571–580 of 653 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that most serious computer users use a laptop docked, so it’s useless 70-90% of the time, which means the software can’t rely on it, which means it’s an afterthought in all apps.
>most serious computer users Ahh... the good 'ol Scottsman shows his face yet again! Right on time!
The pricing is not really justifiable especially given the most use cases of the Mac mini (Home Theater, NAS, Backup etc.) are better handled by other OSes. The NUC8 with comparable specs (sans 6 core CPU) comes at under half the price! If you needed the 6 cores sure but given most workloads other than encoding don't - it's questionable. Even then the 6C processor doesn't cost enough to make up for the difference.
What OSes are better for a "Home Theater" TV computer?? That's a serious question; I recently replaced a creaking old Mac Mini (that couldn't do 4K) with a new Dell, after going a little bicurious with respect to Windows 10 (for software development work)... and, surprisingly, it's a complete and utter shitshow. I was astonished, actually; I had assumed Windows would be better than macOS as a TV computer, other than…
You assumed correctly circa ten years ago. Unfortunately the best solution bar none was killed by Microsoft: Windows Media Center Edition. It had a killer ten foot interface and actually supported CableCard digital TV tuners. I can only assume it wasn't a big revenue maker and that the support calls were pretty high. Not to mention it never had more than lukewarm reception from cable companies which didn't appreciate the competition for set top tuner boxes.
These days if you really want to roll your own you can buy an HD Home Run [1] and let it stream to you. It doesn't install any malware but I haven't seen the UI so no clue if it's beautiful or absolute crap. Since it can stream via DLNA that probably depends on the device you stream to as much as anything. I punted and used Youtube TV which I'm about to cancel since hurricane season is over. Like the old song says "500 channels and nothing's on."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll have to try this again. I put VLC on my AppleTV4, and I don't remember having luck playing things off my Synology. I'm using Kodi on my Android TV-equipped Sony to stream from the NAS, which works, but the UI is a disaster for adding sources. I finally got it to work, but I never want to have to change anything again. For me, using Plex is an utter and complete nightmare. Anything with transcoding and library re…
Plex is the least nightmarish of the video library apps I've used in the last few years (Plex and Kodi are the only ones I've ended up using extensively, though I've tried out several others). Transcoding is obviously a last resort, but I've used it on rare occasions for streaming live and recorded TV from home to the Plex app on my iPhone and it works reasonably well. For my home theater stuff I absolutely don't wan…
I've also tried running Plex server on my Win7 HTPC with the volume mounted over CIFS, but I had various issues with that; for one, having to reindex the volume means I have to either wait 15 minutes to watch something I just procured, or manually login and force a refresh which is annoying when I just want to browse files. It's been awhile, but I have tried a number of approaches (including Plex server on OS X) and none of them were satisfactory. Furthermore, I could never figure out why any of it was preferable to simply having a media player read files from a network store and play them. I don't care about "album art" type stuff; I don't download/store/play hollywood movies or music, so those features would be irrelevant even if I cared about them in general.
The one nice thing about Plex is I now have a few friends sharing their libraries with me over the internet. It's a cool feature, but I'm only using it from the client side, and I typically forget to even consult their libraries before paying to rent content.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anyone who owns a MacBook Pro with Touch Bar will definitely be saying "yay it hasn't gotten worse!" about these. If drcongo doesn't mean to speak for "Anyone who owns a MacBook Pro with Touch Bar", drcongo should refrain from using those exact words. And you should probably refrain from speaking for drcongo.
It's pretty common to make sweeping generalizations in casual conversation, which this is. I find it really annoying when someone says something like "everyone likes cats!" and then someone, inevitably, will hop in and reply with "ACTUALLY, I hate cats." This isn't a mathematics proof.
It's interesting that you chose the term "sweeping generalization". It almost always carries a negative connotation. In fact, it's considered to be a logical fallacy (see https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...).
> I find it really annoying when someone says something like "everyone likes cats!" and then someone, inevitably, will hop in and reply with "ACTUALLY, I hate cats."
I'm sorry I annoyed you. I find it annoying when someone speaks for me and gets my opinion wrong.
edit: Is it really "inevitable" though? It happens every single time? (just kidding)
> This isn't a mathematics proof.
No, but communicating clearly and honestly is important, even in casual conversations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The quote is a bit out of context. The sentence right above it: >It makes almost nothing worse and almost everything better, finally bringing the Mac Mini into the modern age. So, no, it's not "yayy" because it "hasn't gotten worse", it's "yayy", because "[it makes] almost everything better".
I'm going to hold on to my Mid-2015 MacBook Pro for dear life. I'm hoping it will be good for 3 more years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And it has got a bit worse. Just not as worse as we'd expect from Apple.
Well, quite a bit faster, in ways that are relevant to my interests. Stands to reason designing a thing like this together onto a bespoke board allows for some optimizations: it's hilarious that it's apparently faster than any other Mac anywhere ever, for single-core things that suit it. Including Mac Pros and iMac Pros… I just think that's amusing. I'm now wondering if VCV Rack is sufficiently multicore that it will…
(Assuming you use a typical USB A audio interface rather than something more exotic)
FWIW, I also do electronic music, though just as a hobby.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's pretty common to make sweeping generalizations in casual conversation, which this is. I find it really annoying when someone says something like "everyone likes cats!" and then someone, inevitably, will hop in and reply with "ACTUALLY, I hate cats." This isn't a mathematics proof.
> It's pretty common to make sweeping generalizations in casual conversation, which this is It's interesting that you chose the term "sweeping generalization". It almost always carries a negative connotation. In fact, it's considered to be a logical fallacy (see https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla... ). > I find it really annoying when someone says something like "everyone likes cats!" and th…
Nobody is talking for you and getting your opinion wrong.
> No, but communicating clearly and honestly is important, even in casual conversations.
According to your opinion, sure. Everyone else is perfectly fine making silly generalizations for the fun of it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure if you are aware of this, but you have to have your TV shows separate from your movies in Plex. When Plex scans files, it uses different logic for TV show and movie file name. I had a similar problem where I imported my TV shows as movies... some worked, but most didn't. After moving my shows out of my movies directory and re-importing them specifically as tv shows, everything detected perfectly.
Not sure if you are aware of this, but you have to have your TV shows separate from your movies in Plex. Nope. Had no idea. And no idea why I should, since iTunes has no problem with it. I'm not going to spend six hours sorting 4GB of files because Plex can't read metadata that iTunes can.
We're running the Plex app on an AppleTV (4th gen, not 4K), and it all works really well. The only issue is that it loses connection to the server maybe once every month or two, but I think that's related to my really crappy modem.
edit: Plex server is running on the 2012 Mac mini "Server" edition. Quad-core, baby!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds like a horrible mess of wires and power strips to me. If only they could make a single case to fit all these various computer components in, and one chord to supply power to all of them.
That doesn't sound like something with "mini" in the name. Maybe an alternative product with "pro" in the name?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What OSes are better for a "Home Theater" TV computer I use an Apple TV 4K. For non-netflix/hulu/primevideo stuff, it streams off a Synology NAS (using Plex or VLC for Apple TV) edit: it's funny how your experience pretty much mirrors mine almost 10 years ago. A Mac guy outfitting a machine for a home media center. I was used to Mac media stuff always being behind on codec support and performance so I bought some H…
I used to use Plex, but went back to AppleTV/iTunes. For some reason Plex wouldn't see half of my video library. I eventually tracked it down to Plex not liking the filenames of certain TV shows. My TV shows are named Show Name - Episode Name. Plex wanted them to be ShowName.s0x.e0x. I'm not going to go through and rename all of my files. Plex should just work from the metadata like iTunes does. That's what metadata…
A lot of people were super annoyed coming from WinAmp. They organized their library by filename and the metadata was often a mess. They also wanted to treat iPods as USB drive and drop files on there.
Plex is even different in that it only looks at the filename and pulls metadata from the Internet.