gerowen
@gerowen@lemmy.world
- Comment on HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops’ CPUs 5 days ago:
VGA was originally a proprietary technology developed by IBM, though it was later built upon by VESA and is now publicly documented, so while it wasn’t developed by VESA as an open standard from the get-go, it is now considered an open standard that doesn’t require any licensing fees to implement. DVI was developed by the “Digital Display Working Group” and also does not require any licensing fees, though there are licensing terms you may have to abide by and there may be some costs associated with testing and validation to ensure you meet those terms and the spec.
- Comment on HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops’ CPUs 5 days ago:
H.265 is not a royalty free standard like AV1, VP9, Theora, etc. It’s covered by proprietary patents held by groups like MPEG LA so in order for manufacturers to build hardware level support for it into their devices they have to pay whatever the then current royalty fees are to those patent holders.
- Comment on HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops’ CPUs 5 days ago:
That’s reasonable, people deserve to get paid for their labor. In this situation however, the difference between them is that DisplayPort is a royalty free VESA standard. So while manufacturers have to pay for the materials and such to include it in their devices, they don’t have to pay any additional fees to license the standard. HDMI on the other-hand is a “brand” of proprietary connector/interface (kind of like how “Velcro” isn’t the actual name of a product, it’s a “brand” of hook and pile tape), so not only do manufacturers have to pay for the materials and labor related to physically acquiring and installing the connectors, but they have to pay both per-device and annual licensing fees for rights to use the HDMI product.
- Comment on HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops’ CPUs 5 days ago:
“Direct playing” just means the source file is entirely compatible with the client device and doesn’t require any transcoding/re-encoding by the server, it doesn’t really tell you whether the client is using software or hardware decoding to play it. I’m guessing it’s probable that a Jellyfin server could still report “direct playing” even if the client is using software decoding to play it. However, if the client device is something like a smart TV or something with a more locked down OS, and the maintainer/manufacturer removes support for a codec from that device, you may show more transcoding action on your server for things that previously just direct played because smart devices like that may not have support for software decoding, or may not have the horsepower to try even if they still have the codecs installed.
- Comment on HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops’ CPUs 6 days ago:
I just set it to downmix to mono in Handbrake and it’s been alright. I’ll definitely do some reading/comparing to see what this setting is all about though.
- Comment on HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops’ CPUs 6 days ago:
H.265 (HEVC) is not a free (as in freedom) codec, so yes. You as an individual consumer can use things like Handbrake to encode H.265 video for your personal use, probably using the free x265 software encoder, but in order for a device like your phone, camera, TV, laptop, etc. to have hardware accelerated encoding or decoding, the manufacturer has to pay a licensing fee.
This is true of lots of proprietary technologies. HDMI is another one. In order for a device to ship with an HDMI port (as opposed to Displayport), the manufacturer has to pay a per-device licensing fee.
- Comment on HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops’ CPUs 6 days ago:
Kinda makes me even more glad I’ve been migrating everything over to AV1/OPUS.
- Comment on Microsoft AI CEO pushes back against critics after recent Windows AI backlash — "the fact that people are unimpressed ... is mindblowing to me" 1 week ago:
They’re completely out of touch with how normal people use their computers. The only people who want AI in their OS are the AI tech bros.
- Comment on Valve Announces New Steam Machine, Steam Controller & Steam Frame 2 weeks ago:
They say it can run games at 4k60 “with FSR”, so it seems like it’s targeting 1080p native rendering, which is totally fine for me. I’ll be connecting it to the living room TV and sitting 6-8 feet away so I’ll probably keep it set to 1080p anyway just to keep the framerate high.
- Comment on Valve Announces New Steam Machine, Steam Controller & Steam Frame 2 weeks ago:
Definitely will be grabbing the Steam Machine when it releases.
- Comment on With how shitty some Christians are, you really have to wonder if Lucifer or Satan is truly "evil" 3 weeks ago:
We moved on from the pantheons of Greece, Egypt, Rome, the Norse and Aztecs, etc. Hopefully one day our descendants will be smart enough to realize that Abrahamic mythology is no different than any other, it was just more successful.
- Comment on My collection is growing 3 weeks ago:
And they’re always the softest mild steel they could find so it’ll cam out, destroy the head on a bolt and force you to go dig your good one out anyway.
- Comment on "I used to be with it" 4 weeks ago:
I’m a school bus driver and I’m not even joking when I say I blew my kids’ minds with a burned CD the other day. My daughter asked me to make one of the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack. One kid asked how I got it on CD and when I showed him a burned disc complete with sharpie label his response was just, “Wait you can do that?!”
Made me feel old as hell.
- Comment on AWS crash causes $2,000 Smart Beds to overheat and get stuck upright 5 weeks ago:
People who buy an internet connected bed have more dollars than sense.
- Comment on A roundabout 1 month ago:
I don’t think there is a roundabout anywhere in Kentucky, or at least I’ve never seen one. So when I got to Fort Lewis, WA and was driving across base I came up to one and had zero fucking clue what to do. I started at it for about 10 seconds and watched another car or two go into it and kinda figured it out, but it was the most alien thing I had ever seen.
- Comment on Has this ever happened to you? 1 month ago:
You could have just missed your shot at a threesome. Way to go, 😄
- Comment on Important Notice of Security Incident 2 months ago:
I dropped it in favor of Jellyfin some time back, but this was a good excuse to go ahead and delete my family’s accounts.
- Comment on Spotify fans threaten to return to piracy as music streamer introduces new face-scanning age checks in the UK 3 months ago:
There is a cost to convenience ratio. Each individual has to decide based on their own ethics and preferences whether they’re willing to sacrifice their own personal experience for the right of ownership. I personally chose to cancel my Spotify subscription some time ago and start buying digital downloads and CDs again.
- Comment on Spotify fans threaten to return to piracy as music streamer introduces new face-scanning age checks in the UK 3 months ago:
That I don’t know. I mean you could always just use something to record the sound played by your PC, but at that point A) You’re not getting as good of quality as you would from an actual download of the source material and you’d have to manually assign metadata, make sure no notifications or other sounds played, make sure your recording settings were optimum, etc. It’s easier, right now at least, to just buy what you want on CD or from a store that sells digital downloads legitimately.
- Comment on Spotify fans threaten to return to piracy as music streamer introduces new face-scanning age checks in the UK 3 months ago:
Buy and store your own music. HDTracks and 7Digital both sell high quality DRM free downloads, or you can just swing by your local Walmart or Dollar Store and grab some CDs to rip.
Or you could go sailing, that’s always an option…
- Comment on GOG’s Freedom To Buy Campaign Gives Away Controversial Games For Free To Protest Censorship 3 months ago:
Word of warning, clicking “Claim” on any of these games claims them all. I clicked claim on Postal 2 and got a warning message that I never thought to read, but now I have “Lust Theory” and other timeless classics in my GoG library.
It’s not a huge deal for me, just wanted to put this out there.
- Comment on 7,818 titles on Steam disclose generative AI usage, or 7% of Steam's total library of 114,126 games, up from ~1,000 titles in April 2024 4 months ago:
If you’re AI upscaling a low resolution texture or something I can see that. But if I want a computer to rip off somebody else’s work and regurgitate a story based on some amalgamation of its questionably sourced training data, I can do that on my own for free.
- Comment on 7,818 titles on Steam disclose generative AI usage, or 7% of Steam's total library of 114,126 games, up from ~1,000 titles in April 2024 4 months ago:
Honestly, maybe I’m an old fart, but I refuse to knowingly buy games if they use AI instead of paying talented people to create works of art.
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 4 months ago:
You can’t survive around here without owning your own car. The nearest Walmart to me is a half hour drive at 60mph and we don’t have taxis in any of the towns around me. That’s 7 hours of walking, each way. No buses or trains either. The closest store of any kind to me is about 2 hours each way if I walk.
- Comment on goodbye plex 4 months ago:
It is the command line interface for libvirt/qemu/kvm on Linux. I usually just use virt-manager remotely via SSH to create and manage my VMs, but virsh can be handy as well.
- Comment on Young men are 'playing videogames all day' instead of getting jobs because they can mooch off of free healthcare, claims congressman 4 months ago:
We have free health care? Coulda fooled me.
- Comment on Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, their read-it-later and content discovery app, and Fakespot, their browser extension that analyzes the authenticity of online product reviews. 6 months ago:
Pocket is one service of theirs I did use from time to time. Save an article you want to read later without committing it to a bookmark.
- Comment on What's the worst spelling you've seen? 6 months ago:
A kid whose name is said “Akelah” phonetically, but is spelled “Akleah”.
- Comment on Getting mixed signals from Reddit. Furthermore I shall henceforth be on Lemmy full time. 6 months ago:
Showerthoughts was one I tried. I don’t remember specifics but I tried a couple times to post actual thoughts I had in the shower and they got insta-banned by a bot so I just gave up.
- Comment on Getting mixed signals from Reddit. Furthermore I shall henceforth be on Lemmy full time. 6 months ago:
Oh I did and even contacted moderators a few times to try to have posts reinstated after they were insta-banned by a bot. I just got tired of fighting with it every time I wanted to participate.