CentOS regret

To be quite honest, the summary of this post is that I'm just too old for this shit. Gone are the days where I had all the time in the world to faff around with customising builds to my heart's content.

The problems

The matter with configuring audio over Xrdp in CentOS was one hurdle. Annoying, but not a show-stopper.

But other things that cropped up included:

Limited export formats on DaVinci Resolve

I couldn't export H.264 MP4 with AAC audio which is what I was using on macOS. I had to use LinearPCM which would fail to successfully upload on more than one platform I needed it on. I tried a variety of other combinations of audio and video to no avail. Some combinations even failed to play back in QuickTime or VLC let alone get anywhere online.

The only option in these cases was to transcode them with ffmpeg or Handbrake after the initial render. But, why.

Audio over Xrdp was fragile

Even after all that setup, things just didn't quite work, but only sometimes? Audio would cut out or not be in sync over remote. If I wanted to switch to working from the box directly, audio would not transfer back. Restarting services sometimes worked, but most of the time I'd have to restart the box entirely. I'm sure if I had figured out the right combination of services to restart it would have done the thing, but then I'd have to restart the services every time I needed to do that. Again, why.

Laggy interface

This one perplexes me. I noticed the DaVinci Resolve UI was particularly laggy. I thought perhaps it was because I was using it remotely, but even on local it was janky if marginally better. Resources weren't being unusually taxed, other things were working fine, it was just kind of rubbish even when it was the only thing actively running. It was sort of tolerable in the way you're alright with the sound of dripping water for a little while, but not for extended periods of editing. No workaround.

The last straw

But really the big one was the codec issue. I was not going to sit through two extended periods of rendering just to get the file in the format I wanted. One render in DaVinci Resolve run already took 1.5-2 times the length of the video to be rendered on its own let alone what I'd have to do with it using ffmpeg or Handbrake. Just, no.

Given I am comfortable and familiar with macOS, I did briefly entertain the idea of a hackintosh. But, just, no. If my field of fucks was barren for CentOS, it would not be less barren for a hackintosh.

And this is why I tapped out and went to Windows.