Two little cores had two little chores...

Tovid (or more precisely, dvdauthor) doesn't want to know about the .vob of Keith Potger on Spicks and Specks, so I decided to transcode it to something. Preferably, something that is virtually lossless. And then Tovid could convert it back to DVD format.

I had the idea of converting it to DV format, but I couldn't be bothered finding the correct options for ffmpeg on the command-line. I toyed with the idea of putting the footage into Kdenlive and converting it to DV that way, but then I wondered what Kino's video transcoding capabilities were like.

I dragged the VOB onto Kino and it immediately offered to convert it to DV format. Precisely what I was looking for! I noted that the program seemed to be multithreaded in its conversion, but it wasn't maxing out my processor. I guessed that the final DV file would be 5 gigabytes (in the end, it was 5.4 gigs - good guestimate)

At the same time, I wanted to Blacklight the movie "Lovewrecked" to put onto my Walkman, so I did that.

And I was met with a beautiful sight in the System Monitor: Both cores working at 100% of capacity.

Lm-sensors doesn't read my CPU's temperature correctly, it is always too low. But the temperature DOUBLED from 21 degrees C at idle, to 42 degrees  C at 100% load. I dreaded to think what the real CPU temperature was - 60 C? 70 C? My chassis fan is set to medium these days, and the actual CPU fan speed wasn't going up much so the heat must have been dispersing correctly, but I still got worried and brought a pedestal fan out to blow straight into the empty floppy drive bay :-)

Heh. But I *love* to see both cores earning their keep. It's the first time I've ever thought "Gee, I wish I had bought the Q6600 instead"^!

^Note: Even with the Intel Core 2 Quad, the encoding processes might still have just used 2 cores. I was encoding with a total of 6 logistical GHz this time; if I had a Core 2 Quad using 2 cores, it would have been just 4.4 logistical GHz.