PROTIP: In order to avoid undermining the reputability of your documentary, make sure you do not quote from Wikipedia sections marked "[citation needed]."
You may have noticed that Youtube has gone widescreen, but you may not have noticed that they're experimenting with 720p video. It's not available generally, but you can get to it by adding '&fmt=22' to the URL. Obviously, it's not going to work unless the original video is 720p, and there aren't many right now. To see an example, try out this clip of me racing a Lancia rally car downhill (in a video game).
Since processing 720p video is rather CPU-intensive, I decided today that I would get a cinelerra render node running on yomiko. This wouldn't be hard — I've compiled Cinelerra and most of its dependencies from scratch on my video editing machine. Or at least, it shouldn't be hard.
Being a Slackware nerd for about a decade now, compiling everything was a breeze. I got cinelerra working on a batch job and... it's much slower than it should be. This is running on an Opteron with all the assets on local disk, and it runs half as fast as it does rendering in the Cinelerra GUI with assets over NFS. It doesn't make any sense to me, but it also wasn't really a show-stopper.
In the process of upgrading several rather important packages, I created a problem where ffmpeg would segfault when using x264 as the codec. I tried updating x264 and ffmpeg to their latest versions, only to find that both projects had recently broken their ABIs. Taking a step back, I recompiled x264 and ffmpeg a dozen times while running through a git-bisect, but I only found the problem when I ran ffmpeg through a debugger and saw where it was crashing — I had compiled x264 statically, but there was a shared lib from the previous x264 lying around that ffmpeg was using. That fixed, everything was running along swimmingly.
Erickson postulated that if I did real, paid work for the amount of time spent dicking with this, I could afford a Mac Pro and a copy of Final Cut Pro. I told him that that having everything work the first time would be boring. The fact of the matter is, if I didn't spend those hours debugging, I would have spent them playing Racer.
Moral of the story: Maintaining Linux multimedia tools is like disco dancing on the shiny, blinking razorblade dancefloor of madness.
%!PS
(While debugging the ffmpeg/x264 debacle, I found the wonderfully lispy but unfortunately brain-damaged stumpwm hogging one of yomiko's CPUs. Stumpwm had crashed a couple weeks prior after attempting the extremely difficult task of resizing a window. Apparently, it decided that rather than stop execution like a normal program, it would enter an infinite loop and help keep the house warm. Thanks, stumpwm!) show