Social

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Editing from the past

Greeting! if this was 2008 this workstations would be really kick ass!
But it is not 2008, or even 2010, maybe in 2012 it would "Just be enough" for some people, but this is how I will be doing the video edits from here out.

First the system stats:
It is a custom build system that back in the day it was nice.

  • Motherboard GA-EP35-DS3L (link)
  • Intel E8400 Core Duo (3GHz)
  • 6GB of Patriot RAM (2x2GB 2x1GB)
  • Toshiba 320GB 7200 HDD
  • Pioneer DVD-RW
  • Integrated RealTek ACL 888 Chipset
  • LEPA 500W PSU 
  • GeForce 9500 GT 1GB (here)
  • IOGear 4.0 USB Bluetooth (here)
  • Wireless: TP-Link USB Wireless 
  • Dell Keyboard (the generic one)
  • Logitech Laser Mouse 
  • Blue Ice Snowball (because BALLA!
  • Microsoft LifeCam Cinema (Old School, sucks actually) 
  • Monitors: 2x Apple Cinema Display 20" (1680x1050 each)
  • Monster Heat sink (NZXT no link) 
  • Various case fans 
  • Cheap case 



Why would I try this with such old hardware? I mean seriously, not even an SSD! It is simple, I had this hardware laying around and I spent $10 on this update. It was on the wifi adapter.
I know, even back in 2008 when the system was build the first time, the parts total was around $500.
In fact the only thing that are not from the original system is the hard drive, the monster heat sink, and the power supply. Time killed all the original ones.

Another reason to do it, because I can. It is an overly old system and it does show a few signs of wear and tear, but it should be a good start for some ghetto video editing and time wasting, youtube anyone?

So far the experience has been, it is slow. It crashes every once and a while, but it does work, and it does edit videos.


Did I mention that it is running El Capitan? Yes fellow readers, this is a hackintosh, in a pretty true sense of the word. There was some issues, the audio was a bit difficult to configure, but after that was done everything else "just worked"

The system spec for it is an Macmini 5,1 (2011 Mac Mini) and the audio problem was handled by using Clover bootloader, and forcing it to load the kext on boot.
Audio Issue:
  To solve the audio issue, I mounted the clover partition, then added the AppleHDA.kext directly to the EFI/CLOVER/kext/10.11 folder.
After that, everything worked.
For wi-fi I am using the TP-Link Wifi Adapter, it was cheap and it connects to the internet.

As an added bonus, it takes 5 minutes to render a 2 minute video. Overall though, I don't think it is a bad little system for general use.