I ripped a ton of my stuff back in the day, guess I’ve been lucky, every generic BD drive i’ve used just worked.

But once you get past the “works” hurdle, the real struggle begins.

It’s slow, like really slow. Assuming you can find the right titles and convince makemkv extract them, it’s a start the process and go brew a cup of coffee slow. But hey, I’ve got time and you don’t need to watch it … mostly.

Depending on the disk, it’s still either crap quality or it takes up an ungodly amount of space. Even a decent sized drive buckles sooner or later if you’re generating 20GB images.

Unless you’re up on your network game, your streaming sticks/tv’s can hardly handle the throughput to stream the video.

So you encode the video. HEVC (which is getting dicey starting january as the royalties go up and processors stop support hardware decoding) or hopefully AV1, which still has spotty support in places. and the re-encode? The easy software isn’t free, the free software isn’t easy, but FFMPEG isn’t that hard to work with.

OR, you find an ISO provider and download it.

Can’t crossfade, developers won’t add the features the server doesn’t support it. I get a random crashes at least once a session. Search sucks because I don’t feel like wiring up elastic. Doesn’t stream large lists, browse to P? With 5000 artists and 20K tracks? Forever.

The beta is a little smoother but doesn’t address any of my issues with it.

Symphonium is 100 times better, never crashes, solves lists/streaming by downloading the lists and handling them locally.

I was wondering how long before they dropped that other shoe.

I bought Plexpass when it was $70. Got my money out of it. The centralized login, ssl, caching and proxy are probably worth paying something for.

That said, I’ve mostly walked away from them over privacy concerns and an utter refusal to add community-requested features while removing actively used features.

I just want my AHK stuff to work again. They’re dragging us kicking and screeming into un-avoidable security that breaks software that noone is up for fixing.

First off, thank you for all your work.

Why this hasn’t happened yet

You set the bar pretty high for improvement.

The vacuums are expensive. The work requires multiple top-tier skill sets, and the people with those skill sets don’t generally have enough time to contribute to something this heavy

Somebody could just fork you and clone everything you’re doing, but it’s not like any users would chase someone else versus you when you’re the only one getting actual work done.

It’s also kind of poking the bear for these vacuum companies skirting along by selling user data.

The idea is you use the sysinternals to scrape the file handles as the app opens. It’ll log it and you can go back to the log and look. You just have to add the application as a filtered application.

If it’s opening them from anywhere in the disk, that’ll show up.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer

Start process explorer, start the app, look and see what files it has open.

You can also try opening the EXE as a zip file.

If the assets are compiled into the EXE, there’s a chance that if you put assets in an identical structure outside of the EXE, it’ll let you override them.

There have been 209 versions of that site

https://web.archive.org/web/20250331043558/https://www.isitdns.com/

it predated AI, but likely seems to have had some AI cleanup.

If it was truly just vibecoded, the comments would usually be on every element.

I just did the same f’ing thing and came here to write your comment!

well done.

Dev: My app’s getting a 400 hitting the server. Your firewall changes broke it.

Me: You’re getting to the server, it’s giving you back a malformed request error. Most likely it’s a problem in your client.

Dev: it worked fine until you made that change in QA.

Me: Your server is in production.

After that, I just get too busy to look at it for a while… They figure it out eventually.

Everything you expose is fine until somebody finds a zero day.

Everything these days is being built from a ton of publically maintained packages. All it takes is for one of those packages to fall into the wrong hands and get updated which happens all the time.

If you’re going to expose web yourself, use anubus and fail2ban

Put everything that doesn’t absolutely need to be public open behind a VPN.

Keep all of your software updated, constant vigilance.

When I started with it, I looked through references all over and just felt f’ing lost, and I do this kind of stuff all the time. I am intimately familiar with AWS and Azure, but setting K8S up is just very different than the normal stuff we’re used to. I’m big on installing a package and screwing with it until it works, but this doesn’t work like that.

At the risk of being criticized here, and I’m very sorry if you’re strongly opposed to AI, consider asking ChatGPT or Copilot to guide you through setting up Kubernetes step by step. Out of desperation, I figured I’d give AI a shot, and for the most part, it was really great at teaching it to me.

Ask it to give you the different options for setting up Kubernetes on your home lab (there are numerous ways to do this). You can save a lot of steps by using something like Rancher (k3s), which is a simplified version, but I prefer starting with the official kubeadm first. It’s harder, but it gives you a better feel for what’s happening, and it’s more capable and closer to what you’d experience when crafting a production deployment.

Indicate your level of experience in the next prompt and specify which systems you’re familiar with so it can tailor training to your existing knowledge and play to your strengths. Ask it to make a lesson plan first, and then pick what items you want it to walk you through. If anything feels weird or you have questions, stop it and ask away. You’re working on something from scratch, so there’s little to lose if it gets something wrong, but honestly, teaching technical things with tons of documentation available is probably the best use of LLMs that has ever existed.

If you decide against AI, focus your research on Docker cli, Kubeadm installation (the control plane/controller) and creating/joining nodes, persistent storeage and networking, K8S Namespace, then pod deployment. Complicated parts that might hang you up are getting logs from PODS that die on startup, and getting interactive prompts in a cluster are a little different than Docker (have to specify namespace)

For persistent storage, you then have numerous options. For a homelab, I like Longhorn; it’s a RAID-like system that stores data blocks across the nodes, and it easily backs up to S3 if you want it to.

For homelab learning and testing, I just crapped out a Proxmox and started 3 VMs, setup kubeadm on the control plane and then joined two nodes, then spent I an hour getting NTFY to run in it for the first time, I really should have done a python hello world, NTFY is fiddly. But, it’s super fun to stop a VM and watch the app come back up like nothing happened.

Once you get a base system up, whatever you choose, do check out https://www.ansibleforkubernetes.com/

Jeff Geerling did a bang-up job on the book, and it supports his cause. It just doesn’t go into the detail you need to get started with k8s.

The nodes go on x86. You use the pi’s for control planes. They sit around doing pretty much nothing until a pod get’s wrecked or upgraded then they spin a new one. You use 3’s or 4’s clocked down to save power.

You really only need one, but for $50 two gives your fault tolerance, fault tolerance.

K8s is pretty cheap for fault tolerance

Two VM’s and two Pi

If my wife decides whe wants to watch the wedding video or the kids first TKD break and it’s down, she’ll clamor to move back to Google/Apple. I can also move my piholes over there and some of my arr stack.

Resillient hosting for zero cost is pretty hot.

I didn’t say copy facebook

I’m not saying don’t decentralize at all

Forcing people to decentralize isn’t* going to work in most places.

I’m not spending any more time on the subject, I think we’re at an impassse and neither of us are going to change our minds.

Honestly, it’s a great project though,

best of luck

edit: brain said isn’t, fingers wrote is’t, autocorrect did me dirty

the explicit design goal

IMO, it’s a bad goal. Not that decentralized is a bad goal, but dictating the amount of decentralization will decimate wide adoption.

A server for every community is also a Mastodon goal that never really happened. Sure there are some out there, but the general public doesn’t want that. It’s a waste of compute resources to run a 24x7 server for every community. It’s a problem of scale. I get the decentralized point, but I think it’s going to utterly fail at widespread adotion if it needs a technical caretaker and a $20 a month bill evey time a zipcode wants to sell things. It migth work well in Germany, it’s not going to work well in most places.

I’m just going by what’s said here because i’m not about to go through installing it to find out.

So every town that wants to sell things needs to host their own instance? And make sure that their instance doesn’t federate with other towns that are ‘too far away’?

edit:

OK I read the readme.

Why not just setup communities on the server as locations? Why is there a need to install another server for every location that wants to sell things? Certainly one server could handle thousands of locations.

Wait, you mean it actually won’t let you set your location and search for local ads?

If someone is going to build a site for selling things, that’s ‘kind of’ the most important part of the site. Having it be federated makes that a thousand times worse. Now I’m supposed to find other local federated services in my area?

That is so against how any of this works.

God damnit, now I need to set up k8s and install it.

I’ve been putting off moving out of Google photos for years. No, no, I shouldn’t spend the time to host it. It has that scary banner.

Way to ruin my weekend! /s

Congrats Immich Team! /and if you’re listening, thanks!

If everything is working correctly, whether or not you transcode is basically whether or not the end device can play the file without changes.

For example, my old Roku can play a raw 4K File under H264 with no problem. But if I throw an H265 at it, it requires the server to transcode. It also has problems with AAC audio. And my server is so old that just trying to rip the 4k apart entrance to the audio is often too much for it.

So to start, make sure your client device can play the files directly. If it can’t, you’re going to need to handbrake it before you put it on your server.