^^^^^^^ i’ve tried explaining to my therapist that having an external source of motivation just makes things intrinsically easier and her only response is basically “well you just need to figure out how to be that external source” and i’m like =| thanks for curing ADHD lady. just gotta THINK about it harder.

If you have a theater nearby that offers Dolby Vision films you can try out a version of HDR. They use laser projectors so the blacks can really be pure black. When the screen goes dark just before the movie the entire theater will be pitch black except for emergency lighting. It’s glorious.

I live out in the country with a lot of farms and yeah people do this. I’ve seen apples, peaches, firewood, and a few other “shelf stable” things.

For sure the quality will be worse than software but typically if I’m away from home I’m watching on an ipad and then you really can’t tell the difference.

EDIT: I meant QSV Gen 7, which would be intel Gen 11. Kaby Lake and up can still handle HEVC in hardware but they have to use software as well for 4K.

worth mentioning that any intel cpu with an iGPU from generation 7 (kaby lake) and up can handle 4k hevc transcode in hardware. i just upgraded my plex box to an i7 8700K and it works quite well. an old office workstation with like a 9th or 11th gen intel cpu would probably rip through transcodes.

aesthetics, i would guess. everyone has different tastes.

Caveat: I am not a programmer, just an enthusiast. Windows programs typically package all of the dependency libraries up with each individual program in the form of DLLs (dynamic link library). If two programs both require the same dependency they just both have a local copy in their directory.

oh shit you may be right lol

An 1/8th to a quarter of weed, a cake, AND a new shirt? lucky man

I can (anecdotally) confirm the overclocking sensitivity. Although it seems to be more that this game just REALLY pushes hardware if you let it which is naturally gonna draw out overclocking instabilities.

i can’t find the article for the life of me but i read an interview with a dev who basically said that the UE5 engine is fine unless you try to crank all of the visual bells and whistles on at the same time. Now imagine being a dev team trying to convince marketing not to use all of the features they paid for? Can we blame Epic and Nvidia?

This was my first thought too lmao. “How considerate of them to recreate the experience of not being able to play it smoothly until half a decade after it comes out”

I think the silent protagonist choice is valid in more of “sandbox” story like BG3. Speaking for myself, voiced protagonists tend to “lock” me into a specific role. I absolutely love the voice acting for Geralt of Rivia but when I play a witcher game I’m not inserting myself into the game, I’m becoming Geralt and making choices based on how I believe Geralt would make them.

one of these creepy bastards got inside of my soap dispenser brush thing for doing the dishes. just threw the entire brush away D=

oh okay, interesting. well, you could always use the web browser on your phone/ipad i guess. not a great experience but i know for a fact that plex works on ios in chrome at the very least.

Plex has pretty bad DV “support” as an example. AFAIK it will only play back dolby vision profiles that have the HDR10 compatibility mode or whatever. Any time I get an older DV file I have to play it through some Android TV app.

Ease of setup was how I just got one techie friend and two non-techie gamer friends to set up Plex servers and we had libraries shared to each other within 15-30 minutes. I don’t want to think about explaining VPNs and SSL to them for the alternatives.

Plex still offers that option, it’s just buried in the settings.

i’m not sure why it would do this, i’ve never had any issues with watching plex while the internet is down (in fact that was one of my original uses for it, to have movies and tv in a building without internet). I don’t have it turned on but I do know you can go into server settings -> network and set a list of IPs/subnets that can access without any authorization at all. That lets you use plex without even having a plex account afaik.

As a techie I hate this answer but it’s hard to beat a Roku with Plex from an ease of use standpoint. My 70+ year old parents have no problem navigating it.