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A website for debloated open source alternatives

debloat.dev

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Re: A website for debloated open source alternatives

#11

Post by intelkishan »

piaste wrote: post #3
hnlmorg wrote: post #2

In the TV and Media section ( https://debloat.dev/c/tv-media ) there are 11 recommendations and 4 of them are XBMC. There used to be so many options for media centres. What happened?

I think it's just a pretty consolidated space? Kind of like ebook management, which was dominated by Calibre for so many years (this changed recently). But unlike ebooks, media centre management is a fair bit more complex since it involves supporting many different media formats and many forms of acceleration or transcoding. So the big projects - Kodi for local media and Jellyfin for streaming - have a lot of inertia…

What did the ebook space change into?

Re: A website for debloated open source alternatives

#12

Post by hnlmorg »

piaste wrote: post #3
hnlmorg wrote: post #2

In the TV and Media section ( https://debloat.dev/c/tv-media ) there are 11 recommendations and 4 of them are XBMC. There used to be so many options for media centres. What happened?

I think it's just a pretty consolidated space? Kind of like ebook management, which was dominated by Calibre for so many years (this changed recently). But unlike ebooks, media centre management is a fair bit more complex since it involves supporting many different media formats and many forms of acceleration or transcoding. So the big projects - Kodi for local media and Jellyfin for streaming - have a lot of inertia…

It’s not that difficult to be honest. VLC / ffmpeg can do most of the heavy lifting. And there’s no shortage of libraries for rendering in a UI.

There used to be dozens of options to choose from. Multiple different XBMC forks. Multiples different Subsonic forks. Multiple different DNLA servers. Multitudes of web-based servers. CLI MP3 servers. Independent media centres for a variety of different consoles.

Maybe that’s still available and just not indexed on that site. But I noticed the choices had shrank significantly last year when I was looking for Plex alternatives compared with when I last built a media centre approximately 15 years ago.

Maybe smart TVs have reduced people’s desire here?

Re: A website for debloated open source alternatives

#15

Post by hnlmorg »

moron4hire wrote: post #10
sam_lowry_ wrote: post #6

suckless.org?

"Use /* */ for comments, not //." I find stuff like this hilarious. No software project has ever failed, or even slow down one iota, because of the comment style. This is just someone's personal "ick" masquerading as "coding standards." EDIT: I think it has actually been becoming a dad of two boys that has absolutely killed my patience for this kind of thing. A lot of it is so similar to how my children argue with ea…

Whilst I do agree with you on that specific example, it’s worth noting that code standards as a whole are a somewhat blurry line that can be extremely subjective at times.

Re: A website for debloated open source alternatives

#16

Post by ad_fontes »

yannoninator wrote: post #7

Is there a marker to know if any of these tools are AI generated slop here? That would be a good feature here.

How do you define "AI generated slop"?

There's also an implicit judgment in your question. Is well-designed, well-tested AI-generated code worse than poorly written, but hand-typed code?

Re: A website for debloated open source alternatives

#17

Post by metek »

hnlmorg wrote: post #12
piaste wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's just a pretty consolidated space? Kind of like ebook management, which was dominated by Calibre for so many years (this changed recently). But unlike ebooks, media centre management is a fair bit more complex since it involves supporting many different media formats and many forms of acceleration or transcoding. So the big projects - Kodi for local media and Jellyfin for streaming - have a lot of inertia…

It’s not that difficult to be honest. VLC / ffmpeg can do most of the heavy lifting. And there’s no shortage of libraries for rendering in a UI. There used to be dozens of options to choose from. Multiple different XBMC forks. Multiples different Subsonic forks. Multiple different DNLA servers. Multitudes of web-based servers. CLI MP3 servers. Independent media centres for a variety of different consoles. Maybe that’…

I think I understand how to use about 20 of the command line options for ffmpeg and the companion utilities like ffprobe. Which is to say; I understand about 0.5% of the total options they provide and am likely a world leading expert in it. I'm mostly joking -- as in, overstating how many of them I understand.

Understanding ffmpeg borders on a specialization in itself. No big surprise that so many of the alternatives have fallen away over the years as people realize the absolute scope of that piece of software.

Re: A website for debloated open source alternatives

#18

Post by metek »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #5
piaste wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's just a pretty consolidated space? Kind of like ebook management, which was dominated by Calibre for so many years (this changed recently). But unlike ebooks, media centre management is a fair bit more complex since it involves supporting many different media formats and many forms of acceleration or transcoding. So the big projects - Kodi for local media and Jellyfin for streaming - have a lot of inertia…

It's logical, but the low variety is disappointing nonetheless and makes it more likely than none of the available options are well-suited to one's needs/desires. In the case of media management, ffmpeg is easily usable with just about every programming language in existence and its usage is extremely well-trodden at this point, which makes the vacuum of newer alternatives to the XBMC lineage all the more puzzling.

You know that recent social media trend where you name 100 women? Try naming 100 ffmpeg command line options.

Re: A website for debloated open source alternatives

#19

Post by ad_fontes »

joshuat wrote: post #14
WalterGR wrote: post #4

How is “bloat” measured here? Or is this simply a list of open source alternatives to commercial products?

The inclusion of Tailscale here was a little surprising to me. I'm betting on the latter.

I like Tailscale, but it's difficult to argue with a straight face that it's not seriously suffered from product creep.

This is the inherent problem with tech start-ups. Once they solve the problem they were founded to solve, then what? It's feature complete, but investors insist that the line must go up. Can you imagine if `sed` or `vim` was brought to market by a venture-backed company?

IMHO, capitalism and FOSS are fundamentally incompatible.

Re: A website for debloated open source alternatives

#20

Post by hnlmorg »

metek wrote: post #17
hnlmorg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not that difficult to be honest. VLC / ffmpeg can do most of the heavy lifting. And there’s no shortage of libraries for rendering in a UI. There used to be dozens of options to choose from. Multiple different XBMC forks. Multiples different Subsonic forks. Multiple different DNLA servers. Multitudes of web-based servers. CLI MP3 servers. Independent media centres for a variety of different consoles. Maybe that’…

I think I understand how to use about 20 of the command line options for ffmpeg and the companion utilities like ffprobe. Which is to say; I understand about 0.5% of the total options they provide and am likely a world leading expert in it. I'm mostly joking -- as in, overstating how many of them I understand. Understanding ffmpeg borders on a specialization in itself. No big surprise that so many of the alternatives…

You don’t need to understand much of ffmpeg to build a media centre. Your requirements here are extremely simplified and there are hundreds of guides online on how to use it for very simple transcoding.

But if you don’t want to use ffmpeg directly then use one of the many ffmpeg wrappers. Or a different lib entirely like gstreamer or VLC.

Around 15 years ago I built a media centre for my car and the media playback part turned out to be the easiest part of the project.

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