• 5 Posts
  • 319 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
cake
Cake day: January 21st, 2021

help-circle

  • I’m pretty surprised that all of the audio formats work. I’m not so surprised that the TV has h265, although maybe a bit surprised that it is exposed to the browser. The container support is also pretty surprising. Unless your MKVs are so simple that they are effectively WEBM.

    Or maybe it pops the link out of the browser into a dedicated media player which has decent codec support.

    iDevices do expose h265 in the browser, but the container support is still a bit surprising. But then again WEBM is basically MKV, so maybe that is why it tends to work.


  • There are a handful of common reasons.

    1. The client doesn’t support the formats. Browser clients are notoriously picky not supporting some common video (for example few browsers support h265 and it isn’t generally considered web-safe) and audio formats. But embedded devices may also cause trouble if they don’t have enough CPU to do non-accelerated playback and don’t have hardware support for the codec used.
    2. Playing at a lower bitrate. In that case you can transcode at the fly.
    3. Remuxing. This is things like the moov atom where the actual codecs are supported but not the container or exact packaging of the file.

    But yeah, especially if you are using a player with wide format support you may not need it.




  • IMHO this isn’t really worth it.

    1. x264 is very fast at lower profiles. Especially if you aren’t streaming across the internet often the size hit from the fast profiles is fine. Even if you are streaming over the internet it is probably fine. Getting a slightly faster CPU will also get you super far and is more useful to have lying around than a GPU as it will benefit most things that you do on the server. And worst-worst case a bit of CPU usage isn’t going to hurt much of the things that he is running (except maybe a game server if people are playing at the same time and you are really maxing out all of your cores).
    2. Integrated GPUs are fine for a handful of concurrent streams. Especially the Intel ones which have amazing media engines.
    3. Even if you are going for a dedicated GPU I would go with an Intel ARC. They are way better at media encoding and cost less.
    4. You can always add a GPU later. Wait until you have a need and are seeing problems without.

  • While I agree, I think that getting more games on Linux is far more useful. When Linux is almost 3% very few studios will care much. If they can do a small bit of testing on Proton and maybe work around a bug or two they are far more likely to do that then make and test a native build. If this then gets Linux usage to 5, 10 or 20% that will drive more native builds.

    So I agree that it somewhat reduces the incentive to release a native build. But I think that is outweighed by the benefits of making the Linux gaming experience better today which will have a greater impact on availability of native builds in the future.




  • kevincox@lemmy.mlMtoOpen Source@lemmy.mlGIMP 3.0 Released
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    23
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    4 months ago

    Actually I would pick GIMP.

    1. Says what it is, an image editor.
    2. No popups and random interruptions.
    3. Not only AI editing examples which makes me thing the tool is AI only.
    4. An overview of the variety of major features it has rather than just AI editing.
    5. Links to helpful documentation rather than endless marketing pages that say nothing.

    Really think only thing I would like to see is some screenshots and examples of using the tool, rather than just info on what it does. But the Photoshop page barely has this, just a few examples of the AI tools.








  • kevincox@lemmy.mltoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldMini pc arriving tomorrow
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    6 months ago

    IMHO Arch is actually a great choice. They do have a minimum update frequency you need to maintain (I don’t recall exactly, I think it is somewhere between 1 and 3 months) but if you do, and read the news before updates (and you are usually fine if you don’t, usually the update will just refuse to run until you intervene) things are pretty seamless. I had many arch machines running for >5 years with no issues and no reason to expect that it would change. This is many major version updates for other distros which are often not as seamless.

    That being said I am on NixOS now which takes this to the next level, I am running nixos-unstable but thanks to the way NixOS is structured I don’t need to worry about any legacy cruft accumulating from the many years of updates.

    And after all of that I don’t think it really matters. I think any major distro you pick, weather stable, release-based or LTS will be fine. They all have some sort of update path these days. (unlike in the past where some distros just recommended a re-install for major updates).


  • Only if they gain possession when the device is running with the drive decrypted and they keep it running the whole time. That is a lot higher bar then being able to turn the machine on at any time and then recover the key. For example if this is a laptop that you are flying with. Without auto-decryption you can simply turn it off and be very secure. With auto-decryption they can turn it on then extract the key from memory (not easy, but definitely possible and with auto-decryption they have as long as they need, including sending the device to whatever forensics lab is best equipped to extract the key).


    1. Wiping the drive is a lot easier, just overwrite the root key a few times.
    2. If you store the key on a different drive you can safely dispose of the drive just by separating the two. (I do on my home server, keeping the decryption key on a USB drive. If I need to ship the server or discard old hardware I can just hold onto the thumb drive and not worry about the data being read.)

    Security is always about tradeoffs. On my home server unattended reboots are necessary so it needs to auto-decrypt. But using encryption means I don’t need to worry about discarding broken hardware or if I need to travel with the server were it may be inspected. For my laptop, desktop and phone where I don’t need unattended reboots I require the encryption key on bootup.