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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

#33

Post by hnlmorg »

rpdillon wrote: post #24
hnlmorg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pa…

Do you still maintain it?

No. It was built before Android / Apple integrations existed and was built around tactile controls and voice interactions. But I think Apple Car play is a far far more useful product these days than anything I built 15 years ago. Even if their touch controls are an ergonomic step backwards.

Re: A website for debloated open source alternatives

#35

Post by moron4hire »

hnlmorg wrote: post #26
moron4hire wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually don't think it's worth noting. I think, if a particular code standard issue is really of value, it will be obvious. You will propose it and nobody will argue. I think the fact that code standards are contentious is proof they are extremely low value. Subtle effects are indistinguishable from superstition.

I think you’re underestimating how opinionated developers are. The fact that we are disagreeing on this point is great evidence that there isn’t an easy to define, proverbial line in the sand.

I know very well how opinionated other developers are. I'm explicitly saying it's a waste of energy to be that picky about code style.

There is an easy to define line: there is no line. It's not a boundary where "over here is good code" and "over there, not" we just don't have a good idea of where the line is. No. There is absolutely no line.

Re: A website for debloated open source alternatives

#36

Post by JoshTriplett »

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 would love to see an Open Source media center that supports streaming services. I wouldn't care if the services say "we only support 1080p for browsers / open source, anything more needs a locked-down device". (Perhaps the project could have some add-on you can buy that's a physical hardware dongle for doing 4k HDR and emitting HDCPed HDMI.) I already live with that for watching on my laptop. Just having watchable basic-resolution streaming would make it a one-stop-shop.

Re: A website for debloated open source alternatives

#37

Post by moron4hire »

rpdillon wrote: post #25
moron4hire wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually don't think it's worth noting. I think, if a particular code standard issue is really of value, it will be obvious. You will propose it and nobody will argue. I think the fact that code standards are contentious is proof they are extremely low value. Subtle effects are indistinguishable from superstition.

I think the particular choice of coding standards is low value, but I think the consistency they bring has a lot of value, at least potentially. As a father of two boys myself, I know exactly where you're coming from. Like some adults, they'll argue over pointless details and miss the entire thrust of the discussion.

No, to repeat what I said, I think "consistency" to a programmer is like "fairness" to a child: it's not what you think it is and it probably doesn't apply to whatever situation it's being invoked.

Re: A website for debloated open source alternatives

#38

Post by 0x457 »

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…

i had media center powered by a few perl script that would transcode all videos into formats that ps3 supported in 2007-ish. Yes ffmpeg had a lot of options, 99% of them does not matter, there really only 3 ways to stream to client: as is, repack streams into something client support (i.e. your source is mkv) or transcode into something client support (clients know which formats they support).

People that run these services don't want "dynamic stream quality selection".

Re: A website for debloated open source alternatives

#39

Post by rpdillon »

moron4hire wrote: post #37
rpdillon wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the particular choice of coding standards is low value, but I think the consistency they bring has a lot of value, at least potentially. As a father of two boys myself, I know exactly where you're coming from. Like some adults, they'll argue over pointless details and miss the entire thrust of the discussion.

No, to repeat what I said, I think "consistency" to a programmer is like "fairness" to a child: it's not what you think it is and it probably doesn't apply to whatever situation it's being invoked.

Oh, interesting. So you're advocating for projects that have wildly different styles encoding from file to file?

I guess I've never really worked on a project like that. I can imagine it would feel very messy and would make manual refactors difficult but might not be such a problem for AI?

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