I agree that there are many great free streaming sites out there, with 1080p and good quality.

But quality is still an advantage of paid services (or acquirung the larger files in other ways). Streaming with higher bitrate costs way more bandwidth (= money) while being marginally better.

It’s noticeable though, if you have a good, large enough display. Especially darker scenes suffer from low bitrate. On my phone I don’t notice it at all.

That’s even true for high bitrate. E.g. I’ve even compared a Reacher WEB-DL to BluRay remux, and the latter was noticeably better — not that it’s worth the additional storage usage.

What RAID system did you use which corrupted your data on power loss? With software raid like zfs I believe corruption on power loss shouldn’t be a problem (unless the hardware fails. Or your using btrfs raid 5/6, ignoring all warnings).

Edit: For this reason I’m looking into buying another drive for an offline backup of my media files. I could redownload them, but it’d be increasingly more annoying.

Yes.

If VPN’s actually won’t be able to protect its users from copyright claims anymore, there’ll still be anonymisation networks like I2P (at least so long as encryption isn’t banned).

Yes, it’s slow atm, but if it was included in more torrent clients and enabled by default, speeds would likely get better.

Because they use the official apps/web-vault, they don’t need to implement most of the vault/encryption features, so at least the actual data should be fine.

Security audits are expensive, so I don’t expect it to happen, unless some sponsor pays for it.

They have processes for CVEs and it seems like there wasn’t any major security issues (altough I wouldn’t host a public instance for unknown users).

“On skippable ads, the button appears after 5 seconds into playback, as always.”

They aren’t hiding the skip-button, they are hiding the not-being-able-to skip-button.

I guess the advantage for Google is that users can’t know whether they’ll be able to skip, so they might watch more of the ad with expectations that they might be able to skip it.

Vaultwarden is one of the few services I’d actually trust to be secure, so I wouldn’t worry if you update timely to new versions.

Yes, Bitwarden browser plugins require TLS, so I use DNS challenge to get a cert without an open port 80/443.

The domain points to a local IP, so I can’t access it without the VPN.

Having everything behind a reverse proxy makes it much easier to know which services are open, and I only need to open port 80/443 on my servers firewall.

Fully agreed.

Accessing Vaultwarden through a VPN gives me peace of mind that it can’t be attacked.

Another great thing about Bitwarden is that it’s possible to export locally cached passwords to (encrypted) json/csv. This makes recovery possible even if all backups were gone.

My banking apps lock screens consistently aren’t recognized by Bitwarden Android.

Some websites/apps only show the email field at first, then add the password field afterwards. This also sometimes makes it not being detected as a login form.

Sometimes a password field is detected only on the first filling in (which is annoying when choosing the wrong entry).

On desktop it’s great, but I really don’t know why some apps have to do custom login screens.

Great to hear you found my comment helpful.

Just make sure you make backups regularly. Especially with used drives, I wouldn’t count on them surviving the stress of a rebuild. If a second drive fails in a RAID10, all data might be gone.

Edit: I’d be thankful if you could report back how the test goes. I need a drive for a backup ;) and I’m considering buying from eBay too.

I will test them upon receiving and see how it goes from there:)

I don’t know where exactly you live, but if your in the EU customs/taxes + shipping will make the deal worse, but better than expected.

E.g. for Germany, this drive would cost 382€ with UPS Saver Duties & Taxes included, instead of 273€ for the drive itself.

I’ve found the same drive with a local commercial eBay seller for 420€, including taxes and shipping.

A new 24TB drive would cost 485€.

Edit: IMO a better deal would be 22TB drives, which have the same price per TB but are new. But then again, their used/recertified price is also ~10% lower than new.

The Fennec F-Droid build isn’t maintained by Mozilla, but by someone else. They link to Mozilla for donations and source code, but the issue tracker for Fennec on F-Droid links to their own repo.

K-9 Mail on F-Droid is maintained by the K9-team, which works for MZLA/Thunderbird. Thus I’d guess it shouldn’t take to much work adding Thunderbird to F-Droid.

from the page it looks like they’re working on getting the beta in fdroid though, so here’s hoping.

https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuild

https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/blob/master/metadata/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid.yml

https://f-droid.org/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/

K9-Mail has been and continues to be on F-Droid, while it’s basically the same as Thunderbird Android, except for branding.

Yes. Looking through K9’s blog, “recently” is more than two years.

K9 didn’t have a stable release for 3 years, until a previous contributor raised enough money to sponsor his work for a year or so. (Which I was happy to donate to, because K9 was starting to get really outdated UI-wise).

After that money ran out, they started working for MZLA Corp/Thunderbird more than two years ago.

If you want better speeds and quality I recommend looking into TorrentLeech, FearNoPeer and similar private trackers.

Sometimes BluRay remuxes aren’t available or well seeded on public trackers, while they aren’t even counting against your upload/download ratio on the above trackers (On TL, FNP big torrents are freeleech).

What is the video bitrate of movies/shows in the share? Does it support transcoding or are they only doing direct stream?

I’m curious because OP wants higher quality and to save space I’m usually using similar bitrate as commercial streaming services for my media library.

Why LVM + BTRFS instead of only using btrfs? Unless you need RAID 5/6, which doesn’t work well on btrfs.

This does not apply to difficult projects like emulators.

E.g. suyu, a yuzu fork, does not seem to get much development. Most of the changes are build or documentation related. [1]

Those emulators will work fine for the currently supported games, but without new competent people (trying to stay anonymous), I don’t see how these emulators will improve.

[1] https://git.suyu.dev/suyu/suyu/commits/branch/dev

Most people using these sites prefer the lossless codec flac anyway, which can be transcoded to anything.

MP3 320kbps and MP3 V0 is transparent to most (all?) people, so there’s not much of a reason to go with a newer codec, except for space savings.

There’s not even much of a reason to go with 320kbps, as V0 achieves the same quality with smaller files. That’s why almost nobody actually downloads MP3 320.

I personally think MP3 is there for historical reasons, as I don’t see a reason for using lossy codecs for archiving purposes. Just download flac and transcode it once or on demand on a media server for streaming.