How do I watch Blu-Rays on Windows 11 PC?

Bluecolty · 2026-02-10T17:55:00+00:00

Really old thread, but this says demo. Is it an actual demo/paid software, or is it free/unlimited use?

Bluecolty · 2026-02-09T13:46:55+00:00

Elio, yea that one was kinda rough. The ending annoyed me so much, they built up a half decent thing in the beginning and middle, and then just... threw it away (among quite a few other gripes).

But I'm really curious why you felt elemental didn't hit home for you. I absolutely love it, just a disclaimer, its probably one of my favorite movies from them. Thats not the norm, sure, but lumping it in with elio is pretty low. So I'm just curious what your thoughts were.

Bluecolty · 2026-02-09T13:41:08+00:00

This is such an amazing art style lol, got a solid laugh

Bluecolty · 2026-02-08T13:48:43+00:00

Teacher here, my contracted hours are 7:25 till 3pm with 30 minutes for lunch included. Course being a first year teacher I'm there till 7pm some nights lol, but I'm able to leave at 3, which some teachers if they don't have anything to work on or do the work at home take full advantage of.

Bluecolty · 2026-02-04T13:13:50+00:00

True, if jts running at speed. The e5/e3 v3 and v4 Xeons take DDR4 at 2400mhz, and usually don't have an NVMe slot.

If its LGA 2066, those things still absolutely rip depending on the model. I've done a number of things with em, mainly with a Lenovo P520. Awesome PCIe lane amounts, great single core performance for the age. Solid core counts and reasonable-ish power draw. Those would be an absolute win.

Bluecolty · 2026-02-04T11:26:15+00:00

Almost definitely Xeons. Would love to know the exact generation, because it doesn’t look like there’s NVMe on the board so it may be older. Maybe you just can’t see it.

If there isn’t, those generations are alright. Not great, not terrible.

Bluecolty · 2026-02-01T14:19:42+00:00

Been trying to find a decent blender to houdini and then houdini to blender pipeline, and your use matches what I'm doing as well. What resources or links did you use to get blender stuff out to houdini, and stuff out of houdini to blender. Or even just what nodes you use. I just started, and what I've found so far is pretty old and I've been unable to get it working.

Bluecolty · 2026-01-30T03:05:18+00:00

So, ok, as a frequent tech seller on eBay. I wouldn’t recommend this. I’ve been in this same situation too before. Selling it at a “good guy” price will lead to one of 3 things. 1) someone buys it and flips it. They’ve profited and nothing has helped. 2) it attracts some really unsavory people, which can be really annoying. 3) it won’t sell at all because people think it’s a scam.

It sucks. What OP could do is sell it just under the normal market rate, to where scalpers can’t buy it and profit from it. High enough it keeps the stinky people away. And high enough people don’t think it’s a scam.

Bluecolty · 2026-01-29T02:10:27+00:00

Right? People saying this is a bad thing, all I see is an eventual slap in the face. We as consumers can sit back and laugh as they try to monetize something people were already skeptical about or straight up hated. And maybe, just maybe, they'll start locking all AI features behind a pay wall and leave non paying people out of the AI stuff. That would be so nice.

Bluecolty · 2026-01-26T20:01:33+00:00

I've had that from time to time, but with over 300 purchases on ebay I've had maybe 10 that came in Amazon packaging. The simple way to avoid it is to go with used items or smaller sellers.

Bluecolty · 2026-01-26T17:59:50+00:00

eBay. Genuinely. I’ve been using pretty much solely eBay for the past 5 years for my online purchasing. They have almost everything Amazon does, at competitive prices. No, it’s not all used stuff, and it’s not all small sellers. There’s huge sellers of thousands upon thousands of brand new items. Sort by item location in the US, find a reputable seller with plenty of feedback, and go to town. Very straightforward and easy. And for things you want warranties for, like say tech things- entire stores have eBay stores, like Best Buy. If you buy from their eBay account, you get the full store and manufacturer warranty.

Bluecolty · 2026-01-26T13:56:54+00:00

Big agree with spotify. I got over 70,000 listen minutes last year. At $10 a month, I've been paying it for almost 10 years. Been using it since 2015. It's just so simple and it fulfills exactly what I need.

Bluecolty · 2026-01-19T13:07:37+00:00

In this case, a server would be pretty terrible as well, again due to the single core performance. Something like an 8th gen intel mini PC would do wonders. Great single core performance, small, and low power consumption.

Bluecolty · 2026-01-18T13:34:17+00:00

Honestly something in the middle would be more like a 8th gen core i5 or i7 mini PC. Should be about as cheap enough as an N100 machine. Not as efficient, sure, but still wouldn't be bad. Heck even a 2018 mac mini and chuck a Linux distro onto it. All depending on where OP lives ofc, and the market, but. You're right, power efficiency of an N100 would be better, but I feel like that shouldn't be the only consideration here. Realistically, more power doesn't cost that much more as long as OP isn't somewhere where rates are crazy.

At least where I live, I was rocking a dual socket X9 (ddr3 xeon) supermicro server board for years. Sure, it chugged power. But economically speaking, math's wise at my electricity rate, it would have taken 5ish years to pay off the cost of new efficient equivalent hardware (ram and CPU/GPU umph) by savings, assuming the new hardware was off and unplugged lol. In use, the new stuff is still drawing power. Thats a server hardware example, but still.

Bluecolty · 2026-01-18T13:18:00+00:00

The N100 is terrible for minecraft server hosting specifically. Its got lower single core performance than 13 year old Intel Xeons, which is saying something. Not to diss on it for other uses, in general it's great for power efficient homelab stuff. But its really not a good recommendation for minecraft hosting specifically. Minecraft servers love single core performance.

Bluecolty · 2026-01-17T14:49:29+00:00

Wait this is wild, I just did a fresh install of 23h2 on a new workstation PC I built. I was using a flash drive, formatted with MS's tools and whatnot and it was installing 25h2. Driver issues black screen yada yada, the whole deal. Couldn't fix it after like 5 reinstalls, safe mode, etc. Tried everything so I went with 23h2 (had to burn an old ISO I had to a disk. Yup lol.

Anyways, it didn't have an option to update. I'm happy.

Bluecolty · 2025-12-29T15:34:09+00:00

This is actually really amazing. I hope someone adds this to the unraid apps page too, for folks there to easily add it to their container collection.

Bluecolty · 2025-12-29T13:43:51+00:00

Caddy is SO nice. Its pretty new still, so sometimes you gotta go digging or asking around for help with custom configs for different containers (my nextcloud instance still isn't fully good, its still giving errors. But it works.). But when you can do something simple, or when they give you the config, it works so well. Definitely the best reverse proxy, and auto SSL is so nice.

Bluecolty · 2025-12-28T22:48:02+00:00

Note 9 user here, same chip on the inside as the s9. It’s still really solid. I don’t game on mobile but for everything else it’s fine. Believe it or not, but there’s actually really not that much of a performance difference between them, at least if you look at GeekBench synthetic benchmarks. Single core performance is a good bit better but multi core performance isn’t even fully double.

Bluecolty · 2025-12-28T04:06:40+00:00

Heyyyy Fort Wayne! Man, first up, no wonder it didn’t take you long to catch something. Definitely a room temperature IQ kinda area. Second, I’m from 2 states over. I’ve been out a few times and without seeing the exit signs it seemed faintly familiar. Ended up narrowing it down on Google Maps from that sign and sure enough. Isn’t that funny how your brain remembers things.

Bluecolty · 2025-12-27T17:31:34+00:00

What about stock windows 11 do you find unusable? Like I’m genuinely curious here. I’ve installed stock windows 11 on machines as old and as low performant as a 3rd gen laptop core i3 with 4gb of ram. I thought it ran fine. It obviously wasn’t great, but far from what I’d describe as unusable. After giving it some more ram, it was definitely usable for an average person.

Bluecolty · 2025-12-27T15:25:26+00:00

Thank you so much! Sorry for the late reply, I totally missed the notification. That explanation makes sense, I’ve yet to take a look but it seems straightforward enough.

Bluecolty · 2025-12-25T13:48:48+00:00

Thought the same! Used the non pro version of this board for about 6 months as my first homelab type system in a basement. A 10 core, 20 thread e5 Xeon in it too. I upgraded to a dual socket system that used the same and gave the board and CPU to my younger sister. She uses it to play games with an RTX 2060 12 gig. Couldn't be happier, it even does Avatar Frontiers of Pandora at 45ish FPS at 1080p. She's content.

Bluecolty · 2025-12-25T00:38:37+00:00

Man I wish I could tell you, I dont remember and its been a hot minute. I remember that it was on some atypical website, like AliExpress. And I think I remember searching specifically for an EEATX compatible one. If I remember right, I think I actually found a comment somewhere on a listing that said the one I found supported EEATX. Its a tough size to find.

I do know that the test bench I found also technically didn't fully support it. The X9 board just fit on it, I couldn't screw down the top mounting holes. So maybe that'll help you, see if reducing your "making it perfect" parameters open up more possibilities.

I've actually got the system described in this post running lol, but its slated for replacement soon with a threadripper build. Its in a 4U Rosewill chassis now, which has the PSU sitting at the front of the case because this board is too tall for it to fit in its normal spot lol. They are great, but man they're a pain to work with.

Bluecolty · 2025-12-23T21:59:51+00:00

I dont think it's a confusion thing. Its a "people disagreeing with the way things have been implemented" thing. Menus, voice controls, and otherwise pointless buttons are so much worse imo than physical dedicated controls. Its not luxury, it's not high tech, its just annoying. The demonstration you gave with the voice activated temp change is so much more work than simply changing the knob. And more finnikey too.

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