I left for Void at the beginning of the year, and it knocked my socks off.

I used MX for a handful of years after CrunchBang ceased development. I decided to migrate to just a core Debian install at a certain point, when I realized I was basically installing custom everything, and wasn’t really using MX the way it was probably intended.

It’s a good, mid-weight choice. Nothing negative to say about it.

Oh, I uhh… also bought a Panasonic AG-1980 SVHS deck. Those that know, know.

This might dictate some changes to my hardware setup, and see me eventually remove the TINK and the Magewell HDMI capture card from the mix, in a move towards SDI. TBD.

I recently revived a circa-2014 Thinkserver with a core install of antiX, and was pleasantly surprised. I went for the smallest footprint possible by installing only the core distro, and then choosing the packages I wanted/needed.

The day same day Elon is announced a trillionare, a competitor gets nerfed. 🤔

Void + Mango has been my jam.

I’ve always been curious about it, but felt like it might be a pain to try to use as a daily driver.

I’ve fairly thoroughly hardened my Void install, have an update and CVE audit workflow, and use firejail to sandbox any apps that make sense to sandbox. That feels more than enough for me.

It’s annoying for sure. I tend to adjust my expectations if the item is used (ala ebay, etc) or from a boutique outfit that makes things in limited batches.

Could someone knowledgeable tell me why desktop Linux has seemed to be ‘chosen’ in comparison to something like FreeBSD or OpenBSD?

I’m not necessarily knowledgeable, but I’ve gathered that Linux has historically been a little more approachable than the *BSDs, for the average person.

propageeza

Yeah, it’s all about you, Raymond.

Thank you for the offer. Though, my intention is to just control everything via terminal.

I’m familiar with vhs-decode, on account of considering a domesday for digital backup of my large LaserDisc collection. I decided in the end though, that both applications are just way above and beyond what I want to do.

I do a lot of Hi8 digitizing, because I like to film in it, so this is first and foremost for that usecase. But I also want to get set up to digitize VHS found footage and lost media.

The script is nothing to write home about at the moment, with most of my time being spent just dialing it in for performance given the age of the Thinkserver. I feel that’s pretty squared away, so the next step is updating it to accept args for things like fps, resolution, etc.

#!/bin/sh

AUDIO_DEV="hw:CARD=HDMI,DEV=0"
FPS=60
OUTDIR="/home/wesker/capture"
PREVIEW_URL="udp://netsphere.lab:5000?pkt_size=1316"

exec ffmpeg -hide_banner \
  -thread_queue_size 2048 -f v4l2 -input_format yuyv422 \
    -video_size 1920x1080 -framerate "$FPS" -i /dev/video0 \
  -thread_queue_size 2048 -f alsa -i "$AUDIO_DEV" \
  -map 0:v -map 1:a \
    -c:v dnxhd -profile:v dnxhr_sq -c:a pcm_s16le \
    "$OUTDIR/$(date +%F-%H%M%S).mov" \
  -map 0:v -map 1:a \
    -c:v libx264 -preset ultrafast -tune zerolatency -g 20 \
    -c:a aac -b:a 128k \
    -f mpegts "$PREVIEW_URL"

I settled on the Magewell card because I found one super cheap, their Linux drivers seem pretty well supported and maintained, and I wanted a bolted-in solution since everything is rackmount.

I paid $50 on ebay for the Magewell, because the seller had a huge lot of them to liquidate.

The TINK 4k is indeed expensive, but it was one I had laying around collecting dust. I have a museum of gaming consoles and for a while was upscaling them with the TINK, before moving on to a different solution.

The 16:9@60 is simply my not yet having implemented conditions in my script for variable capture settings. I am fortunate to have an 8TB HDD in the server, and an additional 140TB data server, so file size footprint isn’t currently high on my priorities.

Not sugar.

Is this slop or spergposting? One answer gets a block; the other gets a block, but it’s not personal, I just don’t understand.