Playing only Audio from a Video File

If you want to play only audio from a video file (say xyz.avi),
please provide -vo null in mplayer, given as:

$ mplayer -vo null xyz.avi


Speeding up Disk Performance

We can increase Hard Disk performance by ~40%, and decrease power consumption by Hard Disk, if we provide "noatime,nodiratime" options during partition mounting. Actually what happens is: whenever a file/directory is accessed, its atime "access time" is updated with epoch. These two options prevent these not-so-useful disk accesses. Hence
performance improvement.



The sample mount point (/home) entry in /etc/fstab may look like:

$ cat /etc/fstab | grep home
/dev/sda2 /home ext3 defaults,noatime,nodiratime 0 0