Sure, but something tells me the kinds of people who use software like Wondershare and Aiseesoft video converters arent going to be writing their own FFMPEG automations in batch files or bash scripts.

Basically everything worth using is just a wrapper for FFMPEG these days, so they all perform the same, just with different interfaces. So Handbrake will always be the go-to for the basics, but if you are looking for automation and custom processing based on rules you set out, then FileFlows is worth playing with

I think a lot of people have facebook accounts but dont use it for facebook. Messenger, instagram, marketplace… I’d guess that most people using those services don’t actually “use facebook” and probably think they arent providing profitable data to meta by using those services.

its been on the experimental branch for a while now

These are the people that complain to their ISP when their game ‘lags’ on their wireless connected computer several rooms away from the router.

I cant say I care as much as I used to, since encoding has gotten quite good, but I have also gotten better at seeing (aka. worse at being distracted by) compression artifacts so while I am less of a perfect remux rip supremacist, I’m also more sensitive to bad encodes so its a double edged sword.

I still seek out the highest quality versions of things that I personally care about, but I don’t seek those out for absolutely everything like I used to. I recently saved 12TB running a slight compression pass on my non-4k movie library, turning (for example) a 30gb 1080p Bluray Remux into a 20gb H265 high bitrate encode, which made more room for more full fat 4K bluray files for things I care about, and the few 1080p full remuxes I want to keep for rarities and things that arent as good from the 4k releases or the ones where the 4k release was drastically different (like the LOTR 4k’s having poor dynamic range and the colours being changed for the Matrix etc), which I may encode in the future to save more space again. I know I can compress an 80gb UHD bluray file down to 60gb with zero noticeable loss, thats as far as I need to go, I don’t need to go down to 10gigs like some release groups try to do, and at that level of compression you might as well be at 1080p.

I cant go as low as a low bitrate 720p movie these days as I’m very close to a large screen so they tend to look quite poor, soft edges, banded gradients, motion artifacts, poor sound etc. but if I were on a smaller screen or watching movies on a phone like I used to, I probably wouldn’t care as much.

Another side to my choice to compress is that I have about 10 active Plex clients at the moment and previously they were mostly getting transcoded feeds (mostly from remux sources) but now most of them are getting a better quality encode (slow CPU encode VS fast GPU stream) direct to their screens, so while I’ve compressed a decent chunk of the library, my clients are getting better quality feeds from it.

I have complete ROM sets for a couple of platforms in my archive, they’re available on SLSK but not a huge amount of bandwidth available.

Sad to see the old giants like Vimms finally being attacked after all these years.

Israel making an awful lot of “mistakes” lately…

Sonarr/Radarr etc make it very easy and safe for media, but apps and games would be more of a serious sit down and talk kind of situation as more can go wrong there.

Soulseek is more like an old school peer to peer network like kazaa, limewire, winmx, ed2k etc.

I haven’t seen any clients with a playlist downloader, though that sounds like a cool feature to suggest.

You don’t have to seed.

I played Crysis on a Vuzix VR920 in around 2008, that was my first VR other than a virtual boy.

Dual 640x480, frame interleaved 3d at 30hz per eye! if you drop a single frame the eyes got out of sync and switched! I think I had dual 9600GTs at the time and it struggled. I think it also struggled on the dual 9800GTX+ I had after that.

head tracking was purely gyro/accelerometer based and worked very poorly.

That is awesome.

I played descent 1 and 2 for hours on end back in the day, never got to play 3 as I didn’t have a 3d card yet and they dropped the software renderer option.

Yea I’ve got 3 in my video distribution rig at the moment, one 2015, a 2017 and a 2019 and they are all going strong, all on projectivy and some adb tweaks though.

Morrowind, RCT2, Total Annihilation with all my mods and Deadlock 2 as well if I have time.

You should consider upgrading to some kind of mesh system then. sure they aren’t perfect, but even a basic 3 node kit could probably increase your throughput ten fold. If you want to use DDWRT or OpnSense or whatever you can still run it separately and route internet traffic or use it for your DHCP server.

To stream a 4K bluray remux rips on your Lan you need a solid 150mbit minimum between server and player to be reliable for example. I am hardwired all the way except for mobiles, but even on Wi-Fi I can easily pull 400-500mbit real world throughput through most of the house thanks to my Wifi6 setup with multiple APs

The shield pro 2019 is probably still the best overall, it’s not perfect as there are some weaknesses due to the age of its chipset, but for all the common formats used in Movies and TV it works perfectly, especially if you are playing full remux files, not re-encoded compressed video. Kodi runs very well, Plex runs very well, Jellyfin is mostly perfect too, but has some limitations in the current version.

Yes it supports HDR10 (not10+) and Dolby Vision, which covers 98% of all 4K blurays and TV shows, anything HDR10+ just gets played in HDR10 compatibility mode, if you TV doesn’t do DV it plays the HDR10 layer on 99% of files. There are some issues with HLG as it isnt properly supported but you don’t come across that format all that often and there is usually an SDR or regular HDR version available, if your TV supports manually activating HLG then it works fine.

Yes there is a minor colour bug in some DV content, no it isn’t the end of the world as some people make it out to be.

It is one of the only players that will give you full DTS:X and Dolby Atmos support, it has a very nice configurable upscaler for lower res content (AI upscale on low works excellently with minimal artifacts), it still has a lot going for it despite its age.

Also its easy to decrapify with ADB, you can easily configure third party launchers and other fun stuff.

What is your network infrastructure that is giving you those poor performance numbers?

Most consumer all in one routers are crap but not that bad. the file server should always connect to the main hub of the network with Ethernet (whether that be the router, a switch or an all-in-one crap box), these days pretty much everything should be at least 1gigabit.

Are you trying to use wifi for everything? that’s a recipe for disaster unless you really know what you are doing and have multiple APs and careful signal strength and channel management

Prowlarr is good because it combines usenet indexers and torrents. Makes it very easy to search for anything and compare versions/sources.

Or you could wait for meteor lake CPUs which will have a HW AV1 encoder too.

Plex haven’t even enabled transcode to H265 so it might not happen, but Jellyfin currently supports H265 encode and is previewing AV1 streaming. Perhaps that will spur Plex on to open up the FFMPEG encoder options a bit more and let us tune it to our needs and capabilities, but given the shift away from the piracy focused home media server they might not be prioritising it much.

In general for smaller servers I actually recommend starting fresh for the new server rather than trying to transfer your metadata over, but if you want to try the instructions are here that’s just if you want to maintain any custom matching data, watched status, preferred languages etc etc.

You can run it on the out of the box windows install if you aren’t comfortable linuxing (though I’d suggest something like proxmox or ubuntu) just install plex server, plug in the old HDDs, map the new library locations then set up plex player on the shield to point to the new server (hardcode the IP in plex players settings if you have trouble)

As for the hardware itself, if its just plex and the usual ancillary apps that go with it you can use an N100 or N95 and get plenty of performance for more than 4 clients as long as you don’t need to transcode too much.

If you need to transcode 4x high bitrate 4k streams at once comfortably you definitely need something a bit beefier than those little CPUs (mostly they are memory and cache limited), but not much more, you don’t need an i7 for it, just an i3 or i5 class cpu will do.