I'm not sure why you'd bugger with anything other than HDMI out for both sound and video on an HTPC but that's your call, but yes, I was thinking full system build, probably in the form of something like one of those NUC-like Chromeboxes from Gigabyte or HP if you don't already have spare parts in hand.
Android boxes are mostly the way to go for that application regardless, but reasonably contemporary low-price Intel/AMD CPUs do decode even 4k HEVC in hardware now. You can probably still get away with a $200 ITX system if you really want to, it's just that a $130 nVidia Shield or $60 MiTV box means no more messing around and a lower overall power bill.
There's still a limited case to be made since no one box does everything; if you have content from Apple and Amazon and Google, the PC might be a better option, but 10' interfaces outside of Kodi are largely terrible and you may have issues with 4k authorization depending on your software options. That alone is enough of a trade off to keep me on Amazon and nVidia boxes.
I don't think it's actually BROKEN so much as you need your own API key. I think it blocks the default API key that ships with the plugin. You just have to register for your own dev key and then change the one in the plugin settings.
I use a third party Android client called Smart Youtube TV for access on Set Top Boxes and mobile clients. It bypasses the ads. PCs running a browser can just block the ads in the normal way. That works well enough for me.
Youtube Red is a different deal. It's the $10/month thing that takes Ads off Youtbue (adblock yes, I know), allows access to premium shows from well-known channels and provides paid streaming access to Google Play Music. Most of the premium shows aren't that good or interesting, and I'd rather support creators directly than give Google extra money, but it's an option.
Youtube TV is functionally a basic cable TV package for someone who just can't give up on their History channel or whatever.
I have a small business customer who still runs EComstation on relatively contemporary hardware. They only need it on a couple machines out of the two dozen or so that they have, but since they had some critical OS/2 software in use, it was cheaper and easier for them to update OS/2 than it was to get their software updated. One of the reasons I work with them is that I'm the only guy they could find with some background on OS/2.
It's not absolutely up to date. I don't think it supports USB3, for example, but it does work if you need it.
Not all content is visual. Tumblr is a multimedia platform and some content can be audio or textual. Further, porn is "consumed" in the sense that for most people part of the engagement is deriving enjoyment then moving on to the next dopamine hit of novelty. It's unusual, especially on a platform that creates a never-ending stream of new content, to return to the same posts again and again. The choice of word was deliberate.
Hilariously, post-ban, Tumblr has robo-filters in place that are really only functional for female (presenting) anatomy. If you want to watch see male parts or homosexual male pornography, content is available with almost no barrier on Tumblr.... which means seeing a male coming is still A-OK so long as there's no titties in the media.
I'm responding to an AC and I already know that is dumb but as someone who has run adult web sites, trans content is 1. Overwhelmingly consumed by self-identified straight people. There's almost zero interest in it among consumers of cisgendered male/male pornography. 2. Enormously popular. Easily a top-5 category by most metrics.
It isn't normalized to the degree that some other content is; we don't joke about it yet on daytime TV, but it wouldn't surprise me if norms change to that point by the time GenZs are in their 30s.
I'm pretty sure when I looked in to changing my US Provider, they wanted me to pay an extra $10/month for LTE as well. So does this fee replace the $10/month for LTE or are customers expected to pay $10/month for LTE AND $10/month for "5G?"
I don't need it. I never claimed to. I've exceeded 80GB use in a month one time in five years, because a customer site had nothing faster than a basic rate ISDN line and I turned on the access point on my phone for around a dozen people to use while I was on site. Sprint called me to ask why my data usage spiked and to please not do that again.
I recognize some people will consume 4k video on a phone, given the option to do so. I can't think of another high bandwidth personal application for a mobile device, but in many cases I think the people doing that aren't really aware of why that's a problem.
Unfortunately, the merger needs to happen, since AT&T and Verizon are giants and consolidating equipment and frequency ownership is really the only compelling option for either Sprint or TMO to continue to operate. There just isn't a path forward for either one unless they start to work as a single entity.
The FCC is very much pro-industry right now and I don't think there's a right-left bias in this particular consolidation so much that every time anyone gets a look at Sprint's books and up-close business practices, it's a pretty ugly story that by rights should scare away investors.
Sprint is GOING to be bought. As a Sprint customer, I'd rather see it join with TMO to make a third viable competitor in the US. Giving either ATT or VZW utter market leading dominance would just be the excuse to make service plans and bandwidth allocations that much worse for everyone else.
IIRC Sprint is the only full-service provider in the USA that still has "unlimited" data on offer. Unlimited in the USA is essentially a misnomer; apparently you'll start getting complaints from your provider if you're using more than about 1GB/day no matter which service you have, but it does still have $60/month service plans with no explicit data cap.
I'm not sure what good it does to offer absurdly high bandwidth to mobile devices while capping data plans to insignificant amounts. Exceeding a data cap even faster doesn't sound all that appealing. I'm not sure when I've needed something delivered to my phone at higher than 20mbps and LTE is more than capable of doing that.
I've been on a SERO plan since approximately forever; I live by a major highway and I have a more or less perfect signal all the time. I know Sprint sucks for most people but it's never been a problem for me.
Parts of NT were stable and not-crashy. An NT4 machine that was doing modest levels of data collection or acting as a file server could probably stay online for months at a time. Other parts were kludges upon kludges and would shit themselves constantly, leading to hilarious BSODs or boot files being corrupted.
Pirated content can be had at whatever quality level you feel you need, up to and including 4k for some things. Most TV shows that have ever been released in 1080p with 6 channel audio are available in 1080p and 6 channel audio. Very often, a 45 minute TV show can be had as a 400MB Full HD h.265 file, so it's not like there's even much of an investment in storing the content.
Chromebooks are pretty goddamned legit now. About 90% of my customers could probably do all their business functions on them and that number would be 100% if more small dev shops would quit using MSVB6something front ends that haven't been updated since Windows NT was a thing for MSSQL Express databases and move their client logic to some kind of web application instead.
No cure for games but Steam and nVidia both have remote display systems that work pretty well for that if you really need it.
There's nothing on an Android device that can't be at least disabled with ADB commands and replaced with something else if necessary. There's no root process involved in that, aside from knowing how to use ADB (Debloater for Android and ADBFire are both good front-ends for it). Non-removable apps also reside on the system partition of your device, which means they're not taking up space in the space available to the end user anyway.
I can't speak to what Apple does, other than the general culture over there being "Pay for everything and no, you can't change anything from the way we want it to be." One size fits some is Apple's biggest problem.
On the other hand, Surface devices still take too long to boot and update and are hampered by too many tools that don't work well on a relatively small touchscreen. They're nice enough as small computers but they're merely functional as tablets. Unless I specifically needed an application that only ran on Windows, I'd rather have a $200 ChromeOS/Android device where I'm assured a solid touch screen experience.
The bit you are missing is the ability to connect to that marvelous collection outside your home. Are you seriously going to set up a VPN so you can attempt to direct stream over NFS or CIFS? No. A Plex Media Server (or you can do it with Emby) gives you and other people you choose to invite access to your media.
I have Plex set up for my family to access outside my home. If I want to watch something, I'll do it over a Kodi front-end. I don't pay any attention to Plex unless I happen to be on a work trip or something. I set it up five or six years ago and the only maintenance I've done is to periodically update the server software, but my folks think I'm the god of computing for leaving it on all the time.
Plex Media Server as a platform for sorting and delivering video content is really goddamned good. Almost magic. There are a handful of TV shows where there are arguments about how the episodes should be ordered (Doctor Who is the biggest example) but for the most part, if you sort your content between TV and Movies, it'll figure everything out.
Plex is pretty bad at handling music, but that's definitely an afterthought compared to video content. It can also work with a OTA TV tuner and has limited support for web scraping.
The Cloud Server deal is for I-don't-know-who. Maybe people with laptops or tablets and a multi-terabyte Google Drive or OneDrive account?
There's a huge amount of same-ness in the high end phones. They're all water-resistant (i.e. glued-together) glass and metal, 5.5 - 6.5" devices with 3 - 4000mA non-replaceable batteries and 4 or 6GB RAM. Maybe the OEM puts an SD card in one or maybe they do something extra with the cameras. Samsung or Apple might claim that their digital assistant is in some way better than Google or Amazon's. So maybe that's a feature. The huge phones sometimes come with a stylus. Yay.
Is anyone making a high end phone with a smaller form factor any more? With both removable battery and SD card? Can we get a high-spec phone with a plastic back so the damned thing doesn't feel like a hot brick if you happen to have the GPS on or be recording video? Maybe something with double-size optical sensor for improved camera quality?
I thought LG was on to something with the G- and V- line, as those devices had some modularity, but the current models are just like everything else now.
I've gotten three Pebble Rounds second hand. I haven't paid more than $30 for any of them. They run for at least two days on a charge, and unlike other Smart Watches, they aren't appreciably larger or thicker than any other inexpensive watch; they aren't the monstrously huge things that smart watches typically are.
I know they aren't being made any more, which is why I bought several of them, but they do everything I want them to do and nobody seems to making smart watches with consideration of form factor any longer.
There's a common browser addon called umatrix that allows users to set fine-grained permissions for different sorts of content, including media, scripts and frames. It's a favorite of mine, except one of its most common bugs is that the UI it uses will occasionally randomly disappear from your user interface. I understand why that functionality isn't built in to mainstream browsers, but I can't browse without it.
It's not like the Chromebook is necessarily the only computer one might have. I'm typing on a Chromebook right now in preference to using any of four high-end notebooks (or either of my high-end desktops) that are all relatively close proximity. For a lot of non-business activities, like aimless Slashdot posting, it's a perfectly serviceable device. And I can start a remote session on one of the big-boy computers if I need to; web browsing is ironically something I generally don't do on this thing. I just like having this thing with an 8+ hour battery that doesn't get warm and does pretty much everything it can do pretty much instantly. I suppose that if someone made a bizzaro-world Xterminal with a 1080P touchscreen, I'd be happy with that as well.
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I'm not sure why you'd bugger with anything other than HDMI out for both sound and video on an HTPC but that's your call, but yes, I was thinking full system build, probably in the form of something like one of those NUC-like Chromeboxes from Gigabyte or HP if you don't already have spare parts in hand.
Android boxes are mostly the way to go for that application regardless, but reasonably contemporary low-price Intel/AMD CPUs do decode even 4k HEVC in hardware now. You can probably still get away with a $200 ITX system if you really want to, it's just that a $130 nVidia Shield or $60 MiTV box means no more messing around and a lower overall power bill.
There's still a limited case to be made since no one box does everything; if you have content from Apple and Amazon and Google, the PC might be a better option, but 10' interfaces outside of Kodi are largely terrible and you may have issues with 4k authorization depending on your software options. That alone is enough of a trade off to keep me on Amazon and nVidia boxes.
I don't think it's actually BROKEN so much as you need your own API key. I think it blocks the default API key that ships with the plugin. You just have to register for your own dev key and then change the one in the plugin settings.
I use a third party Android client called Smart Youtube TV for access on Set Top Boxes and mobile clients. It bypasses the ads. PCs running a browser can just block the ads in the normal way. That works well enough for me.
Youtube Red is a different deal. It's the $10/month thing that takes Ads off Youtbue (adblock yes, I know), allows access to premium shows from well-known channels and provides paid streaming access to Google Play Music. Most of the premium shows aren't that good or interesting, and I'd rather support creators directly than give Google extra money, but it's an option.
Youtube TV is functionally a basic cable TV package for someone who just can't give up on their History channel or whatever.
That's actually sort of relevant to my customer's interests. I'll keep that in mind. Thanks AC!
I have a small business customer who still runs EComstation on relatively contemporary hardware. They only need it on a couple machines out of the two dozen or so that they have, but since they had some critical OS/2 software in use, it was cheaper and easier for them to update OS/2 than it was to get their software updated. One of the reasons I work with them is that I'm the only guy they could find with some background on OS/2.
It's not absolutely up to date. I don't think it supports USB3, for example, but it does work if you need it.
Not all content is visual. Tumblr is a multimedia platform and some content can be audio or textual. Further, porn is "consumed" in the sense that for most people part of the engagement is deriving enjoyment then moving on to the next dopamine hit of novelty. It's unusual, especially on a platform that creates a never-ending stream of new content, to return to the same posts again and again. The choice of word was deliberate.
Hilariously, post-ban, Tumblr has robo-filters in place that are really only functional for female (presenting) anatomy. If you want to watch see male parts or homosexual male pornography, content is available with almost no barrier on Tumblr. ... which means seeing a male coming is still A-OK so long as there's no titties in the media.
Yes, it's exactly as dumb as it sounds.
I'm responding to an AC and I already know that is dumb but as someone who has run adult web sites, trans content is
1. Overwhelmingly consumed by self-identified straight people. There's almost zero interest in it among consumers of cisgendered male/male pornography.
2. Enormously popular. Easily a top-5 category by most metrics.
It isn't normalized to the degree that some other content is; we don't joke about it yet on daytime TV, but it wouldn't surprise me if norms change to that point by the time GenZs are in their 30s.
I'm pretty sure when I looked in to changing my US Provider, they wanted me to pay an extra $10/month for LTE as well. So does this fee replace the $10/month for LTE or are customers expected to pay $10/month for LTE AND $10/month for "5G?"
I don't need it. I never claimed to. I've exceeded 80GB use in a month one time in five years, because a customer site had nothing faster than a basic rate ISDN line and I turned on the access point on my phone for around a dozen people to use while I was on site. Sprint called me to ask why my data usage spiked and to please not do that again.
I recognize some people will consume 4k video on a phone, given the option to do so. I can't think of another high bandwidth personal application for a mobile device, but in many cases I think the people doing that aren't really aware of why that's a problem.
Unfortunately, the merger needs to happen, since AT&T and Verizon are giants and consolidating equipment and frequency ownership is really the only compelling option for either Sprint or TMO to continue to operate. There just isn't a path forward for either one unless they start to work as a single entity.
The FCC is very much pro-industry right now and I don't think there's a right-left bias in this particular consolidation so much that every time anyone gets a look at Sprint's books and up-close business practices, it's a pretty ugly story that by rights should scare away investors.
Sprint is GOING to be bought. As a Sprint customer, I'd rather see it join with TMO to make a third viable competitor in the US. Giving either ATT or VZW utter market leading dominance would just be the excuse to make service plans and bandwidth allocations that much worse for everyone else.
IIRC Sprint is the only full-service provider in the USA that still has "unlimited" data on offer. Unlimited in the USA is essentially a misnomer; apparently you'll start getting complaints from your provider if you're using more than about 1GB/day no matter which service you have, but it does still have $60/month service plans with no explicit data cap.
I'm not sure what good it does to offer absurdly high bandwidth to mobile devices while capping data plans to insignificant amounts. Exceeding a data cap even faster doesn't sound all that appealing. I'm not sure when I've needed something delivered to my phone at higher than 20mbps and LTE is more than capable of doing that.
I've been on a SERO plan since approximately forever; I live by a major highway and I have a more or less perfect signal all the time. I know Sprint sucks for most people but it's never been a problem for me.
To be fair I think they'd also prefer that you buy an Office 365 license for that new PC as well.
Parts of NT were stable and not-crashy. An NT4 machine that was doing modest levels of data collection or acting as a file server could probably stay online for months at a time.
Other parts were kludges upon kludges and would shit themselves constantly, leading to hilarious BSODs or boot files being corrupted.
No one was sad to see NT4 go.
Pirated content can be had at whatever quality level you feel you need, up to and including 4k for some things. Most TV shows that have ever been released in 1080p with 6 channel audio are available in 1080p and 6 channel audio. Very often, a 45 minute TV show can be had as a 400MB Full HD h.265 file, so it's not like there's even much of an investment in storing the content.
Chromebooks are pretty goddamned legit now. About 90% of my customers could probably do all their business functions on them and that number would be 100% if more small dev shops would quit using MSVB6something front ends that haven't been updated since Windows NT was a thing for MSSQL Express databases and move their client logic to some kind of web application instead.
No cure for games but Steam and nVidia both have remote display systems that work pretty well for that if you really need it.
There's nothing on an Android device that can't be at least disabled with ADB commands and replaced with something else if necessary. There's no root process involved in that, aside from knowing how to use ADB (Debloater for Android and ADBFire are both good front-ends for it). Non-removable apps also reside on the system partition of your device, which means they're not taking up space in the space available to the end user anyway.
I can't speak to what Apple does, other than the general culture over there being "Pay for everything and no, you can't change anything from the way we want it to be." One size fits some is Apple's biggest problem.
On the other hand, Surface devices still take too long to boot and update and are hampered by too many tools that don't work well on a relatively small touchscreen. They're nice enough as small computers but they're merely functional as tablets. Unless I specifically needed an application that only ran on Windows, I'd rather have a $200 ChromeOS/Android device where I'm assured a solid touch screen experience.
The bit you are missing is the ability to connect to that marvelous collection outside your home. Are you seriously going to set up a VPN so you can attempt to direct stream over NFS or CIFS? No. A Plex Media Server (or you can do it with Emby) gives you and other people you choose to invite access to your media.
I have Plex set up for my family to access outside my home. If I want to watch something, I'll do it over a Kodi front-end. I don't pay any attention to Plex unless I happen to be on a work trip or something. I set it up five or six years ago and the only maintenance I've done is to periodically update the server software, but my folks think I'm the god of computing for leaving it on all the time.
Plex Media Server as a platform for sorting and delivering video content is really goddamned good. Almost magic. There are a handful of TV shows where there are arguments about how the episodes should be ordered (Doctor Who is the biggest example) but for the most part, if you sort your content between TV and Movies, it'll figure everything out.
Plex is pretty bad at handling music, but that's definitely an afterthought compared to video content. It can also work with a OTA TV tuner and has limited support for web scraping.
The Cloud Server deal is for I-don't-know-who. Maybe people with laptops or tablets and a multi-terabyte Google Drive or OneDrive account?
There's a huge amount of same-ness in the high end phones. They're all water-resistant (i.e. glued-together) glass and metal, 5.5 - 6.5" devices with 3 - 4000mA non-replaceable batteries and 4 or 6GB RAM. Maybe the OEM puts an SD card in one or maybe they do something extra with the cameras. Samsung or Apple might claim that their digital assistant is in some way better than Google or Amazon's. So maybe that's a feature. The huge phones sometimes come with a stylus. Yay.
Is anyone making a high end phone with a smaller form factor any more? With both removable battery and SD card? Can we get a high-spec phone with a plastic back so the damned thing doesn't feel like a hot brick if you happen to have the GPS on or be recording video? Maybe something with double-size optical sensor for improved camera quality?
I thought LG was on to something with the G- and V- line, as those devices had some modularity, but the current models are just like everything else now.
I've gotten three Pebble Rounds second hand. I haven't paid more than $30 for any of them. They run for at least two days on a charge, and unlike other Smart Watches, they aren't appreciably larger or thicker than any other inexpensive watch; they aren't the monstrously huge things that smart watches typically are.
I know they aren't being made any more, which is why I bought several of them, but they do everything I want them to do and nobody seems to making smart watches with consideration of form factor any longer.
There's a common browser addon called umatrix that allows users to set fine-grained permissions for different sorts of content, including media, scripts and frames. It's a favorite of mine, except one of its most common bugs is that the UI it uses will occasionally randomly disappear from your user interface. I understand why that functionality isn't built in to mainstream browsers, but I can't browse without it.
It's not like the Chromebook is necessarily the only computer one might have. I'm typing on a Chromebook right now in preference to using any of four high-end notebooks (or either of my high-end desktops) that are all relatively close proximity. For a lot of non-business activities, like aimless Slashdot posting, it's a perfectly serviceable device. And I can start a remote session on one of the big-boy computers if I need to; web browsing is ironically something I generally don't do on this thing. I just like having this thing with an 8+ hour battery that doesn't get warm and does pretty much everything it can do pretty much instantly. I suppose that if someone made a bizzaro-world Xterminal with a 1080P touchscreen, I'd be happy with that as well.