The 970 works for encoding h.264 only. My recommendation: If you have a 7th Gen Intel CPU with iGPU or later, use that. Otherwise, sell the 970 and get one of these (in this order):

• Intel Arc A310
• GTX 1650
• GTX 1630
• Quadro P1000
• Quadro T400
• GTX 1050 Ti
• GTX 1050
• Quadro P620
• Quadro P600
• Quadro P400

The Intel Card has the best encoder, followed by Nvidia Turing, then Pascal. I recently sold my 970 and got a 1050 Ti for the same price. Works great with Jellyfin. If you need to tone map HDR, you probably shouldn’t get anything with much lower performance than that. If it’s just some UHD to HD or h.265 to h.264 for compatibility, even the P400 will work well.

A few reasons.

For one, storing multiple versions of the same film takes up a lot of storage, which is more expensive than a cheap 40€ gpu for transcoding. And I definitely wanna keep the highest quality I can. Besides transcoding on the fly is more flexible, ensuring the best possible quality at any time, instead of having to pick between the good and the shit version.

And secondly, usually I only need transcoding when I don’t watch on my home setup (or when some friends watch on my server). My upload isn’t as high as some of my film’s bitrates and some clients do not support h.265 or HDR thus needing transcoding and/or tonemapping.

Which is fair, I suppose, if you really only have one SATA port left. Then a RAID 1 through that device might work well enough. Wouldn’t be my first choice though… and definitely not for RAID 0. Not that RAID 0 should be anyone’s first choice, nowadays.

Because M.2 equals NVMe in some people’s minds, I suppose

Don’t own a PS5 so I sadly/luckily don’t have experience with that

Both my two 360 controllers and my xone controller are drift free and I’ve had them for a while. And my 360 controllers have been abused by my little brother for a while. They have issues (like the rubber off the sticks getting rubbed away slowly), but drift isn’t one of them. Heck, even my old Wii Nunchucks are drift free and they’ve been abused a lot.

That’s not even necessarily the issue. XBox and PS controllers also don’t use Hall effect. I’ve never had an xbox controller drift. You’d have to seriously abuse them for them to break. Nintendo isn’t just cheaping out on the tech but also on the build quality itself. But what do you expect from a company that sells a console that was obsolete when it was released, hardware wise. For the third time.

Not just Bluray, even compared to other streaming services that sometimes push up to 40mbps. That’s still less than BluRay but imo enough. Heck, a well encoded 25mbps HEVC video file can look great. Sure, not as good as a 4K Bluray but better than a regular Bluray at least

Yea but like… Glass Onion is a Netflix original… They have special requirements for cameras to be true 4K. So everything points to it being actual 4K HDR just with a bitrate so abominably low that you might as well not bother.

I tried Spotify years ago and even then it was terrible. Have been using Apple Music ever since and the app is clean, logical and orderly. Can only recommend, even for android users. Compared to Spotify’s focus on playlists and discovery, Adobe music is very library centric. There are enough ways to discover new music but the standard tab when you open the app is your library

When Glass Onion (terrible film) came out, a friend and I started watching it on his rather good TV and it was horrible even though we had the best 4K HDR, no bandwith limitation quality Netflix offered. Like, the water in the background looked like it was playing back at at 6fps instead of 24.

After half an hour my friend noped out because the film and video quality was so bad and I finished it alone on my 15 year old 720p projector. It looked better on there…

Yea, even HiRes audio is a fraction of the size of even a potato quality video. But spotify seems to still lose money…

Don’t forget terrible video quality, even compared to other streaming services.

Music piracy also seems to be on the rise again though. By far not as severely as with video but still… And while music streaming got a little more expensive over the last few years, it’s not by that much.

I mean, Netflix isn’t even doing great compared to other streaming services… their 4K compression is so atrocious, watching on a 720p projector is a better experience than a 4K TV…

I wouldn’t call h.264 the current industry standard. It’s the smallest common denominator since more or less every device that’s capable of streaming video can decode h.264. However h.265 is pretty much standard for resolutions above 1080p. AV1 is nowhere near standard yet, though.

A lot of “alternative sources” are BluRay or even 4K Bluray rips. Of course there oftentimes also are Prime Video or Netflix rips but that just depends on availability. Usually there’s a choice. You can also download rips that are more compressed than Netflix would ever be but if you’re out for quality you just don’t download those unless there’s nothing better available.

Universities usually have contracts with many journals to provide access for their students/employees. The paywall to access research does not necessarily get paid by the individual.

In my old Uni, as long as you were connected to the internet from inside the Uni or via proxy from outside, it would automatically give free access to the web versions of lots of (although far from all) journals.

Sadly. Although, admittedly, feature selection does rank higher than that for me, so most services are already out of the question for me, based on that, even if they‘d pay the artists better

The extra money is probably going into server upkeep, software development, etc., not to artists.

If you want to support artists, Spotify definitely is among the worst choices, while Deezer isn’t great but not horrible either. A little while ago I compiled the most official numbers I could find for any service that I could find. Now mind you, they are a little older (2-ish years) and I cannot remember the source, so take those numbers with a grain of salt but here they go:

Per 1000 streams an Artist gets on average:

• $4.02 on Amazon Music

• $4.37 on Spotify

• $6.76 on both Deezer and YouTube Music

• $7.35 on Apple Music

• $12.50 on Tidal

• $19.00 on Napster

• $38.16 on Quobuz

As I said, the numbers are most likely not the most accurate anymore, the process for these services have changed a little since. However, they might still be interesting enough to know. Maybe someone is bored enough to search the web for more up to date data.

For consumers it might also be interesting to add, that Spotify and YouTube Music, while costing the same as most of the other services (excluding Tidal HiFi Plus and Quobuz), offer a significantly worse audio quality than any other service (aka no lossless audio) and that Tidal‘s expensive HiRes audio tier uses a codec (MQA), that is proven to be terrible and mostly snake oil.

In short: If you want to support artists, stay away from Spotify or amazon. If you want the best audio quality, stay away from Spotify, YouTube Music or Tidal and maybe Deezer (no support for HiRes lossless. Although to be fair, CD-Quality is enough for almost anyone). If you want both and don’t mind paying a little more: use Quobuz