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  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • As far as I can tell there are two separate worlds, with close to no overlap.

    On the one hand the mainstream stuff, proprietary, DRM compatibile, interner dependet, non moddable, no privacy, no way to own your content, tracking you from asshole to appetite, often ad-infested.

    Best you can hope for is some Android TV streaming box, but the moment you start to do stuff like root it or unlock the bootloader some streaming apps might decide to stop working, or degrade your quality. DRM-protected streaming services will completely refuse streaming high-quality content to any hardware you really control.

    On the other you have self-hosted, often open source, tweakable, local, customisable, technology, compatible with all codecs you want, but functionally blocked from DRM. There is essentially no way to legally acquire video content for the second one. You could get a libredrive compatible BD reader and rip your own movies, but that’s still illegal in many countries, certainly the US, and is a ton of work.

    If you have sufficiently powerful hardware, you might be able to stream low-bitrate 720p with software decoding. They won’t serve you better stuff. Anything better than that, you should consider it accidental and likely to stop soon.


  • Hopefully his 7a doesn’t die tomorrow, and by then Fairphone has managed to put out Something that’s at least reasonably better than 7a.

    When I bought my Fairphone, I was simply too fed up with working around the intentional shittiness of the other companies.

    I prefer to deal with some technical limitations, than have to deal with intentional ones.

    I use Arch BTW.




  • I see, I know the arguments from gamers (and have seen that video before). The discussion was on TVs and I didn’t think of the gaming angle.

    I’m also not convinced about that stuff, to me it’s like talking to audiophiles that swear they can totally hear the difference between made by an expensive ethernet cable in the final audio, or that they can tell 16bit 48kHz from 24bit 96kHz, while basic physics and double blind tests say they can’t.









  • A couple of oldies, that deserve to still be played. Disclaimer: I played both games when they were already ~8 years old, and completely outdated in terms of technology.

    Planescape: Torment

    One of thr best RPG ever created, and that is entirely for the world building and writing, and how much of the gameplay ends up.being based on these rather than the combat mechanics (which are just ok)

    Deus Ex

    Again it was way ahead of its time in terms of world building and depth, and it was still an unashamed PC game, that dared to challenge its users a little and didn’t need to have a GUI that could be used with a gamepad, unlike the sequels.