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This is going to sound like a weird question but I am currently running Linux Mint 18 and have installed and use a customized version of handbrake that has features no other build of handbrake does, namely 10 and 12 bit x265 encoding and vp8/vp9 2 pass with quality slider settings.

As far as I can tell this version was only available via PPA and I can't find the link anymore. I want to move to OpenMandriva because I just hate Ubuntu and all it's variants, can't stand Linux Mint, BUT, for me, this build of handbrake is "the killer app", I want to make it "portable" so that I can just copy it over to a fresh install of a different distro and not be tied to the Ubuntu universe.

Anyone know how to do this?

apt-get source?

Assuming the PPA provides the source, and is still in your sources list, and you know what the package name is.

As Redocbew indicates, if you installed it from a PPA, the PPA should still be in your apt configuration. The right way to do this is to get the source code, and figure out how to rebuild the patched version for your target distro.

PPA aside, the original .deb binary package is probably in your package cache (/var/cache/apt/archives). You can try converting it to .rpm format using the alien tool, but you're likely to run into dependency issues.

Alternatively, set up a copy of Mint or Ubuntu in a VM, install the above handbrake .deb in it, and use the VM to run handbrake on whatever host OS you want.

Just out of curiosity. what is it about Ubuntu/Mint that you hate so much, that you think a different distro will fix? OpenMandriva isn't exactly mainstream... which means it'll be more difficult to find solutions to issues via Google when stuff goes wrong.

Edit: Top result for Googling "12-bit x265 handbrake": https://mattgadient.com/2016/02/15/how- ... x-windows/

just brew it! wrote:

Edit: Top result for Googling "12-bit x265 handbrake": https://mattgadient.com/2016/02/15/how- ... x-windows/

Dude!!! That's the build i was talking about, I googled repeatedly and couldn't find it again.

As for what I hate about Ubuntu and all it's variants, in no particular order:

The GUI's are very easy to break, with Ubuntu proper, if you install a different desktop, say Cinnamon and use a custom theme, everything will be fine for a day then all of a sudden for no reason at all the Cinnamon theme will change to a color similar to the default Unity theme and you won't be able to undo it! The really odd thing is that even removing Unity doesn't prevent this. Xubuntu and Ubuntu Mate are 2 variants that at first install seem perfect, fast, responsive, crisp, everything works great then all of a sudden the GUI will stop working, you will get system freezes that require a hard reboot to overcome (I can't even bring up an alternative workspace), the system will slow down for no reason. Mint, up until 17.3 was stable, smooth, reliable, maybe not the fastest but you could count on it, Mint 18, with all the updates is just garbage, with a fresh install for no reason the system will lock up and other than the mouse nothing will work after a few hours and will require a manual reboot. Copying large number of files from one drive to another will cause the system to stop responding, it's just crazy, if Windows behaved this way people would be going ape all over the Internet.

Fedora is another one, 23 would break at the drop of a hat, dnf/yum/yum ext would just stop working for no reason, kind of how Windows msi sometimes craps out but at least that fixable, Fedora none of the answer you find on the net work; Fedora 24 is even worse, I thought it was just me but even the folks over at Distrowatch when they reviewed 24 complained about how easy it was to break.

here's the thing, you may thing some of my issues are related to hardware, but I have a reasonably fast system with a 960gb SSD, 16gb ram, and a Skylake based quad core Xeon and OSes like GhostBSD, PC-BSD, DragonFlyBSD, Manjaro, Point Linux, Mageia, and ROSA don't break and don't slow down. I can hammer them with dozens of torrent downloads, hundreds of file copies from one hdd to another, an encode and watching a youtube video all at the same time and they don't break a sweat. But the best is OpenMandriva, I have been using it on a test basis on a 10+ year old AMD based Dell laptop with a weak dual core cpu and just 2gb of ram and it's shocking how smooth and responsive it is, thanks to LTO and other optimizations the developers use.

There are times when I have Point Linux or Ghost BSD running off a thumb drive on that old laptop and it's still more responsive Mint 18 running on my main system. That's just sad. Plus OpenMandriva allows you to choose a real time kernel during bootup if you so desire, and if you're ever used a rt kernel you know how sweet it is.

Yes, it's not as main stream, which is really unfortunate, but if I can get this build of handbrake to work on OM, I won't consider using a Ubuntu distro ever again, or at least until they get their act together.

sophisticles wrote:

As for what I hate about Ubuntu and all it's variants, in no particular order:

The GUI's are very easy to break, with Ubuntu proper, if you install a different desktop, say Cinnamon and use a custom theme, everything will be fine for a day then all of a sudden for no reason at all the Cinnamon theme will change to a color similar to the default Unity theme and you won't be able to undo it! The really odd thing is that even removing Unity doesn't prevent this.

In more than 6 years of using Ubuntu variants (and Mint for a few months, at one job) I have never seen this issue. I did find Cinnamon to be somewhat buggy and unstable, but that's not Ubuntu's fault. I do blame Ubuntu for Unity (I know some people love it, I'm not one of those people...), but when Unity became the default I just switched to using Kubuntu as my primary desktop OS and went on with life. And even on systems which had Unity installed alongside another DE, I never had the issue you describe.

Note: I do tend to stick with the LTS releases. The non-LTS ones can indeed be a little half-baked, and I don't like the short support cycles. When I install a new version of an OS and get it tweaked to my satisfaction, I like to stick with it for at least a couple of years. Sure, I'll try other distros and versions in VMs (or on secondary systems); but I generally leave the OS on my "daily driver" in place for a long time.

sophisticles wrote:

Xubuntu and Ubuntu Mate are 2 variants that at first install seem perfect, fast, responsive, crisp, everything works great then all of a sudden the GUI will stop working, you will get system freezes that require a hard reboot to overcome (I can't even bring up an alternative workspace), the system will slow down for no reason. Mint, up until 17.3 was stable, smooth, reliable, maybe not the fastest but you could count on it, Mint 18, with all the updates is just garbage, with a fresh install for no reason the system will lock up and other than the mouse nothing will work after a few hours and will require a manual reboot.

This is definitely not normal, and is indicative of a hardware issue or buggy device driver. I agree, if any of my systems behaved like this I'd be pretty pissed off.

sophisticles wrote:

Copying large number of files from one drive to another will cause the system to stop responding, it's just crazy, if Windows behaved this way people would be going ape all over the Internet.

Again, this really sounds like a hardware or driver issue. If one or both of the drives are connected via USB 3.0, I would check whether your USB 3.0 controller is an Asmedia chip; these are clearly problematic, and the Linux driver is garbage.

sophisticles wrote:

Fedora is another one, 23 would break at the drop of a hat, dnf/yum/yum ext would just stop working for no reason, kind of how Windows msi sometimes craps out but at least that fixable, Fedora none of the answer you find on the net work; Fedora 24 is even worse, I thought it was just me but even the folks over at Distrowatch when they reviewed 24 complained about how easy it was to break.

Fedora is essentially a rolling beta for Redhat Enterprise Linux. You get the latest bleeding edge stuff (yay!), and the latest bugs too (boo!). It suffers from half-baked-ness similar to the non-LTS Ubuntu releases. I prefer stability (and not needing to upgrade my OS every 18 months to stay current on security updates) to bleeding edge features, so I avoid Fedora.

sophisticles wrote:

here's the thing, you may thing some of my issues are related to hardware, but I have a reasonably fast system with a 960gb SSD, 16gb ram, and a Skylake based quad core Xeon and OSes like GhostBSD, PC-BSD, DragonFlyBSD, Manjaro, Point Linux, Mageia, and ROSA don't break and don't slow down. I can hammer them with dozens of torrent downloads, hundreds of file copies from one hdd to another, an encode and watching a youtube video all at the same time and they don't break a sweat. But the best is OpenMandriva, I have been using it on a test basis on a 10+ year old AMD based Dell laptop with a weak dual core cpu and just 2gb of ram and it's shocking how smooth and responsive it is, thanks to LTO and other optimizations the developers use.

Well, if you're seeing this kind of instability on LTS releases, then I can't think of a plausible explanation other than a hardware issue. As to why you don't see this on other distros I really can't explain that, other than to say that I've used Ubuntu/Kubuntu on at least a dozen different systems (desktop and laptop), going back to the 8.04 Ubuntu release. Sure, I've had my share of stability issues, most of them related to GPU drivers, or the occasional busted third-party application (upstream version of VirtualBox... *cough*... *cough*), but I've never had a system that worked fine initially, then mysteriously degraded like you're describing.

sophisticles wrote:

There are times when I have Point Linux or Ghost BSD running off a thumb drive on that old laptop and it's still more responsive Mint 18 running on my main system. That's just sad. Plus OpenMandriva allows you to choose a real time kernel during bootup if you so desire, and if you're ever used a rt kernel you know how sweet it is.

Yes, it's not as main stream, which is really unfortunate, but if I can get this build of handbrake to work on OM, I won't consider using a Ubuntu distro ever again, or at least until they get their act together.

IMO they do have their act together... provided you stick with the LTS releases. And avoid the AMD binary GPU drivers.

Any idea, now that you know the handbrake build I am using, on how to make it "portable"? Maybe I should try and reach out to the guy that created it and see if he can help.

Short answer is "That's not how things are normally done on Linux". If native packages for your distro are not readily available, you're typically expected to compile from source.

Have you tried following the instructions in the Linux section of the linked article? Yeah, they're kind of terse, but we can walk you through any parts that are confusing.

sophisticles wrote:

Plus OpenMandriva allows you to choose a real time kernel during bootup if you so desire, and if you're ever used a rt kernel you know how sweet it is.

For one thing, ubuntu provides a LL kernel (what a random "rt" kernel actually involves is sort of ambiguous, so I'm not really sure how similiar OpenMandriva's is). For another, you almost certainly don't actually want that in the first place. Hard(ish) guarantees about time-slices don't really provide lower latency. Generally speaking, you get just higher latency overall.

The general idea is to make sure that an event happens before a real-world amount of time has passed, no matter what. The plumbing to accomplish that, in today's world of multi-cored, clock-changing, power-saving desktop processors is breathtaking in complexity, so even attempting to do it has consequences, but the real issue is that for almost all applications it's entirely counter-productive.

Basically, outside of A/V production or industrial automation, you don't want it because it will only hurt you. Because, you see, I do use rt stuff for real, and I don't know "how sweet it is" at all. It's simply about absolute(ish haha) determinism, which is pretty mundane non-exciting stuff. It's not about minimizing latency, it's just about making sure you don't go over a deadline, *EVER*. If that means something that typically takes 10 milliseconds but must *NEVER* take 100 ms, well, if it making it take 90ms to avoid even the theoretical possibility of it going over 100, you do it, without question. You're not optimizing into the better case, you're horrendously de-optimizing to avoid a possible worst case.

It's not a magic button. Sure, some of those patchs/configs *might* disable certain power things which can contribute to lower latency with little side-effect (other than power consumption), but the vast majority of those kernels aren't primarily about that.

And, if you are video encoding on this machine, well, you're basically going to make your encodes longer for a placebo.