• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • You can absolutely re-encode h265 video, but you can’t do it losslessly. In the end, it’s always a balance between quality and filesize.

    I decided for myself, that 1080p30 crf28 h265 is good enough for home video, which lead to a 50% to 80% storage space reduction on videos from my phone.

    If you don’t obsess over quality, I would highly recommend just messing around with ffmpeg a little bit and decide how much quality you’re willing to lose in order to save disk space. When you’re happy with your settings, you can either use ffmpeg itself or some fancy batch program like Tdarr to transcode all (or parts of) your video library.

    My goto command is:
    for file in *.mp4; do ffmpeg -i "$file" -movflags use_metadata_tags -map_metadata 0 -vcodec libx265 -crf 28 -vf scale=1920:-1 -r 30 "${file%.*}_transcoded.mp4"; done




  • My personal gripe with mobile Firefox is searching by using the address bar.

    I have had countless times where I put in my search prompt, followed by pressing the little X all the way on the right and thus clearing the address bar. My brain just really expects an enter button to be there.

    I think my current record is entering a search term and then clearing it literally directly 3 times in a row, getting more and more confused each time.









  • i use miracast where I can (my TV and Samsung phone support it natively), as it pretty much just works and is a decent protocol. Sadly every phone manufacturer that isn’t Samsung seems to have abandoned it right now, but it is still widely supported in TVs. On Linux, there is the app gnome-network-displays (yes it also works on KDE) to cast your screen over miracast.

    Miracast is an actual local streaming protocol (closely related to WiFi Direct). For content streaming the only FOSS standard I am aware of is FCast, but sofar it only is implemented in the GrayJay Android app.

    Edit: There is also Deskreen for casting a PC screen.

    For casting mobile to PC there is also scrcpy.

    This isn’t really casting, but I often find that an HDMI cable (often paired with a USB-C to HDMI dongle) is the simplest and most reliable way to display a phone screen on another monitor (as long as the phone supports DP altmode).


  • What worked for me at my old school was using a ShadowSocks proxy. Basically what this does, is it takes all your traffic and just makes it look like random https traffic (AFAIK). ShadowSocks is just a proxy. The description fits the Cloak module, mentioned below.

    I believe multiple VPNs support this, for me with PIA VPN it’s in the settings under the name “Multi-Hop” (PIA only supports this on the Desktop App, not on mobile).

    This technique is pretty much impossible to block, unless you ban every single VPN ShadowSocks Proxy IP. If that is the case for you (chances are practically 0), you could also selfhost ShadowSocks in combination with the Cloak module, however this method is a lot more complicated.