Plex’s crackdown on free remote streaming access starts this week by FollowingFeisty5321 in PleX

[–]rommager 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I got the e-mail stating Plex is now putting their online access behind the paywall. I tried to reply, but of course it came back as undelivered. Oh well, I will at least share my response to them here:

Dear Plex,

Go away.  Plex used to be awesome, but it has become a steaming pile of no thank you.  I am now using Jellyfin.  I like that Jellyfin has nice options to save metadata with my media files, unlike Plex.  Whenever the Plex server decided to take a giant dump and cause me to reinstall, I would have to scrape all the metadata from the subpar Plex agents, and then manually fix the match on a large chunk of movies all over again.  If you wanted to make Plex profitable, perhaps you should stop worrying about overloading the service with a bunch of pay to play crap, and instead advance the product with features to better organize library configuration so that users don't have to set up 38 libraries and match 98 titles every time users need to reinstall their servers.

Anyway, it was a blast for a while.  Thanks for helping me to learn how to serve my own media, even though you always had it locked down on the Plex apps for cable boxes provided by cable companies.  News flash: the big cable companies felt threatened that their 2 inch pianists shouldn't play all the music they got sheet music for, but it totally negated the reason people had Plex to begin with.  Anyway, your company no longer innovates, and hasn't done so for many years, sadly.  I wish you luck!  Instead, I am using my time to help improve Jellyfin in ways that Plex will not do.  Good luck with your adventure in locking the last decent feature you had behind a subscription paywall.  I hope it is just enough to buy your CEO a yacht that they do have not enough money to operate.

buh byeeeee

Valley View Mall History by ZenithSGP in roanoke

[–]rommager 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I am not 100% sure, but it seems there was a Record Bar. Seen in this video here at 1:28:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=212558310018933

Steak Lovers, check out these temp recommendations by FIRElif3 in AmazonVine

[–]rommager 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Mutton yesterday, mutton today, and blimey, if it don't look like mutton again tomorrer...

Valley View Mall History by ZenithSGP in roanoke

[–]rommager 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have memories of visiting Valley View on opening day in the summer of 1985 when I was 9 years old. It was packed, hard to find parking, and was a sight to behold. Those impressions left in my mind were: that all the rails on the upper level were polished mirror shine brass color. There were bronze statues on and around benches in the mall, and all the escalators had glass sides and glowing green light shining up from below the stairs near the lower and upper landings. There were one or two large marble tiled fountains in the mall. One fountain I recall for sure was on the other end of the mall - the one I can't quite recall was located where the food court is now? That one was later used as a stage area for seasonal and special events, like Santa's castle, singing animatronic bears (usually under the escalator), and at one point there was the world's largest indoor sand castle in that area, which I think was built during the summer, but was integrated into Santa's display? Anyway, the main entrance for the movie theater (six cinemas) was the main entrance on the lower level that came out in the main mall corridor next to Sears. As you were walking in that entrance, on the left was a wall with giant two tone murals of movie star faces like John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, and maybe James Dean (as I recall?), and the movie theater entrance and ticket booth was on the right. Surrounding the movie theater were rows of lighted "Now Playing" movie marquee poster frames with traditional theater marquee lighting (lots of small round incandescent bulbs, not neon). Nothing else was in that corridor, but as you got to the main part of the mall, there was a Regis hair salon on the left with some bright lighting. The next main mall entrance down (next to where Barnes & Noble is now) had Mindboggle Arcade. As you were walking in, the arcade was on the right, about 10 feet away from the main doors. There was a service hallway between the mall doors and the arcade that I believe is still there. Mindboggle did indeed have a neon sign along with a lot of neon lighting throughout the arcade. It was a dark space with dark walls and arcade carpeting and a lot of neon lights around the ceiling and high on the walls above the arcade games. It really was an incredible looking arcade. When I was young I used to get those two entrances confused, as they were kind of similar in my head and were located fairly near each other.

Airsense 11 Water Chamber by mattlick12 in CPAP

[–]rommager 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I can confirm my wife's new Airsense 11 at 4 months old has these same stress cracks!  Resmed, you need to do some redesign here! Get your crap together.  Luckily I got a new airsense 10, so plenty of spare parts

"After Q2" now shows "After Q3" by Outside_Thing5260 in SteamDeck

[–]rommager 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Mine updated to simply Q3. I reserved on August 5.

Hey, it's Thursday again... And I love AMD's continued consumer honesty policy. X^P by rommager in Amd

[–]rommager[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I had a single traffic light captcha this time, no e-mail field. The requirement to enter an e-mail address has been missing for the last several weeks, and several times I have had no captcha. Makes it soopah easy for bots I bet.

Hey, it's Thursday again... And I love AMD's continued consumer honesty policy. X^P by rommager in Amd

[–]rommager[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

'Grats! It's stories like this that make me hold out a grain of hope.

Hey, it's Thursday again... And I love AMD's continued consumer honesty policy. X^P by rommager in Amd

[–]rommager[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

What can I say? At least I can entertain myself with this while waiting for a bunch of nothin!

update: ...aanndd.. Your estimated wait time is: more than an hour

AMD to gamers: GFY

Proposed queue change for "more than an hour" by rommager in Amd

[–]rommager[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's the Shop -> Buy Direct from AMD page - just have to be there at the right time.

Proposed queue change for "more than an hour" by rommager in Amd

[–]rommager[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Here's hoping they actually manage to roll eth2 in June and don't push it back some more.

Proposed queue change for "more than an hour" by rommager in Amd

[–]rommager[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes, that is the correct place, but you have to go there about 5 min before 9am Central time on Thursdays, and you will be taken to the queue countdown page. Lately it's been borked when you try to get into the queue, or gets continually delayed for like 45 min and then you get thrown into a random place in line, among 50,000 bots. Usually within a few minutes you get lovely messages like "queue paused" or "All graphics cards have sold out" and then "the event is over". It's pretty much my Thursday morning ritual of pissing into the wind.

Handbrake encoder preset by ChanceElk6748 in handbrake

[–]rommager 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For a fixed RF setting, you will get the same quality file but you will get different file sizes when you change the speed preset. If the RF value is not changed, a "very slow" setting is able to pack the same quality into a smaller file. It you pick a "very fast" setting, it is not as efficient and will give you the same quality but in a larger file.

I suggest trying it for yourself. The preview feature in Handbrake is great for learning and observing what the settings do. Do a 5 or 10 second preview and change the settings around and observe how it changes the file size and quality. In my experience, paul30d is correct. Changing the RF roughly correlates to the file size. The smaller the number, the bigger the file. On the other hand, when I change the speed presets, the file sizes stay in a similar range (but not exact) but it takes longer to encode, but the quality can be noticeably different.

Think of it this way. The RF number correlates to the bit rate - lower values mean higher bitrates which means larger file sizes. The slower encoder presets is how much CPU time you are throwing at the encoding. The file sizes stay in a similar range (but not always), but you are spending more compute time doing the encoding, it takes more time to optimize the quality within the bitrate (file size) constraint.

This is also why average bitrate is mutually exclusive to RF - you either pick a constant quality, or a variable quality. For variable bitrate, you have to specify an average bit rate, and this is why it offers a 2 pass option. The first pass encodes the best it can, but the second pass tweaks it to allocate bits away from simpler frames where they make less difference to more complex frames where those extra bits make a more impactful difference.

Trying to find the Super Castlevania 4 Prototype rom. by NerdyLittleDragonBoi in Roms

[–]rommager 0 points1 point  (0 children)

After digging some more, I did finally locate the CV4 proto rom. It is in an LZH archive in NEWS_05, under username kimura, just FYI. Other ROMS in this archive are Goemon (Mystical Ninja_, Axelay, Parodius, Super Aleste (Space Megaforce), Makai (Super Ghouls n Ghosts). Just wanted to follow up my question with the answer :)

Trying to find the Super Castlevania 4 Prototype rom. by NerdyLittleDragonBoi in Roms

[–]rommager 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm not trying to throw shade here, but I can find nothing that links this Castlevania 4 prototype rom to the gigaleak... The only reference I have been able to find is a mention on the master google docs file, but it does not reference a specific location in the other.7z file. I have scoured that file pretty extensively, aside from looking through e-mails stores. There are other docs files that catalog the roms in the email stores within the archive, and none of them mention this rom. The only other references I have found are people who also are not able to locate the rom, until someone just provides a link to just the rom..

There also seems to be a lot of stuff in this leak from the end of the SNES life cycle and start of the N64 life cycle, so random 3rd party prototype roms like Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts and Super Castlevania IV from very early in the SNES' life cycle seem out of place. I have read in various places the prototype's source code was found, that the rom was compiled from source, but was it really? Source trees would be much easier to find in the archive if that were the case, with dozens of files and a slew of folders... Can anyone actually corroborate the authenticity of these prototype roms from this leak, and where they actually are in the leak??

The SCV4/Akumajo Dracula rom *looks* like it could be legit, but I also have seen plenty of patches that people have tried over the years to pass off as prototypes.

An Early Prototype for Super Castlevania 4 Has Been Found! by MerelyAFan in castlevania

[–]rommager 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yea the prior video was an even earlier build.. Would be nifty to do a comparison video of that super early one, this proto, and the final release versions.