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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Coming from someone who started selfhosting on a pi 2B (similar-ish specs), you’d be surprised. If you don’t need anything fast or fancy, that 1GB will go a long way, and plenty of selfhosted apps require very little CPU. The only real problem I faced was that all HTTPS-related network tasks were limited at ~3MB/s, as that is how fast my pi could encrypt the data (presumably, I just saw my webserver utilising the entire CPU and figured this was the most likely explanation)


  • Maxy@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldData HDD with SSD catch drive
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    2 months ago

    qBittorrent has exactly the option you’re looking for, I believe it’s called “incomplete download path” in the settings, letting you store incomplete downloads at a temporary path and moving them to their regular location when the download finishes. Aside from the download speed improvement, this will also lead to less fragmentation on your HDD (which might be part of the reason why it is so slow when downloading directly to it). Pre-allocating space could have the same effect, but I would recommend only using one of these two solutions at once (pre-allocating space on your SSD would only waste space)


  • It’s possible for a certain hardware/software setup not to support a certain codec. For example, my jellyfin client (Finamp) uses the iOS native decoders (afaik), which means opus files are practically broken. My music library (8000+ songs) contained exactly 1 lossy file, which just so happened to be an opus file. I decided to spend the extra ~20MB to standardise my entire library to flac files, ensuring I could play every song on all my devices.

    Edit cause I posted too soon: you are generally correct; only in very specific circumstances will you encounter compatibility issues like this one in the modern world. This is 100% apple being apple, and you can expect pretty much every other (reasonably modern) device to support all codecs you might encounter in the wild.


  • To add to the audio compression: it isn’t possible to further compress an mp3 file without losing any quality. You can either:

    1. Recompress to a lossy codec (mp3, aac, opus). This will lead to smaller file sizes if you set the bitrate lower than that of the input file, but it will always worsen the quality, no matter the bitrate.
    2. Recompress to a lossless format (flac easily being the best one). Going from a lossy to a lossless format will increase the file size (sometimes by quite a substantial amount), while keeping the same quality. There is very little reason for you to do this
    3. keep the original files (my recommendation)

    If you’re willing to spend some extra time learning about audio compression, you can download lossless files and compress those directly to whatever format and bitrate you want. The quality will be better than option 1 above, as the audio is only lossely compressed once instead of twice.



  • I’ve been running some external drives on my server for about a year now. In my experience, hard drives with an external power supply suffer less from random disconnects. The specific PC also makes quite a large difference in reliability. My server is just a regular desktop and has very little problem staying connected and powering my 3 external drives. My seedbox is an old laptop, and has been having almost constant problems with random disconnects and power issues. Maybe test how well your framework does with some external drives before committing to the plan?





  • Ah, it looks like we have a small misunderstanding. I thought you were talking about uncompressed video, which is enormous. This is only used in HDMI cables for example. A 1080p60 uncompressed video is 2.98Gbit/s, or about 1.22 terabytes per hour.

    A remux is “uncompressed” in the sense that it isn’t recompressed, or in this case transcoded. A remux is still compressed, just to a lesser degree than a transcode. This means the files are indeed larger, but the quality is also better than transcodes.

    To clarify the article’s confusing statement: they claim that remuxes can reduce size by throwing away some audio streams, while keeping the original video. This is true, but the video itself hasn’t gotten any smaller: you are simply throwing away other information.



  • The more you compress the longer and more CPU intensive it is to decompress

    I believe this is becoming less and less true with modern algorithms. Take for example ZSTD: while the compression speeds differs by several orders of magnitude between the fastest and slowest modes, the decompression difference is only about 20%. The same holds true for flac, where the decompression speed is pretty uniform across all compression levels.

    These algorithms probably aren’t used by repacked like fitgirl (so your answer is generally correct in the context of repacks). I do believe it is still interesting to see these new developments in compression techniques.