Recently I’ve been doing some video editing an really started to struggle. For some reason in everything but totem video playback sucked big time. Its was struggling to load the content of the HD and would playback 5 seconds, pause 2, playback 5.

Anyway I decided to try optimise my set-up as if it was an SSD (after all there is 4gb worth of SSD on it). And I’ve got to say big improvement! Video playback is now seamless in all applications. The biggest difference was changing the elevator setting to noop.

If you want to try it see http://opentechnow.blogspot.com/2010/02/linux-ssd-optimization-guide.html for a guide

Update: Still seem to have some issues when launching mplayer by click on a file, but if I run it from command line it seems fine. I also get the same issue with dvbcut. However the noop change does make things run a lot smother than before

Update 2:  Gnome Media player doesn’t suffer from this issue – you may just want to use that instead!

For this to work you have to:

1. Have a CPU that support Frequency Scaling
2. Have CPU Frequency scaling working
3. Use NUT (Network UPS Tools)

Here what you need to do to get thing working

• Check you what ‘Governors’ you have available
  You need to make sure the correct modules are loaded so that you can scale to the correct settings. To see what you do have loaded run:
  cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_governors
  You’ll need at least powersave and one other. Powersave should set the CPU Frequency to the lowest setting. If you don’t have powersave you’ll need to load the module. As root run:
  modprobe cpufreq_powersave and add cpufreq_powersave to the file
  /etc/modules.

  To test that it is working, ideally run something that force you CPU to 100 for a while (say compress a large folder) and then run
  cpufreq-selector --governor powersave
sleep 1
cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/cpuinfo_cur_freq
cpufreq-selector --governor userspace
sleep 1
cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/cpuinfo_cur_freq

  The first number given should be the lowest CPU frequency and the last should be the highest (assuming the process is using a lot of CPU time still)

• Add a few new items to upssched.conf
  Using you’re favorite editor open up /etc/nut/upssched.conf and add the following line:
  AT ONBATT * START-TIMER powersave 30
AT ONLINE * CANCEL-TIMER powersave
AT ONLINE * START-TIMER userspace 30
AT ONBATT * CANCEL-TIMER userspace
  I’ve used a timer (30 seconds) to smooth out jumpy power from triggering off any actions.
• Add the command to the CMDSCRIPT file to change the CPU frequency govenor

Edit the cmdscript file (the path is given in upssched.conf on the line starting CMDSCRIPT. This file probably doesn’t exist – so just create a new one. Assuming it doesn’t exist add the following lines:
#! /bin/sh
case $1 in
powersave)
/usr/bin/cpufreq-selector --governor powersave && logger -t upssched-cmd "Setting CPU Governor to powersave"
;;
userspace)
/usr/bin/cpufreq-selector --governor userspace && logger -t upssched-cmd "Setting CPU Governor to userspace"
;;
*)
logger -t upssched-cmd "Unrecognized command: $1"
;;
esac

• Test Unplug you’re UPS for 1 min, plug back in and look at /var/log/syslog – you should see that NUTs has throttled you’re CPU.

I haven’t had a power cut since I’ve implemented this, but from looking at the stats from the UPS I should gain another 7 min or so of battery time – an extra 21%. An improvement on this may be stopping some process and task when on battery and starting them again when back on mains. But for now, at least untill the next power cut this will do for me.

Another plus point I have discovered is it plays mp2 – the same format as Radio Stations I record over dvb-t (freeview) are recorded in.

Initial impressions are good – the GUI is more responsive and playback is good. I like the replay gain feature and the crossfade looks promising (it sometimes produces some pops/click when switching between songs of different codecs at the moment). The upgrade was easy to do, patch the current firmware (can be done using a windows gui tool under wine), upgrade as normal and then drop the files onto the machine. To upgrade rockbox you just have to replaced the files on the players hd with the newer ones – no more firmware to upgrades.

The plugins are good too, and the quality of the picture viewer seems better than the iRiver one (at least for non-optimised pics). The only thing it misses is video, but I can drop back to the normal firmware if needed.

I’m using an experimental build – so some of the bugs may be due to this

See Misticriver for the firmware

Pro
+Superfast boot up
+More info
+Skinable
+Quicker GUI
+More Options
+ReplayGain

Cons
-Some features a bit buggy
-Battery life isn’t as good (may be due to some of the options I’m using)

To summarise: I haven’t used the built in firmware for the past two weeks, so well I think its good.

Plus its the same colour as my computer case and fits under my desk , while been pretty cheap.

The software (for the moment) does the basics and not much more. Tells you roughly how much time is left on the UPS, the status and current load + battery charge. It also shutsdown the computer – although I have yet to test if this works (might do this later in this week).

No really history as yet – but there is a script for cacti, so I have got history that way .