Is this just more money for Palantir?

Got it.

Ah, I see the unclear part. I read this line…

I imagine sitting on coach, searching for show. Then you want to watch some, and then you have to wait half an hour for full episode (or even season?) to download.

As if OP already had a media library, and was outside of their home, sitting on a coach (bus?) and wanting to watch something from their existing library on their phone/laptop/tablet, thinking they’d have to wait for the entire thing to download. This would not be the case. If OP had no content library, and wanted to browse for something new, then yes, you’d need to download the entire thing and add it to your media library first.

1. Getting stuff into your media library require downloading the thing.
2. Watching stuff (even remotely) that already exists in your library does not require downloading the whole thing.

attempts to query 8.8.8.8, regardless of your DNS settings.

Streaming box / stream app makers have been working around local DNS for a long time. Sometimes of course they’re assholes that want to do shitty things and do this to make interdiction harder. But sometimes there are legitimate reasons. Ones I remember… users who don’t really understand what they’re doing can be overly aggressive with blocking and block things that are necessary for a particular service (causing support problems). Sometimes the ISPs DNS servers have shit performance, and using a well known commercial provider like cloudflare or google can improve performance at scale. It’s not always evil.

You can’t watch media before it’s completely downloaded.

This is not true for just about any use case.

If you use *arr, you’ll likely use Plex or Jellyfin for a media server. That server will do progressive streaming. Netflix by contrast does dynamic adaptive progressive streaming.

Progressive streaming means that playback will start once your client has downloaded and buffered enough of the selected content from the server. The amount is typically a fairly small portion of the stream, like 10 seconds or so, though the specifics are left to the server and client configs.

Dynamic adaptive progressive streaming has a multiplicty of streams optimized for different devices, formats, and quality levels. This might be a few hundred copies of the same video asset, but in a few different codecs, a few different color encodings (ie HDR, SDR), and a quality ladder of maybe 10 steps ranging from low quality SD to moderate quality UHD (like maybe 300kbps at the low end, and 40Mbps at the high end. And these will be cached around the world for delivery efficiency. On playback, the client (player) will constantly test your network throughput in the background, and “seamlessly” adjust stream quality during playback to give you the best stream your network and client can support without stopping to rebuffer.

For example, if you’re on a 4K/HDR TV with Atmos sound, and great network throughput, you’ll get the highest quality HDR streams and Atmos audio. Conversely, if you’re on mobile that doesn’t support HDR and only stereo audio, you’ll get much more efficiently coded HD video (or maybe SD) and stereo audio streams that are more suited to playback on that device. It would be impractical (huge cost and minor benefit) to try to replicate dynamic adaptive streaming just for yourself.

In any case, even if you’re just pulling off a NAS, you shouldn’t need to wait for the entire file to download before you can start playback. If your files are properly coded, you should be able to do progressive streaming in just about any use case.

There is no verification that is true.

But there is a nearly continuous stream of occurrences where Meta is caught lying.

It looks like it says iPad in the upper right. iPad never used Silverlight, it had an iOS app from launch, but you’re right in general. PC browsers used WMV for a brief while at the launch of streaming and then switched to Silverlight.

Streaming was very much the term used to describe watch instantly language (like all language in the UI) wasn’t random, it was the result of continual testing and optimization. The entire set of activities was new for a lot of people, and the company tested variants of everything all the time. I can’t remember too much about this specific device/UI combo, but probably watch instantly was chosen because at the time it needed to distinguish “instant watching” from managing your ‘DVD by mail’ queue (which was the only thing you could do on the web before “watch instantly” was a thing. We definitely used streaming to describe the activity though; you’d find it in press, earnings calls, etc… Just not in that particular variant of the UI. (source: worked there at the time).

No. Debian on the server. CachyOS on the laptop OPNsense / FreeBSD on the router-firewall appliance.

I don’t really feel like I need a single OS across everything. The lack of that has never been an issue.

Most Americans don’t understand the distinction between partisanship and politics. The phrase “I’m just not political” usually means either “I don’t want to hear your partisan bullshit right now.” or “I hold objectionable views that I can’t articulately defend.”

It’s the new Ice Barbie.

If he’s that out of the loop on news, the poor bastard probably doesn’t even realize he dies in a fire locked inside it every time he drives.

For sure, but my point was that t hey know that outright banning guns is nearly impossible, so they’ve done essentially what the republicans have done on abortion. They’ve attacked it on every other conceivable angle: they’ve made it hard to buy guns, hard to use them, hard to run any business that sells them, hard to buy ammo, hard to stay in legal compliance with constantly changing laws and case law.

The state’s strategy has essentially morphed to enacting every law and policy that makes it harder to buy, own, and use guns, knowing that most of them are not legal, but get them tied up in courts indefinitely. It’s a scummy strategy, but it’s been fairly effective.

It’s moronic. We demand lower noise in most products, but demand higher noise in guns because we can’t distinguish Hollywood bullshit from reality. I think most CA Dems would accept the premise that reducing injurious noise levels while participating in a legal activity is a good idea, but institutionally they’d never give an inch on gun laws.

I have opnsense, and it was pretty easy. I use DNS overrides and a local reverse proxy. When I’m on the home network, the local dns overrides point to the local reverse proxy. When I’m outside the home, public DNS records point to my VPS, which reverse proxies the traffic to my home machine. This way I’m only hitting the VPS when I’m outside the home. Much more efficient.

I think Side of Burritos’ youtube channel has a guide on how to set this up, but it’s fairly straightforward.

Something maybe wrong? I have 58k photos and it didn’t take anywhere near that long. If memory serves, I just let it rip overnight and it was done the next day.

OK, so after a bit of poking at it:

1. I agree. The OnlyOffice mobile Android app (called Documents) is a much better mobile spreadsheet viewer/editor than Collabora.
2. What’s even cooler is that the app works with Nextcloud as a cloud backend. So I can log into my existing Nextcloud instance and get the benefit of the better sheets editor on my existing files with no extra work at all!
3. They say that OnlyOffice supports markdown as of version 9, but I think they mean the broader platform itself, not the Android app. For example, you cannot create a new .md file from the mobile app, and if you try to open an existing .md file, it displays a “wrong file type” error, but it does successfully open it as a .docx.

In any case, since it works with Nextcloud, the app, out of the box, is already a more functional mobile spreadsheet editor. That’s a big win in my book. Thanks!

Haven’t tried it. Is it better in this regard?

Yeah. That’s what opencloud uses. Their app does a handoff to Collabora.

Ill have a look at Joplin. Thanks.

I’m not having any issues with my current setup

I’m lazy. I just want things to work. So in your shoes, I wouldn’t go trying to create work if things work fine.

I run Debian on my home server and my VPS, but I chose it for familiarity and stability. I wouldn’t say Debian is inherently barebones; you can add/build whatever you want. It is a longstanding, capable distro that is the base of many other distros. It’s a solid choice that favors stability. And if things are working with Mint, why break them?

By contrast, I run CachyOS on my laptop because it’s a newer laptop and the rolling release model of CachyOS (and Arch, which it’s built on) gets the updates and hardware support I need to make my laptop work. It’s simpler, better, and less work, and significantly more functional than it’s be with Debian, because the rolling release distro moves fast. My home server is 10 year old hardware, so the more stable Debian is fine.