It’s interesting how old console tech comes back around to be useful for other stuff. I’ve used a couple Xbox Kinects to do 3D scanning and with an augmented reality sand box.

People call Buffalo Wild Wings B-Dubs

I almost wonder if this is how it’s intended to be as I can’t imagine why someone would design a mount that only allows the camera to point at the sky.

My tree lights (Twinkly) are also controlled by HA along with some Govee stick lights in the front window. No ‘smart’ ornaments yet but there’s still time!

As the article states, this applies to Netflix originals too so I don’t know how true this is.

There are guides out there to do it or you can just buy one that’s already been flashed to bypass DRM. I bought one 5 or 6 years ago to do it and quit after maybe 10 Blu-rays because it takes forever if you want to compress via handbrake and it’s much easier just to torrent directly unless it’s something obscure.

Might as well just call it an extended rental.

Yes. You won’t need a guide unless you’re trying to compress it with Handbrake or the like.

I suppose, but I think it’s a really nice visual that gets the point across just fine for this level of discussion.

Yes most people use HDDs for this because their speed doesn’t matter when they’re just serving up a single (or even a dozen) huge files at playback speeds. They’re slow for hosting your OS because of the quantity and speed of reads and writes but this isn’t an issue with movies, TV, or music.

Me too but I just don’t see how that’ll be possible without something physical to put it on since studios will likely never give us straight digital files without a bunch of DRM hoops to jump through.

Perhaps they will give us digital files but tied to some service like Amazon or VUDU where you can only watch it through their app after purchasing a copy for as long as the company still holds distribution rights. This has some major pitfalls for the average consumer though since your purchases will be locked into a specific app with some shitty media interface and they’ll only be temporary as companies often holds the rights for a specific period of time.

The total height represents sales of each format in relation to the others. The timeline isn’t the zero line like you might be thinking. $0 would be the bottom of the graph at any given time.

Yeah the '90s was the big heyday for the music industry when they used to charge us $25 (in 1990s dollars, $48 today) for a CD with 2 good songs and a bunch of filler. That ended quickly as, like you said, Napster and the like came on scene. Then we got the iPod and iTunes and a slew of ‘ringtone companies’ where you could buy songs individually for a dollar or two until streaming took off.

They’ve never recovered to the level they were at back then because there are just too many options now and they don’t control them all.

You can still get the best of both worlds with piracy. Click of a button to watch media and it’ll never disappear unless you want it to (or drive failures).

There’s currently little reason to choose SSDs over HDDs when you’re talking about bulk storage for media. HDDs have plenty of R/W speed for this purpose and are a fraction of the price. New, you can buy 8TB drives for around $100 or used/refurbished (from somewhere like serverpartdeals.com) you can buy 14TB for $150 or even 20TB+ for $250.

One reason is that if you ever have an issue with RealDebrid, you can expect them to post your name and email publicly online while talking a boat load of shit about you.

I’m curious what the landscape will be like in 10 years. Hard to push 8k, HDR, and all the other TV gizmos when the only source media available is 3GB ‘UHD’ movies from streaming services that have been stomped all over with compression.

Right and now the parents, who already said they were satisfied with the offer, can watch as it gets sold right back to the shitheads who caused the lawsuit to happen in the first place. Either that or those shitheads can bid some outrageously high number that either guarantees them ownership or guarantees the parents must forgive a much larger portion of the debt so that someone else like the Onion can own it.

Either way the parents are facing a worse outcome now.

It could be worse. It could have been the Pacific ocean.

Yikes you should consider replacing that screw terminal with a new one. With all the charring, it’s possible that it’s not making a great connection between the board and wire, which causes higher resistance and the terminal to heat up further.