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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2025

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  • maybe there is an actual explanation for HDMI Forum’s decision that I am missing.

    HDMI has never been an open standard (to the best of my understanding anyway). You’ve always needed to be an adopter or a member of HDMI forum to get the latest (or future) specs. So it’s not like they’ve just rejected a new idea. The rejection is fully consistent with their entire history of keeping the latest versions on lockdown.

    Standards organizations like HDMI Forum look like a monolith from the outside (like “they should explain their thinking here”) but really they are loosely coupled amalgamations of hundreds of companies, all of whom are working hard to make sure that (a) their patents are (and remain) essential, and that (b) nothing mandatory in a new version of the standard threatens their business. Think of it more like the UN General Assembly than a unified group of participants. Their likely isn’t a unified thinking other than that many Forum members are also participants in the patent licensing pool, so giving away something for which they collect royalties is just not a normal thought. Like… they’re not gonna give something away without getting something in return.

    I was a member of HDMI Forum for a brief while. Standards bodies like tihs are a bit of a weird world where motivations are often quite opaque.


  • Also, the ones I’ve seen in stores lately hare only the trial offers that are only good for a couple days and have to be “replenished” with an online account to stay functional for more than a couple days. Mint wouldn’t even activate initially with an email alias. I called support and they said “we can’t activate it with that email, we need your real email.” I then told them no worries, I’d just return it to best buy. Then they “found a way” to activate it, but I would have needed to give a credit card if I wanted it to stay active more than the 3 days. Best buy didn’t carry any longer duration prepaid card in the stores.


  • You’ve taken an approach here where you intentionally hide the fact that a video file is (at least) 3 different technical formats that are independently variable. An “MP4” file can have a range of audio codecs, a range of video codecs, timed-text formats, additional audio, and so on. And there is no single standard composition that works everywhere.

    When you simplify a matrix of user choices by making the vcodec, acodec, and timed text format choices on behalf of your users, you take on the burden of making sure those work everywhere the users want to playback. What you’ll find is that most devices on the market only support a very limited range of container+vcodec+acodec combinations, they are undocumented more often than not, and buggy as hell.

    The oversimplification approach you’re taking is “ingesting anything, but output only ‘Value Meal #1’ for everybody.” This has value for some people, but it puts a big burden on you to make choices that playback mostly correctly on a wide variety of devices, and it mysteriously breaks things that don’t work everywhere (like surround sound, ambisonics, many timed text formats etc.). There’s a reason why all that choice exists, even if most people don’t, don’t want to, and shouldn’t need to understand it.

    Not trying to dissuage you. Just sharing experience. :-)





  • Now true they could do that and not make it available to advertisers but the very idea is pretty fraught.

    More than fraught… platforms are often contractually prohibited by the streaming apps from collecting and analyzing actual viewer data. Usually the meta-search and meta-merchandising (ie “recommendations”) are built from some agreed upon set of rules between the two companies. They often include some watch history, but it may be the streaming app feeding that into the platform rather than the platform doing the analysis. Contract terms are different for every provider though, so it’s a big ol opaque mess. Rarely just a recommendation algo at work.



  • I just installed Firefly yesterday, and I can say that the docker compose setup was easy. I’ve got no real opinions yet, just wanted to mention this for OP in case he reads your experience as it being easier. I imagine they’re both easy.

    I’m curious, when you say you stopped importing, does that mean you were getting info from your banks, and stopped doing that? Why did you stop? My next step was to set up the automated importer for Firefly.







  • I bought a pixel 9 fold to run GrapheneOS. I didn’t consider running stock android, and wouldn’t use a Samsung phone if you gave it to me.

    Apple doesn’t really offer anything comparable in screen size or form factor, so it’s hard to compare in some ways. I like the fold quite a bit, but it has it’s quirks. The Qi/magnetic charger is trash, battery life is just ok, hardware doesn’t appear as durable as the iphone, and there aren’t great case options for the fold, and the cases that have a mag charger option have it in a place that makes magsafe accessories not fit in the right spot (they hang off the bottom a little).

    Graphene has it’s own set of quirks that take a little getting used to. But overall I’m loving it. The only real sucky thing is that the keyboards are different enough that I can’t type for shit.