Eldritch

They don’t provide much in terms of bandwidth for you to access your own media. Just a few bytes through their web services. Their bandwidth usage comes from their desire to be their own streaming service. They provide access to a whole bunch of other media you may have no interest in.

Actually depending on tasks it can be up to a 25℅ boost. Though in gaming tasks it tends to be a 2 to 5% boost. Which while more moderate can still be felt. Where catchy excels is it’s CPU optimization. So if you’re CPU bottlenecked it can make a big difference. That said garuda and endeavor both give you the option of installing a cachy patched kernel.

Garuda is another easy arch like endeavor/cachy. I believe they even both provide kernel images with the cachy patches. But they aren’t the default. The really big negative with garuda is their default theme choice and setup. Endeavor/Cachy provide a much more vanilla setup out of the box. Making them a bit less problematic over all.

OpenWRT. It’s got a slight learning curve. But if you want something guaranteed to do what you want while still being upgradable. It’s the solution for you. You can find pre-made Hardware that will run it. Or any old business waste computers that you can gut and rebuild any way you like to make a beast of a router if you want.

And even then. Mp3 first in this day and age?! As an individual or a company that’s just bananas. MP3 as a fallback or baseline sure. As a feature to advertise or sell your service on. Clown show. Sure it’s a 30ish year old codec who’s patents have expired. But it’s also a 30 year old codec using ancient expired patents.

There’s much newer patented and libre codes that can provide similar quality at half the data rate. Allowing you to serve twice the listeners with the same resources.

Definitely. Though the original post war with regards to some gaming. It’s much much header with SFF. But their still absolutely solid for many uses.

It doesn’t even need to be that luxury. Look at online mp. EBay even, for old business systems. You can often get a complete 2010s ewaste business tower for around 100 USD. Though spend a bit more for a solid i7 and avoid SFF. Spend a bit more and pick up a cheap RX 580. Can all be done for under 200.

Then just use and learn the system. The other will still be there stable for games etc if you need it. Chances are, barring odd/exotic hardware. Most things will just work. And between that, new features, customizability, and less nagging. You might find it a more pleasant experience to gravitate to.

No more nagging about installing or updating shit you don’t want, but are tricky to uninstall. (One Drive, Copilot, Teams) You can remove anything and everything you want (till enough vital bits are gone). Because the system is yours and yours alone. It will do what you want and only that.

Yes I’ve never gotten a post from mastodon to start a new Lemmy/piefed thread. Though I think it’s supposed to be able to. But you can absolutely reply to them from Mastodon.

Hell my home server is a i7 4700. It’s a solid experience, though it is missing a few nice to haves these days. I have three Linux desktops in the house, i7 6700. One dell one lenovo and one HP. The Dell and Lenovo I have no need or desire to replace them for the little amount of gaming, etc. I do. They have decent graphics cards since I do 3D modeling. RX 580 and NV 1050.

The HP, I don’t know if there’s legitimate hardware failing somewhere on it, or if it’s just HP suckage. I have a little power HP Elite Book with an AMD processor and APU on it, and that thing is awesome. But this little business tower was struggling with Windows 10 before they killed it off. It’s better with Linux, but it’s still a shadow of the other two similarly-spect systems. Who knows.

When going for older hardware, though, my biggest recommendation is to don’t get the low end. Go for something higher. A similarly specced i7 Perfectly offer a significant performance boost over the i5. If someone gave me an i3 I could find a use for it. But I would never buy one.

Definitely take a look at what you’re looking to host and what it supports. Support for raspberry Pi and their Debian based pi OS is surprisingly widespread and robust. Not always first-party top-level support robust, but surprisingly adequate for a $35, $50 SBC.

Worst case scenario is still a solid introduction to open source software. Downloading, compiling, installing, et cetera. Some of my earliest projects on the pi involved that. Using the camera module along with the video for Linux subsystem, which wasn’t included or packaged under Raspian at the time at least. Go git project. Make, make install, and party

Definitely, though that can also be an issue with older x86 cores. Or, hell newer ones with non heterogeneous cores. Though that at least is getting better on both architectures.

Yes, this is one of the few real valid arguments against something like a pi 3. Outside architecture issues they are fantastic to learn on.

No worries. And I remembered the youtubers name. Data Slayer. He’s got a few halow videos. 1Km and several Mbps is just about the baseline to be interesting. Lorawan range is great. But the data rate really is far too low for anything outside iot or im.

Some of the heletech modules look very promising and not unaffordable.

I’ve seen one. Not a great sample size. A YouTuber who also does a lot of mesh-tastic videos. Demonstrated live streaming from an ESP32 camera module in a large public park. High resolution low frame rate. As well as in a bridge configuration streaming YouTube from their apartment close to practical range limits. Roughly line of sight, minimal obstruction, of course.

Guaranteed success? No. But definitely something worth looking into investigating and replicating. Devices like these are much more accessible to your average person than ham certification and equipment.

Wi-Fi HaLow data rates range from 150Kbps to over 15Mbps, over 600 times faster than LoRaWAN while still achieving good range.

It will of course varry by environment, topology, and configuration. As everything does. But even a megabit, 125KB/s leveraging modern technologies. Would be very usable. Capable of pushing DVD level streams of AV1 and opus though at saturation. More than easily able to push basic websites. High traffic probably not. But I wouldn’t expect neighborhood/village traffic to be too heavy.

You mention meshtaatic. There is also halow on the consumer side now. One of my goals for the next year is to set up a few open halow nodes in a mesh. As a local anarchist community network of sorts. With little or no intention of bridging it to the internet. Outside of connecting to other similar remote network segments or maybe an email/xmpp bridge. Mostly a separate local network with separate local resources.

Shield user since 2015. Literally just started down this myself. Got this yesterday but was too wiped out last night to set it up. Figured if I can spend less than a hundred dollars For a fourth generation i7 which is capable of decoding AV1. But I can’t buy a set top box that will do the same for even close to $100. It was worth a try.

The downside is you lose some power efficiency having a full-blown PC. The upside is configurability and usability. The shield was decent for emulation, but it still can’t compete with a full-blown PC. The one other small negative is casting. I’m not aware currently of any great method of casting media to a PC. There’s probably something that exists. I just don’t know of it yet. But I plan to evaluate a few immutable Linux distributions, including Bazite. With waydroid on top for any Android applications, I find that I just can’t get along without yet.

Quick edit after I got home to hook and use the remote. I had looked at several of them and had forgotten the exact specifications of the one I ordered. But I was pleasantly surprised. It has a decent weight. The buttons feel good. It’s plastic-y overall, but for the price, that’s what you expect. But best of all, it has an accelerometer in there to control mouse pointer movement. It’s more perfect than I ever could have imagined, and I’m going to buy two more soon for the project I’m working on for my parents for Christmas. Gonna hook them up with a home theater PC setup like I’m planning for myself. To replace their aging Chromecast TV.

I already mentioned client support. Stating that I was degoogling my clients and moving to htpc so codec support was largely a non issue in my particular case.

TBF, if you’re just downloading content. Even h265 can be rare still depending. Release groups sloooooooooowly change formats and workflows. And even then. Older content rarely gets new encodes.

Encoding these days is simple. I can do HQ 2 pass encodes of my DVD on a 6th gen i7 in just a little longer than it takes to watch. Yes 1080p can take over 3-4 hours for a movie. But I have a couple of old ewaste systems I can let churn overnight. I’m not concerned about real time re-encoding. I’m using av1 for quality and space saving.

Yes, I have a single machine where most of my storage is. I host my jellyfin server there, as well as all the home directories for all the users of my systems. Login to any system in the house and you always have the same desktop and data. If I want to replace a system, reinstall or distro hop. It’s just a few lines to copy into fstab and a few apps/flatpaks to download at most.

Av1 is better than h256 by quite a bit in many cases. Unfortunately, support is still very spotty if you’re running anything other than a home theater pc. But I’m moving to Av1/opus since, I’m actively de-googling/droiding. And moving to htpc.