tables

Most Adobe tools don’t have any good free alternatives even for home use.

Yep. Lightroom is the one piece of software I tolerate paying a subscription for. Alternatives do exist, but they all suffer from the typical FOSS problem of never having had a designer look at them and help them build UI that’s meant to be used by humans.

I’ve spent a bunch of time trying to learn Darktable, and at the end I still couldn’t arrive to the same results I could in Lightroom by watching a 5 minutes tutorial and adjusting a few sliders. Not to mention that searching for a few of the issues I had led me to a bunch of threads of people complaining about the exact same issues only to be met by a developer telling them “if you don’t like the UI use another tool”.

And it’s not like the output is saved for the next time; you need to do it every time.

You can cache transcoded content in Jellyfin. So use a large enough cache and you basically only have to transcode once for every resolution. It’s easier for me to set up transcoding than it would be to manually figure out which resolutions I’ll prefer having around and transcoding them. Most of my stuff exists in 1080p, with 4k files for stuff I REALLY like, but I sometimes find myself watching on very low resolutions on my phone when away because I have pretty limited data.

I find that in a few movies the 4K versions have a generally better image quality and are worth it even if you are sitting far away or not watching the content in 4K resolution at all. But like you, I only keep around 4k files for stuff I really like.

EDIT: I’ve also run into problems with codecs on other people’s devices when not transcoding. I could keep my files in whatever the most compatible codec is nowadays but having the ability to transcode on the spot is easier.

What specifically isn’t working? I’ve got Jellyfin running on Docker with transcoding from a Nvidia GPU.

I pretty much followed the documentation here: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-acceleration/nvidia. I can share my docker-compose for that specific use case if you’d like.

I think those miniPC CPUs do a good job transcoding from what I’ve read, the N95 and N100. I already had older hardware set up when I added Jellyfin so I got a cheap nvidia Quadro P400 for the transcoding. If you’re setting up a new system though, I’d guess a Intel iGPU would be more than enough.

I’ve looked at https://www.elpamsoft.com/?p=Plex-Hardware-Transcoding before for transcoding comparisons.

While I understand the sentiment, I hate this trend that whenever someones talks about how soulless the internet has become, the answer is always Web 1.0.

I don’t want web 1.0. I like having CSS and Javascript around. I use them to build things I couldn’t with HTML alone, and I’ve seen countless incredibly creative websites which fundamentally couldn’t have been built without Javascript. It’s weird to me how the article mentions the creative aspect of the old web, versus the commercial aspect and “sameyness” of the current web, only to then toss out tools that allow for even more creativity and personalization in the current web.

Whenever I finish reading one of these articles it always feels like it’s mostly nostalgia and not much else.

I don’t understand the frustration. With all of the recent examples of people winning photo contests only to reveal later that their “photos” were made by AI, it’s only natural that judges grow paranoid of these things.

As for your friend’s comment on photo competitions, that sounds like someone who’s butt hurt for not winning. I enter some photo contests ocasionally and I have yet to see one in which the winner hadn’t produced some pretty decent work.

I’m on the same boat right now, borg and borgbase.

It’s not pedantry, it’s just that RAID and instant data duplication or synchronization aren’t meant to protect you from many of the situations in which you would need a backup. If a drive fails, you can restore the information from wherever you duplicated the data to. If, however, your data is corrupted somehow, the corruption is just duplicated over and you have no way to restore the data to a state before the corruption happened. If you accidentally delete files you didn’t want to delete, the deletion is replicated over and, again, no way to restore them. RAID wasn’t built to solve the problems a backup tries to solve.