Came over during the great 3rd party app API debacle. It didn’t even make the list. Am I old now?

Even setting seed to infinite, if there’s just one other capable seeder, good odds no individual sends any other individual a full file.

You’re just sending jibberish chunks everywhere, not your fault if someone assembles it all from multiple sources, right?

Yes, it absolutely can, it’s super easy! Just swap your Minecraft .jar with Paper and it’ll do the rest. It’s a tiny bit harder to go back, but only marginally.

Out of the box, aside from huge performance benefits, Paper is virtually indistinguishable from vanilla, but it also opens the door to a whole world of easy-to-use server-side plugins.

Edit: (you should still make a backup before swapping, just in case)

CPU intensive servers like Minecraft are where you start to run into problems with older hardware. If it’s just you on there, a 10 year old CPU is fine, but if you’ve got a few friends, the server may start to struggle to keep up.

Not sure how recently you ran this, or what all your were running, but in the past couple of years Paper has hit some pretty major milestones in unlocking threaded processing. Barring some sort of spammy 0-tick redstone nonsense or over the top plugins, I’d wager a Raspberry Pi 4 could handle up to about 5 or 6 friends without seeing any TPS dips. Its really remarkable how far they’ve pushed performance recently.

Could I get a larg HDD and ad it in an enclosure to the Mini PC to handle the media volume?

Like an external USB drive? Absolutely.

I mean, this is c/piracy, you can pretty easily go download a non-HDR version of everything. If you do want HDR just not DV, most decent DV encodes also have a HDR10 fallback which should kick in if your device doesn’t support DV.

Alternatively, I’m pretty sure there are plenty of tools out there like DoVi Tool that can help you convert the HDR metadata to HDR10/10+ if that’s what you want.

It’s much lower risk, someone dedicated could prove you accessed a seedbox, but it would be a lot harder to prove you violated a copyright

In terms of result quality? In my opinion, based on my particular search habits:

Kagi > SearXNG > Brave > Startpage/Google > DDG/Ecosia/Bing

Everyone is going to have their own opinions on each of those companies, but from a results lens, that’s what I find to be most/least effective.

Like all Google products, they will still make a halfhearted attempt to make it as useful as they can before absolutely destroying it with ads

Guessing Edge by default sent you to Bing, no surprise the DDG results look similar, given that they use Bing under he hood. They shuffle rankings slightly, but it’s the same index.

You can also use Ecosia, if your prefer a different shade of lipstick on your pig search results.

There’s not really a strong player in the open source search space.

Mwmbl exists, but per their own readme:

The quality is a long way’s off from matching the commercial engines at the moment

Kagi provides the source code for many of their services, but is not truly open source, especially because at its core, it relies on applying its own rankings to other’s indexes.

That said, search is a space where the old adage rings true:

If you’re not paying for it; you are the product!

For what it’s worth, I find value in my Kagi subscription.

if its possible to have Jellyfin read the name via a sub folder such as Movies/LinusISO/

It’s possible. Just make a LinuxISO (Year) folder in your movies directory and it’ll pick up the movie file within, regardless of name.

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/movies/

Naming only matters within folders if you have multiple versions.

Libby is able to sync with your kindle, and then you just choose “send to Kindle” on your phone when checking a book out and the book will appear in your Kindle library.

https://help.libbyapp.com/en-us/6017.htm

If you have a Kindle, this is 100% the best way to read books.

I meant visually web vs disc. To me, a 4k 15 Mbps web-DL is visually 99% as good as a 60+Mbps UHD BR remux.

Web-DL may not be how I want to watch something like Interstellar (shot on 70mm film) but is probably fine for something like 7 Fast 9 Furious Tokyo Zoom Zoom (shot on Vin Diesel’s iPhone, probably)

Is the h264 or x264 part of the name the bitrate?

No, that’s the encoding algorithm, aka codec. As another person pointed out, AVC/h264/x264 (all different names for what is effectively the same thing) is a lot easier to process than HEVC/h265/x265 (again, different names, same end result).

Bitrate is just the overall file size divided by the movie duration, basically indicating how compressed the movie is, with compression coming at the loss of finer details. You can generally gauge bitrate based on file size. A 5000 Mb file that is 1000 s long is, on average, 5000/1000=5 Mbps.

Since you’re very clearly not picky, you’re probably best off going for 720p or 1080p content with small file sizes (1-5 GB / movie). Feel free to download smaller though, if it doesn’t impact your experience, just make a mental note if you ever find anything that is too small for you to tolerate, and set your minimum file size somewhere above that.

Based on your criteria, you probably want to steer clear of terms like Atmos, TrueHD, DTS-MA, and DTS-X. These are all terms for different flavors of totally uncompressed audio, which alone can be up to 5GB of unnecessary (for you) added disc space for a given movie. Instead you want compressed audio like DDP, AAC, or AC3

DivX/XVID are really old video codecs, kinda like x264. I wouldn’t fuck with them even with your preferences unless you have no other choice, given your average potato nowadays can handle x264.

TL;DR, based on your preferences, look for / avoid these terms, but know not all files have all of the same fields identified:

GOOD

Video

AVC/h264/x264

720p or 1080p

8-bit (you’ll want this over 10-bit, if specified)

Audio

DDP, AAC, or AC3

Overall

1-5 GB file size / movie

MEH

Video

DivX/XVID

Overall

Be mindful of files smaller than 1 GB / movie, they may be fine for you but this is where you can really start to see some gnarly banding

AVOID

Video

HEVC/h265/x265 or VC1

2160p

HDR, HDR10, HDR10+, DoVi, or DV (not mentioned earlier but these need special, more modern, displays)

Audio

Atmos, TrueHD, DTS-MA, and DTS-X

Overall

Really large or comically small files.

Unfortunately quality is entirely subjective. What you may think is fine, I may hate, and vice versa.

Generally speaking, for a given movie, quality and bitrate are linked, but two movies with the same bitrate likely don’t have the same quality because of a myriad of factors.

For me, with a few limited exceptions of movies I know like the back of my hand, I have a really hard time distinguishing between a good 4K webrip (15-20 Mbps) and remux (40-80 Mbps), so I have no issue keeping the majority of my library encoded at ~18Mbps

Unfortunately there’s no quality magic wand, but if you find a release group that does encodes you like, try to get to their home tracker and just let them handle it.

If you’re good with 1080p non-HDR content, for your use case you probably want to focus on “AVC” aka “H.264” or “x264” encodes of decent bitrate. HEVC yields better quality than AVC for a given bitrate, but comes at the cost of being much more intensive to encode and decode, which may be a source of problems for your 10 y.o. box. If your bar is “tell what’s happening”, you can go to pretty low bitrates.

Handbrake is a robust piece of software, but it’s really not beginner friendly because the automatic encoder settings will just absolutely ruin whatever you feed it.

If you’re on windows, check out StaxRip for encoding

But would you still watch anyways? It seems silly to me to watch a game you’re boycotting then just go around pretending you didn’t. Who did you watch for? Who are you actually lying to?

Not sure I understand the boycott but still watch crowd. Sure, not watching makes viewership go down a tick, but the Superbowl is so cultural, every hallway “did you see the game” helps push those viewership numbers right back up

Good and relatively mass produced? Good start searching for terms like “solid wood dresser”. You still have to do some vetting but it cuts down on the absolute junk.

Good and cheap? Check your local Goodwill and Habitat for Humanity ReStore regularly - their stock is highly variable, but they will have some of the best items for the best price out there.

Money is no object? Make friends with the folks at your local hardwood store and pry them for recommendations for local woodworkers, and attend local craft fairs.