Tag Archives: 4K

News from the Blog 2020-11-11

  • The latest drive enclosures have been a bit of a fiasco.

The small one (6 drives) fits perfectly in one ATX Bay, however, the SAS SSD are too height to fit.

I fit 1 SATA3 SSD 1TB and 4 SATA3 HDD 2TB.

The other one, the 3 Bay 5.25″ SAS/SATA enclosure for 12 drives did not fit in the Corsair Obsidian Series 750D case, and I had to install it outside. Doing a DIY, as I explain in my book about assembling, fixing and upgrading your own PCs and laptops.

However the 12 Gbps SAS SSD were returning Checksum errors in ZFS when I did copy information or I ran scrub. I’m afraid the enclosure can only provide 6 Gbps at max, or a poor connection. Cables or expanders use to be the reason. I ordered new cables to make a direct connection to the HBA Controller without the enclosure to validate my theory and the drives stopped showing errors.

There is something good in all bad: I have been able to document and explain how to troubleshoot, actual errors in ZFS, in my book and talk about the problems with the cables, and the advantages of using a SAS controller even if you use SATA drives.

  • I got my first Excellent in an Assignment in an Ireland university, which makes me specially happy. And I keep going on studying in Linux Academy, the last course I did was GCP and Terraform, even if I knew both it helps me to keep my skills sharp.
  • I share with you some offers and charity bundles that I enrolled and enjoyed a lot:

There is an offer with Microsoft Pass which is that we can use Disney+ for free during 30 days.

  1. I started watching the Mandalorian, Season 2, and is wonderfully displayed in 4K.
    The quality of the video surprised me. Not that many contents in Netflix are 4K and I really enjoyed the great quality of the image.
  2. Humble Bundle offers a pack of 8 VR games per €13.45.
    If you like Virtual Reality and have your headset, this pack is amazing, and the benefits go to charity: Movember. The games are downloaded from Steam and the pack will last for 14 days.
  3. Humble Bundle offers a pack of Java and one go books for €12.65, with a minimum of €0.84 for 3 books. Benefits go for charity: Code for America.

Don’t forget to balance how much of your contribution goes to every player.

Unfortunately by default most of the money goes to O’Reilly and Humble Tip and few to the Charity cause. You can change that from the web when going to to the payment.

Media Player in my Raspberry Pi 4

Just installed a media player in my Raspberry Pi 4

So I mentioned it was one of my pending tasks, to do while I’m confined here, at home, to help the Irish government to stop the quick spread of the coronavirus.

I’m happy that the situation in Ireland has stabilized, unlikely in Spain, where that historical lack of discipline and selfishness and super ego to believe Madrid the capital of the world, and so deciding not to close it for quarantine, will cause a lot of pain. I hope the closing of frontiers in Catalonia works.

Well, what I do you’re probably asking yourself, so I installed LibreELEC https://libreelec.tv/.

They have a very nice SD image writer for Linux, Mac and Windows, that will install the proper image on the micro-SD for your ARM device.

This Raspberry Pi 4 comes with Wifi integrated and a Gigabit Ethernet network port.

When I was in Barcelona, I had Kodi with Raspberry pi 2 and version 3.

This model v. 4 is much more cooler. I bought the 4GB version, and has 2xHDMI 4K.

So it is great to connect to any modern TV.

In Barcelona, I have Linux tower as NFS Server sharing my files with the Pi. Work good, even for the 100Mbit NIC of the version 3, but at that time I was only playing Full HD as the Pi didn’t supported greater resolution, and I only had that resolution on my displays too.

For now, I’m going to explore how is reading from a USB 3.0. Let’s see if it’s able to play smoothly.

The cool thing also is that I have SSH access, and so I can use the Pi for many more things. :)

I have my first update, I noticed that copying to that USB was not the best for me, as I tried to copy a .MKV file of 4.9GB and I encountered the limit of 4GB of FAT32. I could format the USB as ext4, but what I did is, SSH into the box, I see that I have two partitions on the SD for booting the Pi, the second one is a ext4 called storage. So I copied to the SD, through the network, using sftp the file I wanted.

The Gigabit connection was fast, but when the buffer fulled it started to show the real speed of the SD which is 15MB/s for writing.

Ext4 has no problem in holding a file 4.9GB so I’m watching my movie now. Will think about setting a NFS for the Pi as it will be very convenient. :)

I have an external, remote, keyboard logitech, but it happens that LibreELEC recognizes my Sony command, from the television. I don’t need the keyboard/mouse. Nice.

Here you can see my Raspberry Pi 4, connected to TV, in “combat mode”, naked, as PoC, before setting in its definitive place behind the TV.

Playing from the external USB 3.0 stick was also fluid, allowing 4K perfectly.

The only problem I has was when I was pushing movies to the USB through the network, and playing at the same time from the SD. It seems like the Raspberry reached its limits doing this and playing stuck frequently.