VGA was originally a proprietary technology developed by IBM, though it was later built upon by VESA and is now publicly documented, so while it wasn’t developed by VESA as an open standard from the get-go, it is now considered an open standard that doesn’t require any licensing fees to implement. DVI was developed by the “Digital Display Working Group” and also does not require any licensing fees, though there are licensing terms you may have to abide by and there may be some costs associated with testing and validation to ensure you meet those terms and the spec.

H.265 is not a royalty free standard like AV1, VP9, Theora, etc. It’s covered by proprietary patents held by groups like MPEG LA so in order for manufacturers to build hardware level support for it into their devices they have to pay whatever the then current royalty fees are to those patent holders.

That’s reasonable, people deserve to get paid for their labor. In this situation however, the difference between them is that DisplayPort is a royalty free VESA standard. So while manufacturers have to pay for the materials and such to include it in their devices, they don’t have to pay any additional fees to license the standard. HDMI on the other-hand is a “brand” of proprietary connector/interface (kind of like how “Velcro” isn’t the actual name of a product, it’s a “brand” of hook and pile tape), so not only do manufacturers have to pay for the materials and labor related to physically acquiring and installing the connectors, but they have to pay both per-device and annual licensing fees for rights to use the HDMI product.

“Direct playing” just means the source file is entirely compatible with the client device and doesn’t require any transcoding/re-encoding by the server, it doesn’t really tell you whether the client is using software or hardware decoding to play it. I’m guessing it’s probable that a Jellyfin server could still report “direct playing” even if the client is using software decoding to play it. However, if the client device is something like a smart TV or something with a more locked down OS, and the maintainer/manufacturer removes support for a codec from that device, you may show more transcoding action on your server for things that previously just direct played because smart devices like that may not have support for software decoding, or may not have the horsepower to try even if they still have the codecs installed.

I just set it to downmix to mono in Handbrake and it’s been alright. I’ll definitely do some reading/comparing to see what this setting is all about though.

H.265 (HEVC) is not a free (as in freedom) codec, so yes. You as an individual consumer can use things like Handbrake to encode H.265 video for your personal use, probably using the free x265 software encoder, but in order for a device like your phone, camera, TV, laptop, etc. to have hardware accelerated encoding or decoding, the manufacturer has to pay a licensing fee.

This is true of lots of proprietary technologies. HDMI is another one. In order for a device to ship with an HDMI port (as opposed to Displayport), the manufacturer has to pay a per-device licensing fee.

Kinda makes me even more glad I’ve been migrating all my stuff over to AV1/OPUS.

The desire of intelligent, hardworking people to just live their lives and be left alone means we’re eternally condemned to be ruled by those who are absolutely unfit for the job. Anybody smart enough to be a good leader wouldn’t have the job.

They’re completely out of touch with how normal people use their computers. The only people who want AI in their OS are the AI tech bros.

The online multiplayer for the original version of Modern Warfare and other older games still works fine on Linux and even has community modded maps and modes.

They say it can run games at 4k60 “with FSR”, so it seems like it’s targeting 1080p native rendering, which is totally fine for me. I’ll be connecting it to the living room TV and sitting 6-8 feet away so I’ll probably keep it set to 1080p anyway just to keep the framerate high.

Definitely will be grabbing the Steam Machine when it releases.

It looks like you used the eraser in paint to just delete part of his head.

There’s an animated movie from the 70s I think called “Wizard”. This post reminded me of the end of the movie, 😆

And they’re always the softest mild steel they could find so it’ll cam out, destroy the head on a bolt and force you to go dig your good one out anyway.

It depends. It means I live in an area where I have a lot of other freedoms. I can go build a shed and nobody is gonna ask me about a permit. I can plant a garden or put up a fence and my neighbors aren’t gonna complain to an HOA about how it looks. And I have the freedom to drive to places much further away and leave whenever I feel like it instead of working around somebody else’s schedule.

There are trade offs for every way of living, but it would be nice to have “something” around here as an option.

There are lots of places, like where I live, that just straight up have no public transit; no buses, no trains, no taxis. We have a couple medical taxis to take folks to appointments if they have Medicaid/Medicare, and if I drive 2 hours I can catch a Greyhound bus or a plane, but that’s it. If I want to shop at Walmart it’s a 30 minute drive. My in-laws are about 300 miles away, so any time we visit it’s about a 5 hour drive, depending on whether we eat on the way or not.

I’m a school bus driver and I’m not even joking when I say I blew my kids’ minds with a burned CD the other day. My daughter asked me to make one of the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack. One kid asked how I got it on CD and when I showed him a burned disc complete with sharpie label his response was just, “Wait you can do that?!”

Made me feel old as hell.

Flatpak/flathub is your friend. I’ve been using Linux for 20+ years and I’m to a point where if it’s not available as a deb, flatpak, system package or at the bare minimum an executable binary/script I just don’t bother. Compiling should be done by the software vendor and not required of the user unless they specifically want or need to.

Neither are that bad honestly. I have jigdo scripts I run with every point release of Debian and have a copy of English Wikipedia on a Kiwix mirror I also host. Wikipedia is a tad over 100 GB. The source, arm64 and amd64 complete repos (DVD images) for Debian Trixie, including the network installer and a couple live boot images, are 353 GB.

Kiwix has copies of a LOT of stuff, including Wikipedia on their website. You can view their zim files with a desktop application or host your own web version. Their website is: https://kiwix.org/

If you want (or if Wikipedia is censored for you) you can also look at my mirror to see what a web hosted version looks like: https://kiwix.marcusadams.me/

Note: I use Anubis to help block scrapers. You should have no issues as a human other than you may see a little anime girl for a second on first load, but every once and a while Brave has a disagreement with her and a page won’t load correctly. I’ve only seen it in Brave, and only rarely, but I’ve seen it once or twice so thought I’d mention it.