• 6 Posts
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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • Quicksync

    Yeah, it doesn’t sound like you’re transcoding in a way that’ll show any particular benefit from Quicksync over AMF or anything else. My ‘it’s better’ use case would be something like streaming to a cell phone at 3-5mbps, and not something local or just making a file to save on your device.

    DDR4 and no ECC

    That’s what my build is: 128gb of Corsair whatever on a 10850k. I’m sure there’s been some silent corruption somewhere in some video file or whatever, but, honestly, I don’t care about the data enough to even bother with RAID, let alone ECC.

    I will say, though, if you’re going to delve into something like ZFS, you should probably consider ECC since there are a lot more ‘well shits’ that can happen than what I’m doing (mergerfs + snapraid).

    power consumption

    A $30 or whatever they are kill-a-watt plus something like s-tui running on the NAS itself to watch what the CPU is doing in terms of power states and usage. I’ve got a 8-drive i9-10850k under 60w at “idle” which is not super low power, but it’s low enough that the cost of hardware to improve on it even a little bit (and it’d be a very little bit) has a ROI period of longer than I’d expect the hardware to last.


  • If you’re going to be doing transcoding for remote users at lower bitrates, quicksync is still better than AMF, so I’d vote Team Intel.

    If you’re not, then buy whatever meets your power envelope desires and price point.

    For Intel, anything 8th gen or newer should be able to natively do anything you need in Quicksync, so you don’t need to head to Amazon and buy something new, unless you really want to.

    Also, I’d consider hardware that has enough SATA ports for the number of drives you want so that you can avoid dealing with a HBA card: they inflate the power envelope of the system (if power usage is something you’re concerned with), and even in IT mode, I’ve found them to be annoyingly goofy at times and am MUCH happier just using integrated SATA stuff.



  • It’s not even really that bad: a new patch will force recompiling of the shaders in Fortnite, and by the time you hit the ground from the battle bus it’s usually… fine?

    Like, yes, it’s a stuttery mess in the lobby and while landing, but who cares? That’s not gameplay where it matters in the least what the pixel-peeping frametime stats say.

    This kind of thing is why I’ve just stopped caring about product reviews. It’s either pixel-peeping nonsense that nobody but the reviewer thinks is important, or it’s nonsense like ‘The new Gaming Blaster X 2000 Mega Pro! For $1499 it’s the best thing since the last thing, you should buy it, recommended!’ and you look at the benchmarks, and you see that last gen was 148 fps, and this thing is 158 fps on the minimums and like, who gives a shit.

    You won’t notice this if you’re playing the game and not playing watch-a-stats-graph, and this has kinda become the norm for a few generations of reviews on everything.



  • New (7000 and 9000) ryzen CPUs have an iGPU that can transcode via AMF, so the ‘equivalent’ would just be buy a modern AMD CPU.

    AMF isn’t quite as good as Quicksync, but it’s probably fine for most use cases for most people, though I can notice the image quality losses when you’re doing something like transcoding to 1080p low(ish) bitrate for remote streaming, and so have a very big bias in favor of nvenc or quicksync.

    Also, I’m in the more-ram-is-better camp, so buy as much as you want and/or the platform supports.






  • Yeah, I’m just using some cheap NFC stickers from Ali Express.

    The thing is that I don’t use the dashboard: not every action has a dashboard entry and even if there is one, the amount of time it takes to load the app, open the correct dashboard tab, and then click a button is like, 10x the time of ‘tap your phone on the NFC tag, and thing happens’.

    On Android anyway: iOS requires you endlessly tap ‘Yes, yes I’m sure I meant to do that it’s fine just do it already’ for NFC triggered actions, and on Android, it just goes ‘boink’ and does it.

    TLDR: it’s super faster than hitting a button on the dashboard.





  • Both!

    The native automation is perfectly cromulent for what I want, usually, but there’s a couple of cases where the integrations either don’t exist or don’t return meaningful data.

    FOR EXAMPLE, the video playback in the living room thing. Sure, the roku integration says “something is playing” but it’s shockingly wrong and unreliable. What happens is it falls into ‘idle’ status between videos, or if you’re fast forwarding sometimes and thus the automation was not doing exactly what I wanted.

    The Jellyfin API, though, can look at the living room tv user and is spot on as to what is going on with play/pause/stopped statuses, so I have node red yank that data direct from the API and it works great.


  • big fan of mini PC’s

    Same, but just be careful if you venture outside of the “reputable” vendors.

    I bought one recently from Aliexpress, and while it’s perfectly functional, it’s using an ethernet chipset that doesn’t have in-kernel drivers so I have to keep compiling new drivers for it every time the kernel upgrades.

    Not the end of the world, but an annoyance that I could do without, and not something a slightly more expensive version of what I got would have.


  • I’ve gone way too far down the automation path.

    All manner of temperature, humidity, occupancy, motion, and air quality sensors make all sorts of things do appropriate responses.

    For example, I’ve got a mmwave motion/occupancy sensor in the bathroom, and if there’s no motion/occupancy and the humidity is more than 5% higher than the hallway sensor, then turn on the exhaust fan until it’s not.

    Or, if the air particulate count in the kitchen is too high, turn on the exhaust fan until it’s not.

    Or, if the living room is occupied, and the tv is on and playing media, turn the overhead lights off and turn the RGB accent light on very dimly. And if the media is paused or stopped, increase the brightness of the RGB lighting so you can see where you’re walking, and if it stays paused or stopped for more than 10 minutes, turn the main lights back to whatever state they were in before media playback started.

    No dashboards though, since the goal is essentially that you don’t have to think about what is going on, because it should Just Work™ and never be something you have to deal with.

    …though, really, I’d say we’re at like 80% successful with that.

    For manual interactions I’ve got a bunch of NFC tags in various places that will trigger the appropriate automation in the case that you either want to do it by hand or it fails to do the needful, plus the app is configured to allow manual control of any device and to trigger specific automations.



  • Search will never search non-local content.

    Which is the point I’m trying to make: right now, you cannot use search as a discoverability medium, unless you’re on something the scale of mastodon.social.

    Search with a focus on new content discoverability is utterly useless for smaller or single user instances, because a search that only finds things you already know about isn’t exactly a useful search for discoverability.

    If I have to be on the biggest instances, then there’s very little difference between something like Bluesky and Mastodon in terms of usability, and uh, I might as well pick the one that’s more likely to have the most growth and diversity of content.

    We have to give up on the idea of having easy and direct access to the whole of thw fediverse.

    I agree, and it’s why I’ve pretty much migrated back to centralized services with the exception of Lemmy, because Lemmy works very well in terms of finding useful shit to follow in a way that literally no other federated platform does.