One of the problems I've been facing re-archiving my media collection is that Handbrake is sometimes cutting off the end of movies. At this point I suspect my weird setup is to fault: I'm using a 3rd gen NVME on a motherboard, Atermiter X79, that combines some very old technology with modern tech like NVME. The problem is other people have also mentioned having this issue on Windows (I'm using Xubuntu 20.04). They don't mention their setup, but I imagine they can't all have an unusual setup like mine. So I went digging around the world wide web and found a blog post suggesting it could be the CPU overheating then crashing Handbrake.
I'm not sure I believe this theory as Handbrake doesn't crash, in fact many of my issues have come up while archiving television shows, and Handbrake just moves on to the next episode after cutting one short. Sometimes the cut off is after only a few seconds, sometimes it's near the end. It happens with both brand new and used DVDs, so it's not a bad disc issue.
I thought it would be nice to see how my CPU is doing. First I installed lm-sensors and ran sensors-detect:
sudo apt install lm-sensors
sudo sensors-detect
Then I installed xsensors:
sudo apt install xsensors
On my system xsensors shows my R9 380 graphics card temperature, the temperature of that NVME and the temperature on my XEON E5-1650v0 CPU (6 cores). In the screenshot below it looks like the temperatures are a bit high on all cores. Keep in mind this is with several windows open and while archiving a DVD with Handbrake (so the CPU is doing a certain amount of encoding in the background). Previously I used Stacer to look at CPU workload and it indicated around 83% of the CPU was being used in this situation.
Once the encoding stopped all 6 cores settled down to between 28 degrees Celsius to 34 degrees Celsius. The NVME drive was sitting around 27 degrees Celsius and the graphics card 52 Celsius. I like the look of xsensors, it's simple and would appeal to someone who's used to this kind of an interface on other platforms.
I briefly considered software like gkrellm, but it needs a lot of customization to look nice and be functional. While it's not terribly hard, customization isn't something every end user wants to do with their software, they want something that just works, and it looks like xsensors might fit the bill.
I've been looking at a lot of different programs lately with the idea of rolling my own customized version of Xubuntu. It's completely Xubuntu, but with a few simple apps added. The idea is to give end users a solid collection of extra software for designers, musicians, and programmers, and a small collection of software for troubleshooting (xsensors, hardinfo, htop, neofetch).
But this is a topic for another post. Xsensors seems to be a decent program worthy of including in such an ISO.
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