performance of the server. The maximum page view per day so far is little over 1600 recorded last Wednesday – 20 May. I hardly imagined 1000+ visits per day within just a month and that was mainly because of posts on DLF IPL 2009. The linode manager has performance graphs available for last 24 hrs, last 30 days and for each month.

Here is the graphs for the past 30 days. i.e from 23rd April – 22nd May.

Linode VPS Instance – CPU Usage graph – last 30 days

Linode VPS web hosting - CPU Usage for last 30 days

The CPU usage is nearly zero, except for the little spike caused by e107 as explained earlier in this post.

Linode VPS Instance – Traffic graph – last 30 days

Linode VPS web hosting - Server Traffic for last 30 days

The traffic was considerably increase last week crossing 1000 visits per day and hence the little peaks at the end of the month/graph.

Linode VPS Instance – I/O rate graph – last 30 days

Linode VPS web hosting - IO rate for last 30 days

The I/O rate very similar to traffic graph, just reflecting the traffic.

All in all – So far so good!

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.

Gallaxhar comes to earth in his huge space ship. Susan and other monsters fight with Gallaxhar and destroys his space ship in the end.

The funny part was the meeting often held in a secure US office. The office has 2 huge red button, 1 to make coffee and the other to launch nuclear attack. The US President in the movie often goes to hit button to lauch nuclear attack trying to prepare coffee and every time he’s stopped by the alarming members of the office.

Monsters vs Aliens - Larger Image

Plus:

• Realistic animation.
• Kids will enjoy the movie.

Minus:

• Though the movie is a 3-D movie there isn’t much noticable 3-D effects.
• Not upto Hollywood standards.
• You have to pay extra for the 3-D glass. (Rs.20 extra for the glass and has to be returned back!!!).

Overall, a below par Hollywood movie, worth watching once. Have a look at the clips in the Monsters Vs Aliens Official website.