Faceman🇦🇺

Used to be my main source of disks, but these days there are better ways and it is easier to know exactly what you are getting.

Israel making an awful lot of “mistakes” lately…

You’re confusing a container format (MKV) with a video codec (AV1)

MKV is just a container like a folder or zip file that contains the video stream (or streams, technically you can have multiple) which could be in H264, H265, AV1 etc etc, along with audio streams, subtitles and many other files that go along, like custom Fonts, Posters, etc etc.

As for the codec itself, AV1 done properly is a very good codec but to be visually lossless it isn’t significantly better than a good H265 encode without doing painfully slow CPU encodes, rather than fast efficient GPU encodes. people that are compressing their entire libraries to AV1 are sacrificing a small amount of quality, and some people are more sensitive to its flaws than others. in my case I try to avoid re-encoding in general. AV1 is also less supported on TVs and Media players, so you run into issues with some devices not playing them at all, or having to use CPU decoding.

So I still have my media in mostly untouched original formats, some of my old movie archives and things that aren’t critical like daily shows are H265 encoded for a bit of space saving without risking compatibility issues. Most of my important media and movies are not re-encoded at all, if I rip a bluray I store the video stream that was on the disk untouched.

One of my miniPCs is just a little N95 and it can easily transcode 4K HDR to 1080p (HDR or tonemapped SDR) to a couple of clients, and with excellent image quality. You could build a nice little server with a modern i3 and 16gigs of ram and it would smash through 4 or 5 high bitrate 4K HDR transcodes just fine.

Is that one transcoding client local to you? or are you trying to stream over the web? if it’s local, put some of the budget to a new player for that screen perhaps?

I played Crysis on a Vuzix VR920 in around 2008, that was my first VR other than a virtual boy.

Dual 640x480, frame interleaved 3d at 30hz per eye! if you drop a single frame the eyes got out of sync and switched! I think I had dual 9600GTs at the time and it struggled. I think it also struggled on the dual 9800GTX+ I had after that.

head tracking was purely gyro/accelerometer based and worked very poorly.

That is awesome.

I played descent 1 and 2 for hours on end back in the day, never got to play 3 as I didn’t have a 3d card yet and they dropped the software renderer option.

Is it related to this issue posted to the bsd forks github?

I cant help you directly as I run Jellyfin on linux, but that should be your first port of call. just keep in mind jellyfin on FreeBSD is 100% unofficial so you are on your own.

I do have baggy pockets.

I have some rare media that I know would be extremely difficult to replace, so I back that up, but the general stuff is less important.

However, with rights holders constantly trying to move away from the idea of permanent physical ownership, some media will become harder and harder to find in their best or purest forms, disks will go out of print and the used market will start to slowly die as media ages and rots.

The difference you see is probably due to different post processing presets, you could probably tune kodi to look better but in general it was designed originally for very low power devices and never added a lot of enhancement functionality outside of a few plugins for it. Try using the older kodi+dsplayer version for more tweakability or look I to madvr for massive image enhancement capabilities

The only reason I have kodi installed on my main nvidia shield is because it’s the only player ive found that will play back surround and atmos audio files (multichannel Flac and Atmos M4A) without then having to be in video containers. So it works well for my surround hifi rig.

I use plex and jellyfin for video

Jellyfin is great but it’s nowhere near feature parity with plex. I run them side by side. Jellyfin for my personal local playback and plex for everything else.

I’ll switch over eventually but for now, for someone with over 110tb of content and over a dozen remote streaming clients there is nothing better than plex.

These are definitely the way to go, plenty of fanless mini pcs with at least 2 NICs aimed squarely at this use case.

And even the little n100 chip is more than most normal people need for a router, even with an encrypted VPN or deep packet inspection, so you can virtualise and run some light services alongside the router OS, like jellyfin, a caching service, or something like Grafana

One of my mini PC’s is an N95, which is similar to the n100 but with a higher peak power. It’s faster than the old legend 2600k and has a decent little igpu for video processing or general desktop use.

I run a jellyfin test server from it, transcodes high bitrate 4k HDR H265 to 1080p SDR tonemapped H264 at over 200fps, while running my security camera Dashboard with multiple video feeds.

Their only limitation is they usually only have a single memory slot so keep that in mind.

I stopped using Calibre a few years back since I didn’t need any of its advanced management/conversion features or e-reader integration any more so I switched to ubooquity, which is much simpler and doesnt need to rename or move files, you just point it at a folder and it makes books available via a simple web-ui and OPDS service. I dont actually even use it though, since I just pull the files to my Boox tablet when I need them.

I also run that alongside Komga which does the same thing but is better suited for comics and manga etc, I do access that via OPDS.

In the past I’ve used Volumio, but they’ve made multiroom a paid feature now.

One way around it would be to run a chromecast or airplay client, as they both have inherent multizone support, just not as polished as a sonos-style setup with groupings and stereo mapping when using DIY hardware.

I weep for your phone bill, I used to do that to send emails from my Sony Clie when wifi was still pretty new and rare in public.

Are we old. I think we’re old.

The only mmo’s I ever really spent any significant time with were FFXI (on dial up for most of the time I spent with it so my experience wasn’t great) and GW2. not mentioning eve… we dont talk about that…

There was a free MMORPG called Planeshift (I played quite a lot in 2005 or so, it’s still around and being actively worked on) that was very elder scrolls inspired, I put a lot of time into in the past too but being a small free amateur project it didn’t have a lot of players.

I just don’t have the time or motivation to give modern MMOs the attention they really need to make progress, and I was very much a solo player at the time so progress was slow and hard.

I think if I was to pick up a new one it would be FF14, it has a balance of open gameplay and story which a lot of mmos ignore, it seems like a good community but as with all mmos they really dont want you to just drop in a play a couple of hours every second weekend, they want you to get in daily and stick to a routine, which I just cant commit to these days.

The best way to improve plex/jellyfin performance is to make sure your players support what you are trying to watch and transcoding should only be needed if you are sharing remotely to someone with either slow internet or a crappy old player.

Of course, with hardware encoding the chip in that little computer can do what you are asking, including doing it at 4K if needed.

Thats a pretty old calculation that doesn’t take into account hardware acceleration, which modern chips can do very, very well.

So you can get away with a celeron class intel chip (or whatever they are calling them these days) and mange multiple 4k to 1080 transcode streams without issue.

I have a mini PC with an Intel n95, which is around 5500 on the passmark chart, but can easily churn out 10+ 1080p to 1080p transcodes if needed, of course the ideal setup is to avoid transcoding wherever possible. that’s not my main server, but it’s nice to know that if I wanted to I could move my plex server onto it and it would be fine.

I’ve tried to use lidarr but I think my archive is too weird for it.

Not only do I have a lot of obscure releases, but I also have things like vinyl and cd rips of every version of every album by certain artists. Like I have a huge amount of frank zappa for example, sometimes I will have 10 versions of the same album, sometimes more. I have collections of the different live variants of many tracks, archives of guitar solo variations ets…

Lidarr has no idea how to handle that so I do it all manually.