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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • It’s possible for a certain hardware/software setup not to support a certain codec. For example, my jellyfin client (Finamp) uses the iOS native decoders (afaik), which means opus files are practically broken. My music library (8000+ songs) contained exactly 1 lossy file, which just so happened to be an opus file. I decided to spend the extra ~20MB to standardise my entire library to flac files, ensuring I could play every song on all my devices.

    Edit cause I posted too soon: you are generally correct; only in very specific circumstances will you encounter compatibility issues like this one in the modern world. This is 100% apple being apple, and you can expect pretty much every other (reasonably modern) device to support all codecs you might encounter in the wild.


  • To add to the audio compression: it isn’t possible to further compress an mp3 file without losing any quality. You can either:

    1. Recompress to a lossy codec (mp3, aac, opus). This will lead to smaller file sizes if you set the bitrate lower than that of the input file, but it will always worsen the quality, no matter the bitrate.
    2. Recompress to a lossless format (flac easily being the best one). Going from a lossy to a lossless format will increase the file size (sometimes by quite a substantial amount), while keeping the same quality. There is very little reason for you to do this
    3. keep the original files (my recommendation)

    If you’re willing to spend some extra time learning about audio compression, you can download lossless files and compress those directly to whatever format and bitrate you want. The quality will be better than option 1 above, as the audio is only lossely compressed once instead of twice.



  • I’ve been running some external drives on my server for about a year now. In my experience, hard drives with an external power supply suffer less from random disconnects. The specific PC also makes quite a large difference in reliability. My server is just a regular desktop and has very little problem staying connected and powering my 3 external drives. My seedbox is an old laptop, and has been having almost constant problems with random disconnects and power issues. Maybe test how well your framework does with some external drives before committing to the plan?








  • The more you compress the longer and more CPU intensive it is to decompress

    I believe this is becoming less and less true with modern algorithms. Take for example ZSTD: while the compression speeds differs by several orders of magnitude between the fastest and slowest modes, the decompression difference is only about 20%. The same holds true for flac, where the decompression speed is pretty uniform across all compression levels.

    These algorithms probably aren’t used by repacked like fitgirl (so your answer is generally correct in the context of repacks). I do believe it is still interesting to see these new developments in compression techniques.




  • If I understand your post correctly, you have 2 PC’s at home: one running wireguard, and one you want to wake using WoL. This is similar to my setup, where I have a server and a personal desktop. When I want to wake my PC remotely, I just ssh to the server and use the server to wake the desktop. Connecting to the server and telling it to wake your PC seems easier than trying to redirect your phone’s WoL app over wireguard.




  • To add to this with another example: my server runs

    • jellyfin
    • Nextcloud
    • gitea
    • Monica (a CRM, look it up on awesome-selfhosted)
    • vaulwarden (rust implementation of Bitwarden)
    • code-server
    • qBitTorrent-nox
    • authelia (2FA)
    • pihole
    • smbd
    • sshd
    • Caddy

    In total, I’m using about 1.5GB out of 6GB of RAM (with another 1GB out of 16GB of swap being used), and the idle CPU usage is only 1%-ish (i5-3470 with the BIOS-settings set to power saving).

    Even on very old and low-powered hardware, you can still run a lot of services without any problems.