phantasmish

Alyx just hasn’t been quite enough motivation for me to take on the project of figuring out how to get it hooked up and working, though I did at one point do the few minutes of googling to confirm it might work (I think it’s one of those Facebook ones, and as I recall it is supposed to work for Alyx but I’ll need some cable or other). Especially since it’s a fairly short side-story, it’s just not enough juice to be worth the squeeze.

The conclusion of the series (until it’s not the conclusion any more—yeah, I know how franchises work, lol) though? That’d do it.

If I already had it out and used it regularly I’m sure I’d have played Alyx by now, but with that being the only thing I have any interest in doing with it, just not enough to get me to set the thing up for that alone.

Taiwan’s democracy is absolutely threatened with destruction by a totalitarian superpower, that wasn’t in any way incorrect or misleading, and that’s how the GP post phrased it. Its state is threatened with destruction. That’s entirely accurate.

They’re dense motherfuckers, and that’s the generous take. They’re a black hole of stupid. That’s the level of density we’re dealing with. And that’s just the America I’ll be living with until I die. One that’s been trashed so thoroughly by the idiot brigade that hope for actual improvement is gone for, best case, several more decades, which will amount to the rest of my life.

They’ve wrecked shit out beyond the horizon of my plausible lifespan, in all likelihood. They’ve been continuously working toward doing this my whole life. No, I’m absolutely not being too harsh.

If the core point about the poverty line being based on inflation adjusted food prices alone is correct, then the piece holds up very well and explains a hell of a lot about how life feels in the US right now.

[edit] if the “the line you see on charts is still just 3x food costs” thing isn’t actually true, through, then the article gets a lot weaker in a hurry.

[edit2] FWIW the Wikipedia page on this topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States) largely confirms this, raises some similar points about potential problems with the “poverty line” today on basically the same grounds as the article, and reading it gives the same sense of standing on a deck of a ship that you’ve just noticed is leaning alarmingly toward starboard as the linked piece.

All modern campaigns assume large segments of the electorate are very dumb. Because they in-fact are. You’ll get your ass handed to you by a less-idealistic campaign every time if you pretend things are otherwise.

The trouble now is the huge private media empire capitalizing on that fact was deliberately built over a period of 40+ years and is now entrenched. Countering that is gonna be hard and take generations. Everyone alive now is going to have to suffer for decades before it maybe gets better.

People bringing it up in discussions of the general budget usually either don’t understand how it’s funded, or are presenting it inaccurately because they want to end it.

Failing to even win a majority of voters… less so.

But yeah, FDR did a hell of a lot less actual law-breaking.

You can’t give authoritarians do-overs. If they don’t do it, the next one, emboldened by the total lack of consequences, will.

The same people didn’t know the east wing had been torn down until a couple weeks after it happened.

In both cases they only found out when my wife told them.

They pay attention to lots of “news” but it’s AI videos of mass crimes and viral “look how bad democrats are” garbage.

That people are dense motherfuckers (can we stop sugar coating how stupid these people are if they’re surprised about any of these things? I mean dumb as a bag of hammers kinds of dumb, dimmest bulb in a box of broken bulbs, that level of dumb) doesn’t mean this wasn’t clear.

It is 100% these morons’ own fault they’re surprised.

Being optimistic about this one was one of those “having a mind so open your brain falls out” sorts of things.

I mean what, 10ish% of our entire GDP in the US, and IIRC that’s generously low, is being throwing in a fire from excessive spending on healthcare for effectively no actual benefit, versus peer states. And that’s just one fake-productivity issue (though one that affects the US more than most). But our GDP would drop if we fixed that!

Without both of:

- A driver willing to flee the cops.

- A cop willing to chase at dangerous speeds

The high-speed chase doesn’t happen. Both make it happen.

But people love ‘em, and if you point out what a bad idea they are people label you “soft on crime” (as happens with a lot of plainly good policy)

Kodi's got some really weird UI choices going on. I don't think it's the case that Netflix-alike UIs are anywhere near equivalently bad, but people are able to use them anyway just due to familiarity. I think Kodi's is simply a lot worse.

Even the parts of Jellyfin that don't resemble Netflix (as there's no user-facing equivalent in Netflix)—the server & library management portions—I find vastly easier to use than Kodi's equivalents.

Out of the box, what you get is a server with (Optionally! But included by default in e.g. the Docker image, I think) an official web UI.

It's multi-user, has decent parental controls, automatic metadata fetching from a bunch of sources, can live-transcode when a client needs it (I have that disabled because my server is too weak, LOL), lots of good stuff.

You'll manage it through the Web UI, mostly. Set-top platform clients tend not to include much in the way of management features. (which is fine, it's way more pleasant to do that through a browser)

The web UI is also a Netflix-alike interface. Watch straight from the browser, if you like.

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The one major concession that puts some people off it is that it works butter smooth if your file naming conventions match what it expects, but it gets a lot less-pleasant if they don't. There are some minor variations allowed but mine's basically like:

    /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979).mp4
    /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979).en.srt
    /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979).fr.srt
    /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979) - Redux.mp4
    /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979) - Redux.en.srt
    /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979) - Final Cut.mkv
    /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/extras/The Making of Apocalypse Now.mkv
    /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/extras/Trailer.mkv

I think there is a way to put your subtitles in a "subs" directory or something like that, but I don't do it. Then again I rarely keep more than two sub languages, maybe three or four total files if there are separate SDH options, for a given video. Usually just English and if it's a foreign film maybe the original language's subtitles (the French file for Apocalypse Now above is just an example, I didn't look at a real directory to write it)

For TV:

    /tv/The Wire (2002)/Season 0/s00e08 - Reunion.mkv
    /tv/The Wire (2002)/Season 0/s00e10 - Season 1 gag reel.mkv
    /tv/The Wire (2002)/Season 1/s01e01.mkv
    /tv/The Wire (2002)/Season 1/s01e02 - The Detail.mkv

One pitfall: every now and then you find a case where DVD/BluRay and aired orders differ. TheTVDB usually records multiple orders in these cases. I dunno how to force Jellyfin to prefer one or the other, I just figure out which it's preferring (usually the one TheTVDB shows you on the Web by default, I think?) and adjust to that.

Also note that rarely (but sometimes for important cases, like e.g. Looney Tunes) TheTVDB uses years for the seasons. So you'll want "Season 1965" and such for those. No big deal, just a weird quirk of certain shows' metadata. Not that common.

I think you can name the "specials" directory to... specials, and maybe even give it an arbitrary name in the Jellyfin settings, but I like "Season 0" or "Season 00" (either works, prepended zeros are ignored, I have both hanging around) because it matches the special episode naming in TheTVDB (like "s00eXX").

In a pinch, you can override which IMDB, TMDB, TheTVDB, et c. ID that Jellyfin decided belonged to the movie or TV show, using the web UI, and make it re-scrape the metadata. Usually it's better to figure out why it got it wrong and fix that instead—that way you don't even have to care about Jellyfin's database of scanned metadata, you can always just have it re-create it from scratch with little or no fuss. (and you can also set it to write the metadata alongside your shows and movies in files, like Kodi can)

I think there might be a way to put things like IMDB IDs directly in file names to make it even more clear what you mean, but "name (year)" has been so reliable for me I've never bothered to look into it.

I base my naming and years on what I find in the metadata sources themselves, usually IMDB and TheTVDB for me. Surprisingly often, Wikipedia disagrees with these, and sometimes [ahem] acquired files also have file names recording years that disagree with those sources. Usually it seems to be a festival-circuit vs. wide-release thing, as those often fall in different years. The metadata source should win, since otherwise it'll make auto-scanning worse.

Some people are really set on things like having their movies categorized in folders by director or whatever, and that doesn't work too well with Jellyfin.

(I know that file naming explanation is a lot, but it's really not that complicated in practice, and there are docs but I found there were some "but can I..." or "is it necessary to..." gaps in it for me that I've tried to fill in above)

DESPITE the impression probably given by all that text, I've found this one of the greatest parts of Jellyfin. Delete a file? After a couple minutes, it's gone from the UI. Add some files? In a couple minutes, they show up. (and you can force re-scans to speed it up). Slightly rename a file? But Jellyfin still reads it as the same movie from its metadata source? Your watch history survives. Hell I think you can even delete a movie, then add it again later, and your watch history survives (as long as Jellyfin decides it's the same movie by ID). There's no cruft that hangs around to deal with. It's very low-stress. Like 99% of my "management" of Jellyfin is just rsycing files, LOL.

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As for non-Web clients:

- There's an official Roku client, but... most Roku devices have pretty limited codec support. The client works great though. If your server can transcode, this may be a totally fine choice. It's what I used for quite a while until enough of my files were in formats newer than h.264 that it was no longer viable.

- AppleTV has an official client. It's pretty good, but... if you can't transcode, there's one somewhat-common Dolby audio format (I forget which exactly) that AppleTV doesn't have a license to, so it causes problems. However, for that problem there's:

- Infuse (also AppleTV). It's amazing. The recent release supports multiple user accounts with different server access settings (not only can they log into Jellyfin with different credentials, they could conceivably use totally different servers), which is brilliant if you want parental controls or just to have different "watched" lists. It's free but there's a paid version with a few extra features that includes a license to that tricky audio format. I've been using this for years, at this point, and aside from wishing it supported multiple accounts (and it does now, as of very recently!) I've had no trouble with it at all. Also, Infuse supports other media servers as backends.

There are clients for tons of other platforms, too. And you can always Airplay or whatever from (say) a laptop.

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For going on the road (and short of taking your server with you) I have used two options:

- You can just use it directly over a VPN to your house, like Tailscale, if the client end's connection is solid (and your home connection is good, for that matter). I've streamed mid-quality 4K over such an arrangement, halfway across the US. You can even connect an AppleTV to Tailscale and take the AppleTV with you (it's much smaller than most servers, lol) for the full at-home experience while traveling (Christmas movie marathon at the in-laws' house this holiday season?)

- Long road trip with the kids and want them to watch Apollo 13 (and perhaps a couple Disney movies) while you drive to Cape Canaveral? Browse your Jellyfin web UI on the tablet they'll use, and download the file(s) you want straight from there. Play files in VLC. Done, no internet connection required. Being able to use the web UI is nice because you can browse categories and such, it's actually a fair bit better than something like using an SFTP client.

I tried this several times, for months at a time. Nobody but me ever used it.

Even I sometimes used to manage to get lost in some editing-mode or end up with my movie still playing in the background but the whole XMBC UI overlaid on it at like 80% opacity and struggled to figure out how to get back.

And no, alternative skins never improved that any.

Official Jellyfin client on Roku, and Infuse on Apple TV, have had no such problems. Spouse, kids, guests, all pick it up and use it with zero coaching and only very rarely needing any help.

I think XBMC/Kodi made a mistake having the editing-stuff use case live so close alongside the watching-stuff use case. Among other problems.

Anyway, since switching to Jellyfin my working-on-my-setup to watching-stuff ratio finally isn’t terrible (great, actually) and other people can use the system.

[edit] one generalizable lesson from Kodi should probably be not to have two buttons that both sort-of mean “back” but in different ways. :-/

Haha, yeah. Haha. Nobody sane.

Sweats

In either case, that's a no for me dawg.

All this means is there are enough buyers who can afford 2,800 sqft houses to keep builders from wasting a lot on a 1,600 sqft house. There could be a lot more people who want a cheaper 1,600 sqft house (including some of the 2,800 sqft house buyers!) than who want 2,800 sqft houses, but the market will keep delivering the latter as long as the return is better (for the return to improve for 1,600 sqft houses, see about convincing towns and cities to allow smaller lots, smaller setbacks, et c).

I really like a few of its smaller libraries. Just not Rails.

And I don’t mean like some designers will highjack scroll to deliver a different experience like slide-like transitions or something (which may or may not be, differently, awful) but they’ll override it just to give you ordinary scrolling, except much worse (as on this page).

Seems like a lot of work to do just to make something shittier, but what do I know, I probably can’t implement a* on a whiteboard from memory or whatever.