Literally just started doing this last week. I did NOT expect it to work so much better than the name-brand app for such a “closed system” as Sonos.

Grayjay on Android has been working damn near flawlessly for me. No clue if the parent company is to be trusted at this point or not- but I cannot argue with the results.

Cheaper than Spotify for the number of users it gives you (at least where I live) and the app itself has functioned significantly better than Spotify’s has in my experience so far while not depriving me of any of the artists and albums I listen to regularly. Early on in its life it was big time selling snake oil, but at this point it’s just a solid alternative to Spotify and YouTube music which have both, frankly, gotten “too big to fail” and have begun enshittification because of it. Man we need more competition…

You seem to be arguing it’s all about the implementation of the phoning home itself- I’m arguing that running the entire executable/binary through a virtual environment likely has far more drastic performance implications than a phone home, regardless of frequency. It probably IS mostly an implementation problem, but I’m more inclined to believe that the implementation of the Denuvo virtual environment is at fault, not just a server call and response delay. **EDIT: Apologies, forgot to include a link- see HERE. Looks like a substantial/measurable difference. Not massive, as measured here, but certainly enough that if your hardware is just barely able to run a game it could easily make or break the entire experience.

Regarding performance implications: I believe Denuvo DRM runs through a type of virtual machine environment. While this theoretically should be relatively transparent, there are definitely documented instances of it negatively impacting performance, sometimes severely. Maybe the VM it runs in is just bad with certain instructions/calls on certain CPU’s or api’s, hard to tell for sure. But it’s not nothing.

On the flip side: if a car stereo has a known firmware issue causing problems with say Bluetooth connection, I DO want the manufacturer to actually provide an easy means of fixing/updating the borked software. Better that the system was properly tested and feature complete to begin with- but I’m not delusional enough to believe we can truly have nice things.

Why would I recommend Fileflows? It was a little more user friendly in my experience without requiring pulling in configurations from other sources. I know there are repos chalk full of Tdarr settings and configs, but for simple setups and DIY I preferred the Fileflows interface. The end result is basically the same, so pick your poison.

Isn’t AMD’s HEVC/265 still decent, specifically? I feel like I read that somewhere years back. 264 has always been a weak spot for them, however.

I might recommend fileflows over tdarr- but either way some kind of similar solution is almost mandatory with the grab bag of arbitrary encodings you find out there.

hunter2

Alright, where’s my replacement once my current Fitbit dies? What company makes a watch that tracks steps, heart rate, sleep, spO2, notifications, is generally water resistant (light swimming) and has a battery that lasts ~5+ days? Bonus points for open firmware/hardware that doesn’t require me to design my own apps/systems for each of those items. I don’t even use most of what my Versa 3 can do, but I know it won’t last forever and I’d at least like an idea of where to go if/when it breaks down.

I run mine with the actual photos on HDD but the database on SSD. So far everything has been near instantaneous for loading, downloading, uploading, you name it.