Sorry I'm a bit late

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 23rd, 2023

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  • ChromeCast was far too finicky & app-dependent for my liking; also didn’t seem to add any platform-specific content I cared about.

    Samsung was awful. Didn’t work with anything except Samsung & then still very app-specific.

    Raspberry Pi is a great way to put a proper desktop browser, & standard devices like a HDD/NAS, KB/mouse, touchscreen control, on a TV; but it doesn’t receive casts from one’s phone out of the box, nor offer any exclusive streaming content. That said, a Pi running Kodi can be a pretty great media center PC, for content you already have.

    Roku often has free streaming content that I & my family actually like to watch.

    I also find it to be a much less tightly gated app ecosystem, than ChromeCast etc. There are Roku apps (annoyingly called “channels”) that allow me to cast whatever files I’ve got on mobile, or whatever media streams I browse to; no restrictive “this app doesn’t cast that” limitations. I have seen similarly general-purpose casting apps for ChromeCast etc, but the only ones I’ve seen used were a lot more limited than what I run on Roku. Several seemed to have had their functionality actively disrupted by system updates from Google. Never had any such issue on Roku; in fact, my venerable RokuHD unit plays more codecs than it used it, & had an actual bugfix just last year, despite Roku announcing EOL in 2019. The RokuExpress is a bit of a dog (about as slow as the RokuHD), but it works for non 4K content. The RokuUltra has worked flawlessly so far.

    I don’t know of any smart TVs from major OEMs, that support streaming direct from Samba shares / NAS, right out of the box; but there are apps (“channels”) for that.

    Roku remotes have no numbers on them; if you get a RokuTV (a TV with Roku built-in), it will not ever accept numbers input, even from another remote. For this reason, I recommend getting a TV with proper tuner & number keys, if there’s any chance the TV will get used for actual OATV broadcasts. (“Free, over the airwaves, as God intended.” - David Letterman)

    ATSC 3.0 is getting encrypted, though (violates the terms of the broadcast license, but the FCC isn’t stopping it). So, useful OATV without internet, may disappear soon anyway. Also worth noting: changing channels betwen encrypted ATSC 3.0 OATV streams, is sloooow. Like really slow; don’t push the button too quickly or the TV tuner might crash, slow.

    None of the streaming devices like ChromeCast/Roku/etc, have the full breadth of DigitalVideoRecorder capability. If you actually want a great OATV DVR experience, consider getting an external ATSC 3.0 tuner with “NextGen TV” certification logo. You might even want a dual/multi tuner unit: Even though many TVs & streamboxes & tuners, have multiple inputs, none of them support Picture-In-Picture except the dual tuner units. More than I can say for the TVs themselves: HiSense replaced a 40" with a 44" because the power-switch daughterboard died, & they sent a replacement part but then realized they had no techs in the area to install it. (They didn’t have the 40" anymore, poor me.) Element has repeatedly made their tuner app worse & worse, to the point where it doesn’t even go to what channel you’re on when you pull up the guide, dumps out of the guide at seemingly random intervals, & sometimes switches to the wrong channel & then freezes up. Bear in mind, the TV manufacturer makes the OATV tuner app, for each of these TVs, not Google/Roku/etc. Which makes the insanely bad layout of the Samsung TV & casting apps, even more inexcusable: they had control of both ends, & seem to have put minimal effort into anything but restricting features that were “universal” over 10 years ago.





  • Similarly to I2P, IPFS sites can be relatively decentralized & censorship resistant; so, that & social features, are probably why Veilid was mentioned.

    They’re intrinsically more suited to private cliques than public sharing, so I agree that they don’t really replace major public forums like TPB or the old KAT.

    That said, TPB’s continual relaunches are about the best a well-known centralized public site can manage, on a system as oppressive as the corporate-run “internet” we have today.

    It’s a lot harder to shut down P2P apps & devices, than websites on the clearnet.







  • +1 to just use Tribler, as it already does most of what OP mentioned:

    • Social features
    • Discovery\follow
    • Patronage\ratios
    • Sync (via following \ autodownload)
    • Curation\filtering\tags

    Doesn’t really do privacy, but P2P over corpnets ≠ private; for “privacy”, use a proxy (or torrent exclusively things no one gets jailed for, like entertainment video\music\books).

    (I know this sounds insane, but I don’t use a proxy for torrenting, yet the only ISP that ever complained was CenturyLink, when using a friend’s computer that lacked ad-blocking, to download extremely well-known torrents of a recent show, without removing the tracker URLs from the magnet link. Since 2005, zero complaints from my own torrenting, AFAIK…? I even torrent directly on my phone & cast to a TV. 🤷 I’m not recommending a no-proxy philosophy, just noting that I’ve never had an issue that required me to proxy\VPN up, even when DLing apps.)


  • +1 to those who said DHT.

    There’s no tagging support, but I’m not sure why I’d need tagging.
    DHT crawling reveals pretty much every active public torrent, & finding what I want is just a matter of including it in the search terms.

    “s04e10 2160p x265” brings up every torrent containing a file with s04e10, 2160p, & x265 in its filename.

    I could foresee plenty of situations where tagging for quality, & for metadata beyond filenames & sizes, would be useful; I just haven’t actually had it come up.

    Everything I need shows up on DHT search.

    Well, except .STL files, but that seems to be because they’re given away for free so often there’s no impetus to make torrents of them?




  • Aren’t the TAS episodes literally the TOS scripts they didn’t get to do?
    Notably “the soft weapon”…
    (Are those Caitians? No, Kzinti!)

    Anyway, given that it’s the original cast doing the voice acting, I like to think of TAS as “the rest” of TOS.
    Star Trek TOS: 3 seasons
    Star Trek TAS: 2 seasons
    Star Trek TNG: 7 seasons
    Star Trek DS9: 7 seasons
    Star Trek Voy: 7 seasons
    Star Trek Ent: 4 seasons
    Star Trek Dis: 4 seasons
    Star Trek ST: 2 seasons
    Star Trek Pic: 3 seasons
    Star Trek LD: ≥4 seasons
    Star Trek Pro: ≥1 season
    Star Trek SNW: ≥2 seasons

    Hmm, what’s next? A DS9+Ent crossover show, to round out the “peak Trek nostalgia” lineup?

    Personally, my pick would be to see a crew of scrappy Terrans find their way to the good lucky universe, rather than “Starfleet Academy” kids… We have Prodigy for that?