Last night before bed, I decided to put my idle Pi to work while I slept. I've got a movie file that needed converted to a modern format as the Pi was struggling to play it. I fired up Handbrake and put in the file. Went to bed and woke up with a finished file. One more small piece of a very large project completed. I am going to run a few files through every night to get things ready for when I hit the road. I'm ordering a new laptop soon which can churn through videos very quickly, but I really don't want to tie up my main machine with such things. I very well may order another Pi 400 to just sit around on a UPS and chug through my entire library until it's all done. $70 to free up my main work PC and my development system seems a reasonable price to me. I know some would consider it a waste, but it's basically spending $70 to set up a project to finish itself while I do more interesting things. I'm ok with that. I want to really push one of these Pi 400s and see what happens, and CPU video Encoding is a great way to do it. 

When done with this project, the secondary Pi 400 would be set up as a permanent lab computer, freeing up my Pi laptop to live in it's travel bag so it's always ready to go. I'm just tired of my main PCs being tied up with random work such as backing things up, file compression and co version, and downloading software. 

I realized that I need another Pi 4 to finish my camcorder project. I could even use that to process things when it's idle to free up the lab computer. I'm starting to collect Raspberry Pis... I'm ok with that. They're wonderful little machines. I'll get an 8GB model for that. It can be my camcorder/storage server. Strange combination, but that's quite alright. I have strange requirements. 

So far, the Pi 400 is making a decent every day computer for me. I installed Kdenlive last night and will test it out soon. It's still a little sluggish, but will speed up eventually when the GPU drivers are sorted. No luck installing Steam link yet, but I haven't given up. I will download the 32 bit Buster version of Raspberry Pi OS and try again later. So far, so good.