I cant say I care as much as I used to, since encoding has gotten quite good, but I have also gotten better at seeing (aka. worse at being distracted by) compression artifacts so while I am less of a perfect remux rip supremacist, I’m also more sensitive to bad encodes so its a double edged sword.

I still seek out the highest quality versions of things that I personally care about, but I don’t seek those out for absolutely everything like I used to. I recently saved 12TB running a slight compression pass on my non-4k movie library, turning (for example) a 30gb 1080p Bluray Remux into a 20gb H265 high bitrate encode, which made more room for more full fat 4K bluray files for things I care about, and the few 1080p full remuxes I want to keep for rarities and things that arent as good from the 4k releases or the ones where the 4k release was drastically different (like the LOTR 4k’s having poor dynamic range and the colours being changed for the Matrix etc), which I may encode in the future to save more space again. I know I can compress an 80gb UHD bluray file down to 60gb with zero noticeable loss, thats as far as I need to go, I don’t need to go down to 10gigs like some release groups try to do, and at that level of compression you might as well be at 1080p.

I cant go as low as a low bitrate 720p movie these days as I’m very close to a large screen so they tend to look quite poor, soft edges, banded gradients, motion artifacts, poor sound etc. but if I were on a smaller screen or watching movies on a phone like I used to, I probably wouldn’t care as much.

Another side to my choice to compress is that I have about 10 active Plex clients at the moment and previously they were mostly getting transcoded feeds (mostly from remux sources) but now most of them are getting a better quality encode (slow CPU encode VS fast GPU stream) direct to their screens, so while I’ve compressed a decent chunk of the library, my clients are getting better quality feeds from it.

I have complete ROM sets for a couple of platforms in my archive, they’re available on SLSK but not a huge amount of bandwidth available.

Sad to see the old giants like Vimms finally being attacked after all these years.

Soulseek has been getting hammered too

Sonarr/Radarr etc make it very easy and safe for media, but apps and games would be more of a serious sit down and talk kind of situation as more can go wrong there.

Soulseek is more like an old school peer to peer network like kazaa, limewire, winmx, ed2k etc.

I haven’t seen any clients with a playlist downloader, though that sounds like a cool feature to suggest.

You don’t have to seed.

Yea I’ve got 3 in my video distribution rig at the moment, one 2015, a 2017 and a 2019 and they are all going strong, all on projectivy and some adb tweaks though.

Morrowind, RCT2, Total Annihilation with all my mods and Deadlock 2 as well if I have time.

You should consider upgrading to some kind of mesh system then. sure they aren’t perfect, but even a basic 3 node kit could probably increase your throughput ten fold. If you want to use DDWRT or OpnSense or whatever you can still run it separately and route internet traffic or use it for your DHCP server.

To stream a 4K bluray remux rips on your Lan you need a solid 150mbit minimum between server and player to be reliable for example. I am hardwired all the way except for mobiles, but even on Wi-Fi I can easily pull 400-500mbit real world throughput through most of the house thanks to my Wifi6 setup with multiple APs

The shield pro 2019 is probably still the best overall, it’s not perfect as there are some weaknesses due to the age of its chipset, but for all the common formats used in Movies and TV it works perfectly, especially if you are playing full remux files, not re-encoded compressed video. Kodi runs very well, Plex runs very well, Jellyfin is mostly perfect too, but has some limitations in the current version.

Yes it supports HDR10 (not10+) and Dolby Vision, which covers 98% of all 4K blurays and TV shows, anything HDR10+ just gets played in HDR10 compatibility mode, if you TV doesn’t do DV it plays the HDR10 layer on 99% of files. There are some issues with HLG as it isnt properly supported but you don’t come across that format all that often and there is usually an SDR or regular HDR version available, if your TV supports manually activating HLG then it works fine.

Yes there is a minor colour bug in some DV content, no it isn’t the end of the world as some people make it out to be.

It is one of the only players that will give you full DTS:X and Dolby Atmos support, it has a very nice configurable upscaler for lower res content (AI upscale on low works excellently with minimal artifacts), it still has a lot going for it despite its age.

Also its easy to decrapify with ADB, you can easily configure third party launchers and other fun stuff.

What is your network infrastructure that is giving you those poor performance numbers?

Most consumer all in one routers are crap but not that bad. the file server should always connect to the main hub of the network with Ethernet (whether that be the router, a switch or an all-in-one crap box), these days pretty much everything should be at least 1gigabit.

Are you trying to use wifi for everything? that’s a recipe for disaster unless you really know what you are doing and have multiple APs and careful signal strength and channel management

Prowlarr is good because it combines usenet indexers and torrents. Makes it very easy to search for anything and compare versions/sources.

Gets even weirder when you see LGs webOS kinda started out as PalmOS

I have seen some talk over on XDA forums, but since there is more to an android TV than just the basic android OS, it’s a bit trickier without risking losing licences/compatibility/DRM/features.

Some older LG webOS tvs can be rooted and custom apps installed too such as ad free youtube players etc.

Not sure if there’s a list, but most Android based TVs can be cleaned and modded to some degree via ADB. If you can access the dev settings in android, chances are you can do a lot to make it better, strip out some google or branded packages, replace the launcher to block OS level ads etc. Projectivy usually works well since it supports input switching on many devices, but it’s still better to do all of this to a separate box and then plug it into a TV that is firewalled/filtered/offline. more control and less to fuck up.

Rooting and unlocking bootloaders is more complex as these android devices dont have normal recovery systems and require a lot of custom drivers to make the video and audio processing work, so it’s not worth going that far.

LCDs do tend to speak somewhat standardised languages, but there is a lot more to a modern TV than just an LCD controller.

Color and white balance calibration, image/motion processing, HDR Processing, backlight control/dimming zones, input management, audio decoding/encoding/passthrough, digitizing analogue sources, HDMI licencing, Dolby licencing, etc.

If you want a better smart TV the best thing to do is to get a hackable TV like most android based models, replace the launcher, strip out system apps and telemetry with ADB and start fresh, then either leave it offline or use filtering to only allow access to the services you approve.

We know spez’ secrets too.

Dude loved the jailbait subreddit before it was banned for obvious reasons.

He was a moderator.

I’m certain he must’ve lost a lot of money betting against amd on the stock market right around the time of zen1 and he never got over it.

In ranked choice voting systems, single issue parties have a meaningful purpose, they don’t need a full platform covering every topic of running a country, they just need to show the major party that gets their preference flow that people support their cause and they need to take note of where those votes came from

Massive first preference vote losses maybe, but the preference flows would still trickle down to two major parties, it always does.

That preference flow data can then be used to shape future legislation to keep voters on their side and even to pull swing voters from the other sides, or at least that’s how it is supposed to work when the media isn’t actively working against you.

“hey we only won because of votes from this minor single issue party, maybe we should consider our position on that issue”

might be from one of those FPTP countries where democracy is barely holding on in the first place.