You’ve kind of keyed in on one of the things I was hesitant to say:

There are two big uses for an “offline” media library.

Some people just use it for all the stuff they grabbed off the pirate bay (probably avoid TPB in 2025 but…). You don’t really care about quality and just want to consume media.

Others, like myself, primarily use it to rip/back up their blu rays and UHDs and the like. If I am watching on my TV in the living room? I want that to be the highest quality I have available and I want to revel in every shadow gradient and so forth. If I am watching it on my computer? I don’t need anywhere near that much detail. And on a tablet? Compress that shit like an exec at netflix just saw the storage arrays.

That is the benefit of transcoding and offline caching. It means you, as a “server”, just focus on backing up your library/finding the best quality rips or whatever. And you, as a “user”, don’t have to worry about figuring out how many different versions to keep so that you always have an appropriate version for whatever your use case is that week.

Storage is cheap until it isn’t.

On my desktop where I have something like 6 TB of NVME storage because I am a sicko? The only thing that makes me think twice about a flatpak is if I need to give it access to devices or significant parts of my filesystem (yay permissions weirdness).

On my laptop where I can have one drive and replacing it involves opening the entire laptop AND reinstalling Fedora (or dealing with clonezilla/dd)? Yeah… I very much care about just how much bloat I am dealing with. And, as the other person pointed out, flatpaks can balloon REAL fast.

If dependencies are articulated (and maintained…) properly, it is very doable and is intrinsically tied to what semantic versioning is actually supposed to represent. So appfoo depends in libbar@2:2.9 and so forth. Of course, the reality is that libbar is poorly maintained and has massive API/header breaking changes every point release and was dependent on a bug in libbar@2.1.3.4.5 anyway.

Its one of the reasons why I like approaches like Portage or Spack that are specifically about breaking an application’s dependencies down and concretizing. Albeit, they also have the problem where they overconcretize and you have just as much, if not more, bloat. But it theoretically provides the best of both worlds… at the cost of making a single library take 50 minutes to install because you are compiling everything for the umpteenth time.

And yeah… I run way too many appimages too.

Part of it is that Ubuntu/Canonical so aggressively pushed Snaps which became a huge culture war. So you have people who hate the idea of those style of packages because they hate Snap AND people who hate flatpak because they are Team Ubuntu for some reason.

And the other aspect is that it is incredibly space inefficient (by the very nature of bundling in dependencies) and is prone to “weirdness” when it comes to file system permissions and the like. And many software projects kind of went all in on them because it provides a single(-ish) target to build for rather than having a debian and an arch and a redhad and a…

That’s nice.

That doesn’t work if you are on an airplane (unless you want to spend the entire flight downloading one episode). Or if you just don’t want to deal with hotel wifi. Or if you just don’t want to expose your internal home network at all.

Which is the point and why this is one of those big features of plex that there are so many tickets and requests to get into jellyfin et al. Because yes, you can just copy files from your NAS to your phone’s internal storage (assuming you don’t care about transcoding and the like)… at which point there isn’t much use to a metadata oriented media server/service.

Or you can just set up Plex to always download the next 10 episodes of whatever show you are watching when it has network access. I mean… that probably won’t work (see: 40%) but when it does, it is awesome. Which is the “it just works” functionality.

Which gets back to the issue where, because it is FOSS, it is the greatest thing ever and anyone asking for anything else is wrong and stupid. Which is a shame because if the Jellyfin devs could actually get the “download the next N episodes” functionality to reliably work (even at 80-90%) it would be a killer app. And, for what it is worth, I have liked the devs a lot when I interacted with them in the past. But the users and evangelists are just… what we can see in this thread.

Did they? Or is that still the old hack of “just download the raw file. Your tablet is just a computer”?

Because I didn’t see it advertised on the main web page and a quick google got me to https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin/discussions/364 which is open and abandoned tickets for the ios apps.

https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-offline-downloads?pid=16373#pid16373 suggests it is also in the same boat for android. You can find workarounds but they aren’t using jellyfin.

Which is “fine”. I watched WAY too many movies over the years with VLC on a laptop. But… why are we using a shim to treat a library as a streaming service in that case? Which gets back to Jellyfin just not actually being a Plex alternative for the majority of users.

Yeah.

Jellyfin is spectacular for LAN usage on two computers. Once you start using devices (because, you know, that is what people tend to plug into their TVs…) or going on travel, it rapidly becomes apparent that it just isn’t a competitor.

Hell, a quick google suggests jellyfin STILL doesn’t have caching of media for offline viewing. Plex’s works maybe 40% of the time but… 40% is still higher than 0%.

I have a lifetime pass for Plex and encourage anyone who even kind of cares to get one next time it is on sale (or shortly before the scheduled price hike). I have tried Jellyfin a few times over the years and… it is basically exactly what I hate with FOSS “alternatives”. It isn’t an alternative in the slightest but people insist on talking it up because they want it to be and that just makes people less willing to try genuinely good alternatives.

To put it bluntly, Plex is an “offline netflix” as it were. Jellyfin is a much better version of smbstation and all the other stuff we used to stream porn to our playstations back in the day.

I am not aware of any meaningful number of people (other than DNC leadership) saying that this point. Hell, AOC et al have pretty regularly torn into the party and they ARE the party.

What you might be confused by is people who said that last year when we were trying to get Kamala elected in the hopes of avoiding trump doing exactly what he said. And even then, it was mostly “I have a LOT of problems with the Democrats and there is going to be plenty of time to tear into them later. But right now, this is an existential threat and that takes priority”

Yup.

I have replied to every single fundraising email (that isn’t a blatant noreply address) asking them to tell me what their plans actually are other than “Wait for 2026 and flip a few seats, maybe”. Have yet to get a response. And all my representatives basically just say they have a tweet where they summarized a cnn article or that they are unable to comment at this time.

Donate to the Democrats who are ACTUALLY trying to lead the country (AOC being an obvious choice. Yes, her first priority is her district in NYC but she is kicking ass on a nation wide scale), if only to make it clear that people ARE willing to fund Democrats who give a shit.

And, considerably more importantly, donate to the ACLU and the other orgs fighting the good fight. Same with LGBTQ+ charities. I am not aware of any funds dedicated to helping fired federal workers but that would also be a good cause.

Everyone gets their start somewhere.

And you can be sure that the old hats are making sure to record and broadcast everything. So when the jackboots inevitably see a black person and start unloading with “rubber bullets” and tear gas, people will see.

Like others said: That is probably just “normal” spam

But also? This is the same logic as “AI can’t draw hands” and all the other gotchas. We are in an arms race and have been for decades. Captchas have always been about “bots” and have increasingly been defeated by various forms of computer vision which are the basis for how a lot of “AI” works. And we are in the same place now.

Yup. It is the same reason that I can’t stand the people who think the world is an episode of Steven Universe and that if we just show compassion toward the hate mongers that they will change their hearts.

Be good to one another. But also understand that there ARE bad people out there and that they deserve nothing but weary scorn.

Basically nobody opposes deporting actual criminals (not political crimes). The problem is that it isn’t the cartel members and bank robbers who get rounded up when a factory is raided. And the mother fleeing persecution is treated the same as the drug kingpin.

1. Learn how to take a screenshot
2. Clean your damned screen

Never underestimate how actively worthless “eyewitness” testimony is.

I was not aware of this detail. But if it were just bystanders telling stuff to cops before they got a hold of the footage, they are going to go with it. Especially since it is already pretty worthless to begin with (so many jackets are easily reversed).

The nose I can go either way on. It looks “different” to me but wearing a mask and not grinning makes a huge difference there (it is why you are told to not smile for ID photos). The eyebrows are more a function of angle and resolution as you can see some darkness on the left (and he is obviously scowling and not flirting with a cute desk girl).

As for the jacket and backpack? Too lazy to look up the backpack models (people figured it out) but the one on the left looks small enough to fit in the one on the right. So he has his backpack for travel and then a smaller one full of gun and snacks and whatever else for the stakeout.

I guess the happy hostel guy would have come forward and been like “WTF?” and “I have an alibi” if it wasn’t him?

Never talk to the cops without a lawyer and NEVER voluntarily talk to them.

Also? The cops are going to find SOMEONE in the next week or so. And you can be damned sure they are going to take advantage of all of the news and social media about how this is a skilled hitman fighting for the loss of a loved one who WILL NOT BE TAKEN ALIVE. They’ll corner whoever they can pin it on, shoot them a few times, and then plant a gun and call it a day.

Yeah. This isn’t the first time the news app and the core nextcloud updates have fought each other in weird and mysterious ways (for me or others). I forget how I solved it last time (I think it was a similar case of needing to manually update to bleeding edge and then tweak things) but… I just don’t care anymore.

I don’t know who is right or wrong in how nextcloud is maintained (my instinct is the nextcloud devs because… have you seen nextcloud? but also, most apps don’t have this recurring problem). But at this point, the benefits I get out of it are largely gone. And when so many issues boil down to “We need more people and resources to maintain this”, it kind of feels like getting off the train BEFORE it crashes rather than after.

I’m on the alpha and it still won’t update any of my feeds. And going through the github issues it is basically summed up as “We will do another stable release once we have a frontend developer” which is basically never. So, at best, it will work until it doesn’t and then I have to fix it myself yet again and… yeah.

And if my choice is to run an older version of nextcloud to support one app? Hell no.

So… Windows?

I vaguely recall an extra worry a few min because. But my expert is that windows inevitably clobbers the boot loader eventually. So unless it is a laptop (where you are better off with a VM or wsl anyway) just give each os their own disc and use the BIOS for boot order.

I have nothing against the wolders but the admins of that instance raise more than a few eyebrows. Particularly when they rolled back specific anti hate speech policies in favor of vague common sense ones to stay ahead of the anti-woke crowd.

Kind of feels like they have been trying to take over Lemmy. Which… Could be a lot worse but still rubs me the wrong way.