So Much 4K

I got a 4K TV a while back, but I haven’t had any 4K media.

Until yesterday!

A couple of months ago, the encryption on 4K Bluray media was partially broken. It’s not just rip’n’go as it is with DVDs and 2K Bluerays, but, basically, you can anyway. You just download this file that has some hashes in it, and then you can use the wonderful makemkv program to rip the DVDs.

If your disc isn’t covered by the hash file, makemkv will create a dump file which you can then mail to the makemkv guy, who will then do some magic and a couple of days later the hash file will be updated with the necessary stuff to rip it. People are speculating about just what’s going on: Perhaps there’s a hardware thing that’s been “compromised” and can output the required data based on the dump file? Or perhaps the makemkv guy doesn’t feel comfortable releasing the full software because of reasons?

In any case, this means that I can finally watch 4K media on my Linux setup! Yay!

You need a “friendly” drive, though. I’ve got a drive that identifies itself as “BD-RE ASUS BW-16D1HT 3.01”, and it’s a SATA drive that I use a USB3-to-SATA interface to connect to the computer.

See? Totes gorge.

What drives work changes all the time, and the first one I bought (a USB3 LG drive) refused to play along. And things may change at any point, so if you find one that works, never upgrade the firmware.

I tested by ripping Thor: Ragnarok, and the resulting file was 50GB big. (The normal 2K Bluray is 25GB. Logical.)

But then the problem is: How do you play this stuff? It’s way too large to decode and render in software, so you need hardware support, and that support is only in the latest version of some of the players.

I chose mpv, because they seem to be most up-to-date. The versions that are distributed in Debian are way too old. So you have to build from source.

You need mpv itself, ffmpeg and libav, apparently, and all quite recent. Clone them all, build and install ffmpeg and libav, and then build mpv using that weirdo waf build system. (The instructions are on the mpv page.)

And now I can watch Thor! On Linux! Whoho!

I have an Nvidia card, so my command line is “mpv –vo=opengl –hwdec=cuda-copy”. And is 4K better than 2K?

Just look at Chris Whatsisname’s eyebrows in 4K:

Compare to 2K:

Ewww! You can’t even count the hairs in 2K! So horrible!

And now… I’m going to watch some more Bergman sourced from an 80s VHS tape upconverted to DVD.

BTLXVI 1983: The School for Wives

The School for Wives (Hustruskolan). Ingmar Bergman. 1983. ⭐⭐⭐⭐★★.

This play was rehearsed by Alf Sjöberg (the director), but he died and Bergman decided (as a tribute) to film the piece for TV.

So it’s the usual kind of Molière farce. It’s funny, of course and the actors are great. It’s very filmed theatre, though. Not that that’s a bad thing.

I almost didn’t recognise Stellan Skarsgård. He’s so young here! And very funny.

This post is part of the 87 Bergman Things series.

BTLXV 1982: Fanny & Alexander

Fanny & Alexander. Ingmar Bergman. 1982. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐.

Bergman’s final “real” film, and like some of the preceding ones, there’s a TV series version and a shorter theatrical release. I’ve seen the TV version a couple of times before, so this time I’m watching the theatrical edit.

And it’s restored gloriously by Criterion on Bluray. I should have gotten the Criterion releases of some of the previous films, too, instead of just relying on the DVD collection. Which is nice and all, but it’s, like DVD.

Bergman certainly ended this part of his career on an up note: It’s his most beloved film; the only film of his that has become a sentimental staple on (Scandinavian) TV.

The poor reception of From the Life of the Marionettes appears to have acted as a spur to Bergman, inspiring in him the necessary energy to carry through the biggest film project Sweden had ever witnessed. He had been on the verge of calling it a day as a filmmaker, but found himself unable to do so. ‘When you’re young’, he observed, ‘you can tell yourself that if it goes to hell, then you can always do something else. But the older you get, the more afraid you become. Afraid of not being able to live up to your own quality demands, of not coming up to the mark.

Well, he found the right film to go out on. Despite winning all the Oscars, it’s a wonderful film.

Gunn Wållgren is amazing. And the girl playing Fanny. And Harriet Andersson as the char lady! Wonderful. And Stina Ekblad! Wow!

Max von Sydow was originally cast as the eeeeevil bishop (but that didn’t happen due to him wanting a higher fee, something he later described as his life’s worst mistake). And I just don’t see that at all. He couldn’t be that eeeevil!!!

I can see why Bergman semi-disowned the theatre version: It’s really abrupt and kinda devolves into a Gothic horror story. The TV series version is better, but it’s still awesome.

This post is part of the 87 Bergman Things series.

Fast Music, or: USB Is Weird

I have my music on an USB3 RAID5 consisting of three external disks connected to one of these, which isn’t a bad little computer: It’s has a 1.7GHz i7-3517UE (Ivy Bridge) CPU, so it’s small, but not horribly slow.

But then one of the disks went AWOL and I thought that perhaps it was time to upgrade the disk array. It’s about seven years old, after all, and surely things have gotten better in the meantime.

My main use case, is, well, it’s a file server that I play music off of:

That’s not a very strenuous task: It basically has to feed out FLAC files over NFS faster than my stereo machine (pictured above) can play them, and basically no machine made after 1987 is too slow for that task.

But my Emacs-based music player doesn’t do any caching of metadata, so if I ask it “show me all the 8K records I have in chronological order”, it has to read eight thousand files, and that takes a while if the disk is slow. This is a problem that has grown year by year, of course, so it’s another reason to explore faster disks.

(I mean, I could add a caching system to my music system, but to quote what Leonard Nimoy said in The Empire Strikes Back: “Meh.”)

So I got a couple of USB3 SSDs. Splurge! I connected them up to the Intense PC and started copying things over. I wondered how slow the original RAID was, and it turned out to be 50MB/s, which is very slow, indeed. With the new disks, I should get like, er, more! MORE!

Copying finished, I did indeed get higher speed. 100MB/s. Which is pitiful. The native speed of the SSD should be 500MB/s, but given USB3, it should be slower, but not 20% of the speed.

So after much head-scratching, I noticed that the CPU was pegged to 100% whenever I read intensively from the disks. Is it possible that USB is such a crappy system that a 1.7GHz Xeon CPU from some years ago would be the bottleneck here?

So I extended a USB3 cable to the other server I had in the same closet, which I had bought a month earlier to do the RAID for my film collection:

It has a i5-7260U CPU @ 2.20GHz, so not much difference in Hurtzes, but it’s a 7th gen Intel CPU, and the other machine has a 3rd gen.

And… Wow! 320MB/s reading speed! 3x faster than the older machine, with the same SSDs, USB3 hub and everything.

I quickly rejuggled my setup and made that machine do the /music array, too, and sighed a breath of relief.

Now I can play music six times faster than before! Whoho!

But then!

The RAID went AWOL, always with the same messages about “tag#0 FAILED”, “USB disconnect” and “I/O error” on various /dev/sdx-es.

I first suspected the USB3 hub, so I got a new one… A couple of days later, the same thing. Tried a different USB3 cable (it’s always the cable!); same thing.

Of course, after each time this happens I have to rebuild the RAID, things get inconsistent and stuff.

Finally, I move the USB from the port on the left there to the right…

And two weeks later, still haven’t had a single disk brown-out.

So: The takeaway here is: 1) USB is a janky thing. It’s not quite like SCSI in olden days (no goat sacrifices needed), but it’s janky. 2) If your USB is slow, get a faster CPU.

The good thing about USB setups like this is that, in my experience, once you get them going satisfactorily, they’re pretty stable. Unless you do something crazy like insert a new USB device. Then all bets are off.

Of course, having a machine with room for plenty of SATA disks internally would be better, but I’ve never seen one that’s a) small and IV) allows easy access to disks that have failed and have to be replaced.

But look!

I can now display all the albums from 1975 by the snap of your fingers! If your fingers snap really slowly. But still!

And since the /dvd disks spin down automatically, my computer setup is now 100% without anything mechanical moving around normally, and I can walk past that closet without hearing any humming sounds.

Well, beyond my tinnitus, that is.

BTLXIV 1980: From the Life of the Marionettes

From the Life of the Marionettes (Aus dem Leben dem Marionetten). Ingmar Bergman. 1980. ⭐⭐⭐⭐★★.

Bergman called this his only real German film: Conceived, written and filmed while Bergman was in his German exile. And it certainly feels like an outlier in Bergman’s career. For one, the audio quality is way beneath Bergman’s usual standards.

Not only does this have none of Bergman’s usual cast; it has very few of his normal crew. Sven Nykvist (behind the camera) is on board, though, so things aren’t completely new.

I’ve seen some people say that it’s their favourite Bergman film, and it’s probably just something they say to sound interesting. It’s not a bad film, but it’s like Bergman had a fever fantasy about German people. It’s a bit overwrought and exploitative.

But there’s some very nice scenes here. Like… when Tim’s talking to Katarina in Tim’s flat.

This post is part of the 87 Bergman Things series.