I cant say I care as much as I used to, since encoding has gotten quite good, but I have also gotten better at seeing (aka. worse at being distracted by) compression artifacts so while I am less of a perfect remux rip supremacist, I’m also more sensitive to bad encodes so its a double edged sword.

I still seek out the highest quality versions of things that I personally care about, but I don’t seek those out for absolutely everything like I used to. I recently saved 12TB running a slight compression pass on my non-4k movie library, turning (for example) a 30gb 1080p Bluray Remux into a 20gb H265 high bitrate encode, which made more room for more full fat 4K bluray files for things I care about, and the few 1080p full remuxes I want to keep for rarities and things that arent as good from the 4k releases or the ones where the 4k release was drastically different (like the LOTR 4k’s having poor dynamic range and the colours being changed for the Matrix etc), which I may encode in the future to save more space again. I know I can compress an 80gb UHD bluray file down to 60gb with zero noticeable loss, thats as far as I need to go, I don’t need to go down to 10gigs like some release groups try to do, and at that level of compression you might as well be at 1080p.

I cant go as low as a low bitrate 720p movie these days as I’m very close to a large screen so they tend to look quite poor, soft edges, banded gradients, motion artifacts, poor sound etc. but if I were on a smaller screen or watching movies on a phone like I used to, I probably wouldn’t care as much.

Another side to my choice to compress is that I have about 10 active Plex clients at the moment and previously they were mostly getting transcoded feeds (mostly from remux sources) but now most of them are getting a better quality encode (slow CPU encode VS fast GPU stream) direct to their screens, so while I’ve compressed a decent chunk of the library, my clients are getting better quality feeds from it.

I have complete ROM sets for a couple of platforms in my archive, they’re available on SLSK but not a huge amount of bandwidth available.

Sad to see the old giants like Vimms finally being attacked after all these years.

Soulseek has been getting hammered too

I played Crysis on a Vuzix VR920 in around 2008, that was my first VR other than a virtual boy.

Dual 640x480, frame interleaved 3d at 30hz per eye! if you drop a single frame the eyes got out of sync and switched! I think I had dual 9600GTs at the time and it struggled. I think it also struggled on the dual 9800GTX+ I had after that.

head tracking was purely gyro/accelerometer based and worked very poorly.

That is awesome.

I played descent 1 and 2 for hours on end back in the day, never got to play 3 as I didn’t have a 3d card yet and they dropped the software renderer option.

Gets even weirder when you see LGs webOS kinda started out as PalmOS

I have seen some talk over on XDA forums, but since there is more to an android TV than just the basic android OS, it’s a bit trickier without risking losing licences/compatibility/DRM/features.

Some older LG webOS tvs can be rooted and custom apps installed too such as ad free youtube players etc.

Not sure if there’s a list, but most Android based TVs can be cleaned and modded to some degree via ADB. If you can access the dev settings in android, chances are you can do a lot to make it better, strip out some google or branded packages, replace the launcher to block OS level ads etc. Projectivy usually works well since it supports input switching on many devices, but it’s still better to do all of this to a separate box and then plug it into a TV that is firewalled/filtered/offline. more control and less to fuck up.

Rooting and unlocking bootloaders is more complex as these android devices dont have normal recovery systems and require a lot of custom drivers to make the video and audio processing work, so it’s not worth going that far.

LCDs do tend to speak somewhat standardised languages, but there is a lot more to a modern TV than just an LCD controller.

Color and white balance calibration, image/motion processing, HDR Processing, backlight control/dimming zones, input management, audio decoding/encoding/passthrough, digitizing analogue sources, HDMI licencing, Dolby licencing, etc.

If you want a better smart TV the best thing to do is to get a hackable TV like most android based models, replace the launcher, strip out system apps and telemetry with ADB and start fresh, then either leave it offline or use filtering to only allow access to the services you approve.

Aussie here, We’re still very much a car centric country, but for major public events we are pretty much hardwired to use public transport. I dont know what the actual parking capacity of the MCG is, but Marvel Stadium (Docklands) is only 500 cars with 55000 seats(not including the many nearby free and paid parking locations), that is much smaller than the MCG at over 100000 capacity, one of the worlds highest capacity stadiums despite our puny population.

Apart from most stadiums having extensive train, bus and drop-off access, we also have Park and Ride programs that can temporarily scale up to cover events like this which can basically turn any unused land into a large temporary carpark with dedicated bus services that take you either to the venue directly or to the local train station when they both have limited parking.

I haven’t thought about powder toy for so many years.

Yea no shit It’s also a significant chunk of regular youtube now too

We know spez’ secrets too.

Dude loved the jailbait subreddit before it was banned for obvious reasons.

He was a moderator.

For a while it was in the international section of one of the big liquor stores. Thought that was funny.

Didn’t Asahi acquire all of lion Nathan breweries over a decade ago?

Edit, actually kirin owns lion Nathan, but asahi definitely aquaired some of their brands a while ago.

Funilly enough Fosters is japanese now, and hasn’t been Australian for decades.

Asahi have been buying up all of Australia’s breweries, even a bunch of popular micros are owned by them now.

Before asahi, they were owned by ABINBEV and SABMiller.

It was actually made in many countries by the likes of Heineken, Coors, Molson, and others. I don’t think any true fosters has been made in Australia and exported for a very long time.

Um. You got a picture of that plugged into the tv?

I’ve never seen that on the LGs I’ve seen, and I’m an AV technician.

There was a panasonic (I think it was them) that had a Displayport connection, but that didn’t last.

I suspect HDMI threatened to cut their licence if they kept putting DP on the TVs.

Agreed 100%

Literally the only way they could become profitable.

I’m honestly more upset at this deal (I think it was google?) than the CEO pay thing, which is all stock options and mostly ragebait.

I expect to see them last 3-5 years and get bought out by some bit tech firm, all current execs take their payouts, sell their shares and retire.