VMware Performance
Looking around for information on getting the VMware Server 2.0 beta running on Ubuntu Server 8.04 — I find it best to look online to see if people are having trouble before I waste time trying to make something work — I saw a fair few complaints about performance not being very good.
Well, I’m not quite sure what those people were talking about. I’ve set it up with a Windows XP VM on a machine that had previously been running Windows XP and as a test I hit it with my usual DVD-to-AppleTV process: rip to disk with DVD Decrypter, convert to XviD with AutoGK, convert subtitles using SubRip.
It’s been a little bit slower than the same stuff running natively, but not significantly so. I don’t have numbers — I forgot to collect stats before nuking the native XP install — but it’s doing the DVD->XviD at ~real-time, which isn’t a whole lot slower than when there was no VMware in the middle.
I’m happy enough with this, particularly given that this is batch processing — fire off a whole heap and forget about it — and that this is a beta with debug code.
Incidentally, I did try using dvd::rip from the Ubuntu packages, but the cluster support is failing — the final “put all the bits together” step barfs claiming there’s no video stream — and while I can indeed do transcodes one-at-a-time without using the cluster stuff, there’s no batch support without it. So while that would probably be faster, life is too short.
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I use AcidRip on Ubuntu, which is a terrible graphical frontend to various stuff, but works well enough. I believe DVD::Rip is in there. The interface itself is unspeakable (you don’t make an easy-to-use interface by translating every command line switch to a button), but it’s less painful than ripping a DVD with VLC.
How’s VirtualBox compared to VMWare? I should really try it.
(I just forgot I was on XP right now - I’m on call - rather than Ubuntu. Firefox 3 really is *identical*.)
AutoGK has the advantage of being fairly easy to work with. Rip the title you want to disk, point AGK at it, give it an output filename, say how big the output should be, add it to the queue.
I have yet to see anything to compare with SubRip on any other platform — it all seems to be gocr frontends, and gocr is dire by comparison — so I simply have to have Windows in the loop anyway.
VirtualBox is pretty decent, but it’s more a desktop tool than anything else and what I want is a Windows VM that’s always there, always on, running a combination of my AGK batch jobs and some scheduled jobs that I simply can’t run on anything else.