Nearly this entire HN comment section is upset about VLC being mentioned once and not recommended. If you can not understand why this very minor (but loud?) note was made, then you probably do not do any serious video encoding or you would know why it sucks today and is well past its prime. VLC is glorified because it was a video player that used to be amazing back in the day, but hasn't been for several years now. It is the Firefox of media players.
There is a reason why the Anime community has collectively has ditched VLC in favor of MPV and MPC-HC. Color reproduction, modern codec support, ASS subtitle rendering, and even audio codecs are janky or even broken on VLC. 98% of all Anime encode release playback problems are caused by the user using VLC.
And this pastebin doesn't even have all the issues. VLC has a long standing issue of not playing back 5.1 Surround sound Opus correctly or at all. VLC is still using FFmpeg 4.x. We're on FFmpeg 8.x these days
I can not even use VLC to take screenshots of videos I encode because the color rendering on everything is wrong. BT.709 is very much NOT new and predates VLC itself.
And you can say "VLC is easy to install and the UI is easy." Yeah so is IINA for macOS, Celluloid for Linux, and MPV.net for Windows which all use MPV underneath. Other better and easy video players exist today.
We are not in 2012 anymore. We are no longer just using AVC/H264 + AAC or AC-3 (Dolby Audio) MP4s for every video. We are playing back HEVC, VP9, and AV1 with HDR metadata in MKV/webm cnotainers with audio codecs like Opus or HE-AACv3 or TrueHD in surround channels, BT.2020 colorspaces. VLC's current release is made of libraries and FFmpeg versions that predate some of these codecs/formats/metadata types. Even the VLC 4.0 nightly alpha is not keeping up. 4.0 is several years late to releasing and when it does, it may not even matter.
I'm also surprised by people's defense of VLC. It's a nice project, especially when it was created, but the bugs I regularly encountered were numerous and in seemingly common use cases.
My main problem with VLC is that when I accidentally hit the wrong key on my keyboard (usually in the dark, because that's how I watch movies), it is quite often almost impossible to get the settings back to what they were without restarting the player.
Honestly, I'm absolutely not. I still vividly remember those times when we have to install codecs separately. And every month something something new and incompatible pops up on a radar, which sent all users on a wild hunt for that exact codec and instructions how to tweak it so the funny clip could play. Oh dear I'm not loking back to times od all versions of divX xVid, matroska, mkv avi wma, mp4, mp3 vba ogg and everything else, all thos cryptic incantations to summon a non-broken video frame on a modern hardvare, for everyone but few people in anime community who drove that insanity on everyone else.
I'll die on a hill of VLC, despite all its flaws, because it gave an escape route for everyone else - if you don't give a F about "pixel perfect lowest overhead most progressive compression that is still a scientific experiment but we want to encode a clip with it" and simply want to view a video - vlc was the way. Nothing else made so much good to users who simply want to watch a video and not be extatic about its perfect colour profile, loosless sound and smallest size possible.
All other players lost their plot when they tried to steer users into some madness pit of millions tweaks and configurations that somehow excites aughors of those players and some cohort of people who encode videos that way.
I istall vlc very single time, because this is a blunt answer to all video playing problems, even if its imperfect. And walked away from ever single player who tries to sell me something better asking to configure 100 parameters I've no idea about.
Hope this answers the question why VLC won.
Things are complicated. As a policy, I wouldn’t want to encourage grandma to be going to any web site to download software. Grandma should probably stick to the App Store. And personally, I would way rather install github builds than downloads from ‘official’/independently maintained web sites. Especially in the case of free / open source projects, sometimes cash constrained. Security is hard.
I’m not super knowledgeable about modern video players- I do like Infuse, which is in the App Store.
For me, Firefox really lacks in handling of very large amounts of tabs and a lot of features that I specifically use Vivaldi for. Does that mean Vivaldi is the best? Yes and No, it depends on what you care about.
Is Firefox still a good browser? As far as I know, yes. But I don't use it much at all because it doesn't give _me_ what I want and need.
And yes, I do actually need a large amount of tabs open at the same time very regularly due to the depth of references I work against in my line of work. That's on top of saving lots of bookmarks and syncing them via nextCloud.
You like Firefox? Great, keep at it.
You want to see features that aren't necessarily elsewhere? Consider trying Vivaldi and seeing if it's great for you or not.
Let's not act like browser selection is binary, because it isn't, and it really hasn't been since netscape navigator was new. And even then it's up for debate.
> Chromium is superior in every way. Rendering, features, speed, memory management
Being faster, prettier and using less memory[1] is pointless if the browser won't let me block all ads.
I mean, it's like comparing a turd sandwich made with expensive exotic bread, and a cheese sandwich made with cheap grocery store break.
Sure, the one has great exotic bread, but I don't want the turd it comes with.
So, yeah, it actually doesn't matter how much prettier, faster or smaller web pages are with Chrome, at least FF lets me (currently) block almost anything.
---------------------------------------
[1] Chrome beats out FF in exactly one of those, and it's not the memory or speed. Turns out ads take up a lot of RAM, and slow down pages considerably.
Chromium based browsers have non-google sync. Vivaldi implements their own encrypted sync service and I believe Brave does as well.
But I am talking about browser feature support, not stuff that can supplemented with an extension like a password manager.
Firefox has poor support for modern web features including video processing and encoding which makes it very bad at web conferencing/video calls or in-page streaming.
Firefox's developer tools and console is also much worse and missing important features.
Other features Firefox is missing or has poor support for compared to Chromium are WebGPU, WebTransport, Periodic Background Sync, and parts of WebRTC. Plus various APIs for web serial, badging, and Web Share are missing partial or full support.
Firefox still doesn't have functional HDR for images and videos including AV1.
Also, for context: ’Some truth here, but it’s overstated.
Firefox does WebRTC fine. AV1 works, simulcast works, calls and streaming work. Chrome still leads on performance tweaks and extra APIs, but “very bad” is just wrong.
DevTools aren’t “much worse.” Different, less popular, sometimes better (CSS, network). Chrome wins mainly because everyone targets it first.
API gaps are real but the list is sloppy. WebGPU and WebTransport exist in Firefox now, just behind on advanced bits. Periodic Background Sync barely matters. WebRTC support keeps closing the gap.
Missing stuff like Web Serial, Badging, fuller Web Share? True, and mostly intentional.
HDR is the weakest claim that actually holds. AV1 decode exists, but HDR support still feels half-done.
TL;DR: Firefox lags Chromium in breadth and polish, not in core modern web capability. Calling it bad for video or modern apps doesn’t match reality.” ’
MPC-HC is still a thing? I remember installing that (and K-Lite Codec Pack) on Windows, back in the day. Haven't used, or even thought about MPC-HC in years.
Is anyone else annoyed about how this is not very discoverable? The first Google hit for ”MPC-HC” is the web site saying ”MPC-HC is not under development since 2017. Please switch to something else.”
What happened? Has the maintainer refused to hand over the project, or something?
It still is, but it's not as recommended over MPV but I'm not as familiar with what it decodes and renders wrong in comparison, but it is still suggested over VLC in Anime circles.
I've really felt gaslit over the last decade from people continuing to promote VLC as such a great thing, when I've had nothing bug bugs, crashes, glitches, issues with it for a full decade now (on Linux). From 10-25 years ago I definitely used it for everything, all the time, but now even the default Ubuntu totem video player (or whatever it's called) seems like 2-3 times as likely to be able to play a random video file without an issue as VLC does.
Honestly the pastebin link needs to be re-submitted and frontpaged.
I even encounter this in professional a/v contexts! If VLC can read and decode your stream, that's a good sign that most things should able to view it, but it absolutely should not be trusted as any measure of doing things correctly/to spec.
I did recently see someone compare mpv and vlc on a 8k HDR @ 60fps file with mpv really lagging while vlc doing it fine.
I could confirm the mpv lags but don't have vlc, so not sure if it's just better in that specific case or did something like no actual HDR
This may just be because mpv has higher-quality default settings for scaling and tonemapping. Try mpv with profile=fast, maybe. To properly compare mpv's and VLC's performance you'd need to fully match all settings across both players.
It was with the fast profile using both software and hardware deciding, important detail I forgot was that the video was av1. Don't have the link to it now but it was from jellyfin's test files
Ironically, my main gripe about Firefox is that it has no support for HDR content and its colour management is disabled by default… and buggy when enabled.
Many HN readers won't be familiar with the fansub culture that this writeup originates from, so sharing a helpful resource in case anyone is interested in learning more:
I generally dislike anime and tend to reflexively roll my eyes when someone suggests I watch it, but I've been complaining about VLC for at least 15 years.
Its main claim to fame is that it "plays everything," and it rose to prominence in the P2P file sharing era. During this time, Windows users often installed so many "codec packs" that DirectShow would eventually just have an aneurysm any time you tried to play something. VLC's media stack ignored DirectShow, and would still play media on systems where it was broken.
We're past that problem, but the solution has stuck around because "installing codecs will break my computer, but installing VLC won't" is the zombie that just won't die.
Bigger PT sites with strict rules do not allow it yet and are actively discussing/debating it.Netflix Web-DLs being AV1 is definitely pushing that. The codec has to be a select-able option during upload.
The first game was good. This one is not. I don’t understand how a big game like this could have you just walking around doing nearly nothing for several hours straight. Every puzzle and lock solution is basically on a sticky note next to it in game removing the minimum challenge the game presents. Movies are more engaging.
As for the story, it’s just Alan Wake 1 retold but louder and in your face about it.
> I don’t understand how a big game like this could have you just walking around doing nearly nothing for several hours straight
Alan Wake 1 had a lengthy walking around/watching cutscenes first part, so this sounds good to me: I like walking simulators (e.g Gone Home, Firewatch). Not every game has to be about blowing things up to smithereens or solving over-rehashed puzzles.
The most recent example for me was Scorn: for me it was fantastic until I got to the area where you get a thinly veiled shotgun thing with mandatory combat + solve those rotating puzzles over and over whose essential logic has been seen a thousand times (in stark with the first big room environmental puzzle whose logic wasn't that complex but was immersive), at which point I dropped the game as it was just killing the mood for me.
I started AW1 the other day because it had been on my list after playing through Control. There's definitely a lot of walking around and cut scenes but I wouldn't say you do nothing. You do have to fight people, collect items and do some very simple puzzles.
It helps to make a decision about whether it's worth buying. Of course opinions can vary wildly, which is why looking up multiple reviews and/or videos might be a wise idea.
As an example, I've struggled to get people to fully play one of my favorite platformers of all time, VVVVVV. And then the much vaunted Ocarina of Time bores me to tears and I can't push myself to get through it.
It makes sense to make a purchase decision based on others opinions yes, but what I don't understand is why sillysaurusx seems to have already decided based on one response, and without knowing how (dis)similar Drybones's taste in games.
Alan Wake is a great game but I consider Alan Wake 2 to be much better, but I also enjoyed Control more than Alan Wake and enjoyed all aspects of Quantum Break. Where you fall on those games will probably most affect how much you enjoy Remedy's latest.
How much you enjoy unorthodox multimedia narrative story telling, psychological and cosmic horror meta-narrative weirdness, how much you accept being confused from design jankiness in certain spots as part of the experience, stuff like that will decide how much you enjoy this game. Personally, its only real flaw is mystery solving can be a little too handholdy and bruteforce-able.
> As an example, I've struggled to get people to fully play one of my favorite platformers of all time, VVVVVV. And then the much vaunted Ocarina of Time bores me to tears and I can't push myself to get through it.
VVVVV appears to be a fairly low budget indie game with graphics that haven't aged very well compared to modern indie games. I'm sure it was fun and it seems it was very well received when it came out.
Ocarina of Time was a AAA game that came out during the first real mainstream transition toward 3D graphics. It effectively kickstarted the RPG and free-roam genres while still presenting a typically polished Zelda experience. It was fun when I played it (when it came out) but it has not aged very well compared to modern games. If you didn't play it when it came out you're probably not going to enjoy it - but at least you can respect its impact on gaming.
Anyway the point is that games don't age well and similar to music, people don't tend to like other people's favorite games unless they're highly aligned in the first place.
Reviews are pretty pointless as well but in general you can tell in the first 2 hours of a game if you're going to like it or not, at which point you can choose to return it or not return it.
VVVVVV holds up perfectly. Good level design, good physics, good gimmick at the core of its game play. The graphics were designed to be evocative of the Commodore 64 era. It's hard for that to really age when that was the intent in the first place.
Ocarina of Time bored me in 1998. It still does. It hasn't "aged poorly" in my view; it was never good in the first place. (Yes, it's my opinion. :P)
Oh my so I am not alone. I always felt like it was terrible, especially compared to the GB and SNES ones, and whatever games were out on PC/PS/DC around that time (not so much about the graphics but the game's pacing,
controls, and mechanics). I feel the same about Golden Eye.
I feel like these games got a lot of success not because of what they are but because it exposed a chunk of players (Nintendo die-hards) to a type of game that wasn't previously available to them on their favourite platform.
VVVVV was released during the initial wave of indie game popularity. It may not be the most influential of that group- but it's more relevant than it probably seems from a present day standpoint
VVVVVV has extremely simple and polished gameplay, what makes it interesting is how the same gameplay mechanic is constantly challenged and reinvented through very clever level design. It looks like metroidvania as far as exploration is concerned but is the complete opposite in general progress, as in the only thing that locks you out from an area is pure player skill, reinvesting what you learned to go further: "oh, you can do this" instead of "oh, I unlocked this and so can now access that".
You defeat your own point. OOT is nearly universally adored, and you don't like it. So other's opinions are worthless when it comes to determining your own taste.
Experience the art and make up your own mind. You either like it or you don't. The end.
Random internet people is, hilariously all you can even trust now.
Reviewers have been pretty questionable of late with a few obvious gaffes, but Starfield was the last straw for me. A wall on 10s for reviews, but the game is a clear 6, maybe 7 on a good day.
> Reviewers have been pretty questionable of late with a few obvious gaffes, but Starfield was the last straw for me. A wall on 10s for reviews, but the game is a clear 6, maybe 7 on a good day.
Pretty much all reviewers I follow were giving Starfield reviews explicitly mentioning how boring it is how it feels obsolete for 2023.
So which "reviewers" are you quoting and why aren't you reading the ones that match your taste in games?
And how the heck are random people in the internet more trustable to you, there's thousands of people that lost their shit because Starfield didn't get perfect 10/10 scores.
Starfield looked incredibly boring from the trailers and preview videos. I had to shake my head and roll my eyes at the review scores. I’ll stick to Halo if I want to constantly jump and shoot aliens.
I must be about 50h into Starfield and I'm on NG+1.
I found it extremely boring at first. I hugely disliked the potato graphics, the clunky animations and the rubbery faces.
Now I find I pick it up to kill time and have fun while doing so. The story is not incredibly deep but it's interesting enough. The gameplay is not 2023 AAA quality but it's decent enough. The endless interruptions with fast travel and loading (even for crossing doors and riding lifts! :-o ) are pretty low effort but they don't bother enough.
Pretty much all aspects of the game are good enough but never great. I'd probably give it a 6/10 but with a caveat that it's something I keep going back to.
This is the first time I'm actually playing a Bethesda game by the way. I tried Skyrim a few times and always found it extremely boring and clunky. I tried Fallout 76 and it was the same. This is the 3rd of their games I'm trying to play and so far it's been going ... quite ok! And I'm glad I'm playing it, it's fun despite its (many) shortcomings!
I was confused about Starfield until I saw https://youtu.be/lHiP5OPZ2sA?feature=shared , which explains what it actually is: Fallout, but in space. Also apparently it takes about 12 hours to get into it.
That's my take on it, and what I found so increasingly boring about those games
Starfield is Fallout, but in space, Skyrim is Oblivion, but in the north, Fallout is Oblivion, but in post-nuke retrofuture, and Oblivion is Morrowind, but in a thinly veiled roman empire setting.
I mean, from gameplay to quests, it's the exact same thing, reskinned. e.g porphyric hemophilia was cool in Morrowind, but the exact set up + quests is reproduced over and over again in subsequent games (incl. across franchises!). I'm halfway wondering (and would not be surprised) if Starfield had vampires as well.
It's nice if you enjoy the thing a lot (good for fans! I'm all for them enjoying it) but is otherwise so repetitive that what was fun back then is not anymore, and a fresh coat of paint increasingly failed at saving the later entries.
It is good, but you have to go into it with different expectations. Skill Up has the best review of it that I've seen [0], where the game is actually a 4th wall breaking meta commentary on the story driven and mystery game genre as a whole, with live action parts interspersed with the gameplay and cutscenes.
The first game was more action oriented while this one is more like survival horror. I think it's a refreshing change from pushing back the hordes as it's much more of a tense and atmospheric slow-burn.
Personally I'm hugely fond of it but I absolutely love the weirdness of Remedy's extended universe, and for me it's less about the gameplay but the story and atmosphere. So, my bias couldn't be more apparent but I think there's a lot more to it than what you're dismissing it for.
> I just wouldn’t use the Proxmox web ui for zfs configuration. It doesn’t have up to date options.
What options are missing for you?
Would be great if you could open an enhancement request over at https://bugzilla.proxmox.com/ for tracking this (no promises on (immediate) implementation though).
No, that is called reverse causality. The type of people likely to drink artificial sweeteners most are those that are overweight, obese, or have diabetes. There is no insulin response from artificial sweeteners. And as an amateur bodybuilder, I utilize a lot of artificial sweeteners daily to curb my cravings while eating rice, chicken, and turkey to help me cut.
Sweeteners won’t make someone overeating stop overeating. But they can be used to lower overall caloric energy intake and reduce cravings as a tool.
I switched to Jellyfin from Plex cause of it being open source and having AMD/VA-API transcoding support
I’ve enjoyed it a but more cause I feel like I can do more on the server end. I recently started to use Infuse on my Apple TV for it cause turns out that Swiftfin, still in development, doesn’t have a license for Dolby Audio formats.
But the development cycle for Jellyfin and the clients looks healthy, unlike Plex which seems to have stagnated. The next gen Jellyfin Web UI (Jellyfin Vue) is looking good too
Jellyfin is also pretty forgiving about my file names but I am meticulous at making sure the structure and filenames are correct before dumping anything new to the library to the point where I have a complex script to process movie and tv show filenames and folders. You can also override the metadata with the Identify function on the media page context menu.
Unfortunately I had a pretty bad experience with jellyfin when trying to switch from plex. Plex works for me in almost all scenarios, mobile, desktop, chromecast, what have you. And I can play multiple feeds simultaneously from my cheap Nuc server. With Jellyfin I had trouble to get video even playing without stuttering/buffering on my phone when on the same network, let alone on mobile internet. I'll probably give it another go in a few months to see how they evolved.
That about lines up with my Jellyfin experience ~18 months ago, although I was coming from (and switched back to) Emby at the time, which Jellyfin was forked from (still evident by all the Emby/MediaBrowser references in folder and file names). Which, IMO, was really interesting, because the codebases were very close to identical for some time yet Emby was orders of magnitude more reliable. I have more and more family accessing my server each month to the point I've almost run out of 'devices' allowed by an Emby 'license,' making Jellyfin a more attractive offering going forward... assuming they've fixed the problems they had at the start.
Hmmm...I might suggest looking into the transcoding settings and changing some things next time you take a look. Because I run Plex alongside Jellyfin (the wife prefers Plex's UI once I tweak it), and it typically runs just as efficiently if not a bit more.
I had some issues with Jellyfin that weren't due to transcoding, still not sure what the cause was.
I had a 2nd gen chromecast that would play half a second and fail, something to do with the data format I think as there was some shenanigans with changing the media container but no real transcoding happening. Solved by getting a newer chromecast which was a nice upgrade anyway.
I also had problems playing on my phone, the integrated player in the app would play video fine while the UI was interacted with, so tapping continuously worked. The picture would freeze up though. Playing through the web UI on the phone worked fine, but I prefer the app. Changing the media player from the integrated to externally through VLC solved that.
So I've found it a bit rough in some cases for me, but there are a ton of Jellyfin apps with nice UI. The core work (transcoding etc) is done by ffmpeg by all the big players (plex, emby, jellyfin) so don't expect much differentiation there.
As other comments suggest, this might be due to transcoding. There is tool Tdarr which transcodes media in advance. h264 could be the safest choice for mobile (hw support) and web.
Classic open source alternative feeling. I hope the near future of open source software is more stable and feels identical or better than the closed source options.
Plex might have been stagnating, but it works kinda flawlessly for me. I run it in Docker at home and through a reverse proxy on a cheap VPS (don’t want to expose any ports at home) and even that works really well - the iOS app automagically switches between remote and local networks. Hardware transcoding (Intel) just works, even in Docker. Media scanning is very snappy. User management and parental controls look powerful enough, at least after having bought Plex Pass.
It's not stagnating, so much as they have decided that their initial market doesn't interest them. They were writing software for end users that let end users set up their own person Netflix. But maybe the revenue was unexciting or just insufficient, and now they want to be their own streaming service.
Their streaming service sucks (they're probably at least two orders of magnitude too small to be able to afford to do it right, maybe even 3 or 4), and contaminates the searches on my server with their junk.
Also, it might be true that they're just afraid of the liability of doubling down on their original market. Contributory infringement and all that. This is almost certainly the reason they haven't expanded to include media like ebooks and audio books and karaoke. I mean they have the perfect paradigm for all of these things... the same software that keeps track of where I am in a season of shows, or halfway through a movie could definitely keep track of where I am in a book, if they wanted to.
This isn't entirely speculation on my part... at some point someone had asked them about preroll trailers for new seasons (Archer might be the most fun for these), but they said that they wouldn't add the feature because there was no legitimate source for those videos (even though just ripping them with youtube-dl is dead simple).
I paid Plex for a lifetime pass a long time ago and unless something changes, I will likely never pay them again and somehow I expect more features.
So it’s not surprising they’re looking at other sources of revenue if they expect to continue paying for developers, hosting and the entire company.
I also don’t see how ripping with youtube-dl is relevant. They need a legal source from somebody, maybe with a SLA, that they can sign a contract with, not set up some hack.
> They need a legal source from somebody, maybe with a SLA, that they can sign a contract with, not set up some hack.
I'm not asking them to provide the video files.
I'm asking for the feature. And if someone doesn't understand that's what I'm asking for, then I have to conclude that what they think Plex is supposed to be is very different from what I think it's supposed to be.
That'd make me wrong, except that 10 years ago everyone who knew about Plex agreed with me. Including the original developers.
I think it is fine for Open Source software to behave as you describe. It is much more difficult for a commercial service. Any kind is service would be borderline but charging money for it pushes it over the edge in my view.
At the very least, I think you would need two entities where one creates the software and other one hosts it. That way “the service” is hosting the software and not the specific features that the software provides.
Plex mixes both and so downloading the video files becomes part of the commercial service they are offering. Providing commercial access to somebody else’s copyright sounds illegal to me.
Insightful points, thank you. I only don’t know about the infringement part - Hollywood seems to be the most litigative group, and Plex has them fully covered.
Only to import metadata. But for actual functionality that's set in stone... the interface clearly believes that any audio file is music.
Hell, I have a stand-up comedy library... and if you pull up the Steve Martin album, it suggests his banjo music. You know, both audio files both Steven Martin (the man's been awarded Grammies for both, it seems).
The absolute minimum they might give us is just a different icon for audio books and for comedy. Chosen at library creation time, and no other changes. Even that's too much though.
> Don’t know about ebooks
Ebooks would require changes to the mobile clients in particular. No one's reading an ebook on Plex HTPC.
These changes aren't staggering in their complexity, they aren't horrendous endeavors. They're pretty cheap/easy. They have no interest.
Yeah for sure on the server side it's not set up with that knowledge, and Plexamp as an audio client is very radio-music-centric, but I agree with Arn_Thor that 3rd-party clients can help bridge that gap.
I've fully switched my audiobook client on iOS to Prologue, it's as full-featured as BookPlayer (playback speeds, chapters, remembered place, sleep mode, etc) but instead of managing media on my phone manually, I'm hosting it in Plex.
> I run it in Docker at home and through a reverse proxy on a cheap VPS (don’t want to expose any ports at home)
What is the benefit of running the reverse proxy vs just opening the port? It would seem whatever attacks viable on the directly opened port could just as well be carried out on the proxy port.
If the attack is an application layer (Plex) exploit, then yes, I'll still have a problem. But, having a reverse proxy which handles TLS handshakes does provide extra security against a lot of attacks. I trust nginx to be better hardened than the Plex server.
Also, all traffic is tunneled through wireguard and my home IP has no ports open. Since I'm behind CGNAT, my home is really hard to DDoS now. If I'm ever attacked, I'll just turn off the VPS.
Ultimately, I had the choice between paying €2/month for a fixed IPv4 at my ISP, or spend a little more (€5) on a Hetzner VPS that would also give me space for hosting some websites with a great uplink. So I went with the latter.
I will likely add CrowdSec soon which will give additional protection. To my knowledge, it's not available for Plex without a reverse proxy.
I've also contemplated using Cloudflare Zero Trust (Cloudflare Access) instead, and might yet switch to it - I just refrained from it for now because I read on Reddit that running Plex through that might be a ToS violation (streaming). I've to check the ToS and see if that's true. Also, I run a Minecraft server for my kids and their friends, which isn't compatible with Cloudflare ZT, so - I need the reverse proxy anyway.
> ...am meticulous at making sure the structure and filenames are correct before dumping anything new to the library to the point where I have a complex script to...
I am the exact opposite, partly because I feel like it SHOULD BE the responsibility of the media library to maintain associations between the media files and their metadata, regardless of the filename.
It seems crazy to me that Plex and other media libraries effectively require you to follow persnickety file-naming conventions. I am very much in the minority of folks who think that you should just be able to point these media servers to a file, tell it what that file is, and then have it maintain associations so you can query your media in arbitrary ways to make a playlist or whatever-- no filenames changes needed.
I think you can do that, there is an informal standard for xml files which can live alongside the media with metadata info. I'm not sure if Jellyfin can create them directly but it can read them. See for example tinymediamanager
> I am meticulous at making sure the structure and filenames are correct before dumping anything new to the library to the point where I have a complex script to process movie and tv show filenames and folders.
I'm curious to know why you chose to write a custom (and complex) script yourself instead of using something like Sonarr/Radarr for this task? Does your script do something that the *arr apps are not capable off or is there another reason?
Please tell me I'm an idiot and show me a better way. Lol it won't save me the hundreds of movies I've put in "Title (year).type" format, but it will save some future work.
The *arr suite of apps is made to automate the whole process of building up your media library. You have Prowlarr for managing your download sites and clients, Sonarr/Radarr for TV shows/movies, Lidarr for music, Readarr for books, etc.
These apps can be self hosted and are fully open source. The basic workflow is that you add a movie/show, it automatically searches all of your download sites for the title, chooses the best download based on your filter criteria (resolution, size, etc.), sends it to your download client and then places the movie/show into your library based on the folder/file naming pattern you specified previously.
You can choose to automate as much of the process as you want or do most of it manually. E.g. grabbing new episodes as soon as they air vs supplying your own files (if you rip your media yourself for example) and only letting the program do the part of renaming and moving your files.
Also check out Ombi once you have the arrs set up. It's a combined UI for your users (or just yourself) to request a movie or show and then you just wait a bit and it shows up in Plex/Jelly.
Maybe it's just me, but ombi was no end of issues for me (and resource hungry). I switched to Overseerr a while back and haven't looked back. Would highly recommend giving it a try.
I found it to be a very polished experience and has been set and forget.
The *arr applications can automate it but I personally don’t like doing it that way, unless you are good with your quality profiles bad files can overwrite good and it’s not the best with removing unnecessary files
I use a program called filebot which uses the same metadata sources as Emby/jellyfin and will automatically rename and move files.
So sonarr/radarr queue things up in rutorrent that saves to a temporary location and then I drag to filebot to rename, skim the results for things going weird, and tell it to move em
I let the Ember Media Manager work out the hard stuff around this for me. It is (generally) extremely good about parsing things, scraping the right details, and producing INFO/NFO files that Kodi, Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, etc will recognise.
The only irritation is that it's Windows-only, but it has saved so much pain and aggravation. It can also auto-rename/restructure your filesystem, but I've never been brave enough to try that feature.
For me it recognizes basically all the movies without any intervention, downloaded from random places. For those few it can't find, I just put IMDB id in its metadata and its done. For music, I tagged all albums with Picard previously, so each has musicbrainz data and was instantly recognized fully. On boarding for 10TB media center lasted maybe an hour for video and 0 for audio.
> am meticulous at making sure the structure and filenames are correct before dumping anything new to the library
Me too! General rules of thumb: as long as your content matches the name on https://www.themoviedb.org/ Jellyfin will recognize it and have excellent metadata, posters, etc. Even if you change the filenames later you can re-scan the library and it will be updated to reflect the new names.
Besides a pointless re-arranging of the UI, which we all hate, what should they be doing? I'll grant you "Bugs to be quashed", but fewer features to fill, fewer devs on the payroll, and less selling out to make payroll sounds perfect to me.
I disagree. The market ready for disruption was the CPU market stagnated by Intel. It was also the perfect opportunity to put the limited financial resources behind to come out with a viable product to compete that didn't need a ton of software ecosystem to work. Datacenters, gamers, Cloud hyperscalers, Supercomputers, they all needed something to replace their aging and inefficient Intel Skylake Xeons and Core CPUs. And their chiplet tech made it possible to make this CPU product span the entire portfolio for cheap.
If they decided to compete with GPU, they would have just lost in gaming GPU sales to NVIDIA due to mindshare and they wouldn't have had the resources to develop the software to compete. And datacenter GPUs were still a niche and rare product.
AI/ML was not realistically something they could predict or bet the house on 7 years ago. And just like Lisa said in the recent presentation, AI is in its early stages and will be a growing and long term business venture.
Additionally, their CPU chiplet developments were critical in producing the talent and experience that would translate to GPU chiplets that AMD is not utilizing on RDNA 3 and CDNA 3, providing a strategic advantage over NVIDIA.
They still have the time to enter it with their MI300s AND now they have the money and resources to develop their software ecosystems more.
AMD absolutely made the right move to focus on Zen and HPC. It's not their fault that investors are blindly overhyped about AI.
AMD's greatest threat in datacenter AI hardware isn't even NVIDIA. It's the biggest tech companies producing their own AI hardware (Google, Meta, Tesla, Amazon) effectively and eventually eliminating the need for AMD or NVIDIA GPU/AI hardware.
I appreciate your points but you're being generous to AMD. They bought ATI in 2006. I remember in 2007 seeing CUDA for the first time in the password cracking scene and thinking wow they've done something amazing. OpenCL was there too, the "one framework heterogenious processing" sounded amazing but quickly became the ugly cousin.
Then in 2011 with crypto, once again Nvidia was always supported but ATI was that other case that required the different install with only some support.
Then 6 years ago when I started working professionally in ai, it was CUDA only for most of the applications. AMD had some stuff but had pretty much given up on OpenCL and at this point was a distant second. If you chose AMD you were quickly going to be locked out while the cool kids played with CUDA and TF. This was in a time when there may have only been one framework or library to do a particular algo. So it really was a lockout.
So to your point, 16 years ago when I first saw GPGPU, you could bet your house on it becoming something massive. The scientific applications alone were obvious to anyone with a copy of BOINC.
Nvidia have shown a masterclass of building something as a corporate over many years and really dominating all competition. AMD should have jumped onboard with TF and made sure any CUDA enabled algo had a _insert whatever AMD would have used_ equivalent. But they didn't, they couldn't even get linux drivers to work.
The cost of nuclear today has more to do with the fact that we aren’t building nuclear plants. There are minimum companies with small operations making nuclear reactor technologies for just maintenance of existing ones and military contracts. If we were building new nuclear plants with modern reactors, the costs wouldn’t be a big deal anymore because the production of them would have scaled better.
But instead we’re spending tens of billions on windmills and solar panels that won’t last 15 years or operate well in many regions, including Germany and especially south Germany. This is why Germany is now reliant on France’s nuclear power to handle the majority of its power needs and the citizens are paying massive premiums for it. Not the government.
So maybe we should ignore the pesky cost issue cause we certainly ignored the financial and economic cost consequences of solar and wind.
The argument that costs will come down if we build more nuclear worked in the 1950s, but we know now where that goes now. Build
More nuclear and costs come down. With more plants there are inevitably more nuclear incidents, the public realizes these things can make entire nations uninhabitable if they fail, and then they demand a halt to nuclear, pushing prices back up.
Nuclear prices have baked in the public sentiment on the risk of meltdowns. The prices are efficient.
> With more plants there are inevitably more nuclear incidents
Can we stop making this argument? It is an extremely bad faith argument. There have only been two accidents of commercial reactors in the history of nuclear power that led to the loss of lives. The likely value is well under 10k (<100 directly attributed to Chernobyl). The first was orders of magnitude more dangerous than the second, was early into the development of nuclear power, and was caused by experimentation using a nuclear reactor that the rest of the world refused to use due to the potential for the reactor to fail in exactly the way Chernobyl did. The second, killed a single person, was caused by the largest natural disaster in the region (in all of recorded history), where the science of the day did not think such an event could even happen.
Yes, there's more nuance to this, but we also need to recognize the actual level of danger. These arguments pretend that scientific knowledge has not changed over 80 years. These arguments pretend that there are no deaths and/or environmental concerns with other energy sources (literally every one has these concerns). They ignore the cost of carbon and other environmental damage of the source's lifetime. Most importantly, these arguments pretend that all incidents are equally as dangerous.
Can we please just stop? There are a lot of valid criticisms of nuclear power, but making lazy arguments just results in fighting. Talk about costs, reliance on fuel, the possibility of not even needing them, or any other points (argue with nuance). The public is (sadly) not well informed about nuclear nor most scientific concepts in general, although many members have high confidence in their cursory understanding. (The thesis here applies to a lot of other scientific domains btw, including: climate, health, and even evolution) We need to have real conversations about these issues as there is a lot on the line. Complex issues require complex discussions.
It is quite misleading to only focus on deaths due to nuclear accidents. Fukushima may not have (directly) killed anyone, but the cleanup is hideously expensive (estimates say many hundred billion dollars). Containing Chernobyl costed a few percent of Ukraine's pre-war annual budget. So far, roughly one in a hundred power reactors have blown up. If this is priced in, the economics get even less favorable.
I'm quite sure, but not 100% that the above number does *not* include research reactors. If it makes sense to include those into the statistics is less clear.
Fukushima had three meltdowns (reactors 1-3), and a hydrogen gas explosion that damaged the spent fuel pool of reactor 4. Together with Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, this corresponds to roughly 1% of all commissioned reactors suffering catastrophic failure with significant radiation release.
You both are making statistical errors. You've aggregated the data improperly. As I mentioned in the original rant, this calculation throws out the temporal component and thus 80 years of development and research. Safety has greatly increased over the last 20 years, let alone 80.
Yes, and these death-based analysis' also ignore the fact that both Fukishima and Chernobyl could have been much, much worse if major interventions were not made at the right moment. I always think about the Fukishima engineers who got the instruments in the control room to turn on by wiring them up to car batteries. If the team on duty that day was just a little less resourceful, the story gets much worse. Those incidents should be seen as a lower-bound to the danger not an upper bound.
No, we cannot stop talking about the danger of meltdowns, because it is a proven danger, and a uniquely catastrophic one. Approximately once per decade, a nuclear reactor melts down and either does (Chernobyl) or nearly does (Fukishima) make a nation-sized area of earth uninhabitable. Asking people to ignore this fact when they consider building nuclear plants in their region is silly.
There is a reason why the Anime community has collectively has ditched VLC in favor of MPV and MPC-HC. Color reproduction, modern codec support, ASS subtitle rendering, and even audio codecs are janky or even broken on VLC. 98% of all Anime encode release playback problems are caused by the user using VLC.
We even have a dedicated pastebin on a quick run down of what is wrong: https://rentry.co/vee-ell-cee
And this pastebin doesn't even have all the issues. VLC has a long standing issue of not playing back 5.1 Surround sound Opus correctly or at all. VLC is still using FFmpeg 4.x. We're on FFmpeg 8.x these days
I can not even use VLC to take screenshots of videos I encode because the color rendering on everything is wrong. BT.709 is very much NOT new and predates VLC itself.
And you can say "VLC is easy to install and the UI is easy." Yeah so is IINA for macOS, Celluloid for Linux, and MPV.net for Windows which all use MPV underneath. Other better and easy video players exist today.
We are not in 2012 anymore. We are no longer just using AVC/H264 + AAC or AC-3 (Dolby Audio) MP4s for every video. We are playing back HEVC, VP9, and AV1 with HDR metadata in MKV/webm cnotainers with audio codecs like Opus or HE-AACv3 or TrueHD in surround channels, BT.2020 colorspaces. VLC's current release is made of libraries and FFmpeg versions that predate some of these codecs/formats/metadata types. Even the VLC 4.0 nightly alpha is not keeping up. 4.0 is several years late to releasing and when it does, it may not even matter.