I chose a synth (draconic lizard bot basically) because a) lizards and dragons are neat, and b) robots are neat. And so I thought “why not both?” found synths, and said “yep that’s me.”

I, too, have only been using Handbrake because idk what else to use, so I’ve been limited to SVT-AV1 for encoding. I’d need to watch through stuff at length, but at speed 6 and quality 40 I personally don’t notice anything super off in my 1080p Blu-ray rip of The Last Wish (and got it down to an incredible 1.5GB). I definitely didn’t catch anything at speed 6 and quality 30 - it won’t be as small, and it’ll still take a while, but at that I personally saw like. no problems whatsoever.

Might need to watch out for any film grain though, idk how much that mucks with the process but there are settings to denoise and reapply on playback. I haven’t experimented with them too much because a) handbrake, and b) was trying to find good settings on a movie without grain to start.

I mostly saw problems when I used AOM-AV1 for encoding, at speed 7 and 6000kbps. That was purely because real-time encoding was why I needed that and it just wasn’t quite perfect for 1080p60 Splatoon clips, mostly also as a test for “if Twitch turned AV1 on tomorrow what could I get at their current limits.” SVT instantly got overloaded for real time at any real-time speed for some reason.

Yeah, hardware encoding is very new, but you can get an Intel Arc 700-series card and get it via QuickSync for pretty cheap if you have a spare x16 slot and really, really need it right now. Only those, Nvidia’s 4000 series, and AMD’s 7000 series support encode. 3000 and 6000 series for each company support hardware decode, though.

Just need to get phones on the hardware decode train! Qualcomm and Apple, step up your game!

What settings have you been using? I haven’t noticed any issues so long as I’m not concerned with real-time encoding. And yeah, GPU encoding is generally worse than software, it’s just usually way faster.

EDIT: for reference I’ve been using speed 6 and an RF between 40 and 30, and even in fast-paced scenes like ones in “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” I can’t notice anything super off. With my real-time recordings best I can do is speed 7 and 6000kbps (maybe higher bitrate), which isn’t quite enough for the 1080p60 fast, colorful gameplay of Splatoon 3 - but even then, I’d need a decently higher bitrate with either x264 or x265, especially GPU encoded.

IDK his exact settings, but a fur I follow on Mastodon has been able to get 4K Blu-ray rips encoded to AV1 down to a handful of gigabytes, and he reports no noticeable quality problems at speed 6 RF 30.

I love this, it looks super good!

but I also feel pain because I am the one getting splatted here. cries in hydra main

Framework has been and likely always will be for the crowd that values repairability and reusability over any price/performance ratio. Being able to shove any GPU you could want (that’s beem built for this) into that special slot is very neat, and pretty useful for the people who want to be able to upgrade their GPU separately from the rest of their system.

It’s like getting the LEGO bricks from PC building into a laptop form factor - you can choose your IO, RAM and SSD, even your CPU. And now your choice of dedicated GPU. For a specific person, that’s worth it.

If space is at a premium, or you routinely travel and wanna game, having a capable laptop that you can upgrade each individual part as needed becomes pretty darn tempting. If I had need for a laptop and had that routine travel thing, I’d honestly think about it myself. I could upgrade whatever part I want whenever I need to, and I can make old mainboards run home stuff or whatever. Turn an old one into a media player, or as a small PC for some other use.

I’ve been eyeing a Lenovo P11 Pro Gen 2 or whatever to replace my HP x2 Chromebook I got a couple years ago. Just don’t need the productivity of ChromeOS anymore, a straightforward media consumption device that I can also use for pen note taking for TTRPGs is all I really need these days, and it looks like it’ll fit the bill.

also because OneNote for Android isn’t available for ChromeOS (at least it hasn’t been afaik) and the app I’ve been using, Squid, is just kinda ok at the task.

Picked up a Motorola Edge+ (2022) somewhat a month-ish ago after giving a Galaxy S23 a go for almost a month before. I just prefer Moto’s experience more, even if updates are sparse and camera quality isn’t as great.

Sure, it’s notably bigger that what I’ve long-term used before (Xiaomi Mi 9 and the 2020 Motorola Edge), but the screen is pretty good and even though the Snapdragon 8 gen 1 is meh foe battery life, I’m not too intense on it and it charges pretty quick when I need a top-off.

The Galaxy S23 just wasn’t my cup of tea. OneUI’s launcher wasn’t tunable the way I wanted, using a custom launcher to get my experience back broke gestures (as expected, but still), and it wasn’t meaningfully smaller width-wise than the Mi 9, which I went back to for a while after I gave my fiancé my Moto Edge (2020).

It’s also pretty damn hard to pass up a brand-new last-gen flagship for $500 plus manufacturer accidental protection 24 months and an extra year extended warranty.

I was way too obsessed with whatever they were doing with that kitty competition or whatever when I was a kid. I borderline religiously watched it, that’s how dedicated I was.

._.

Mmhm. Suuure they will. I see no way in which this power could be abused at all. Clearly this is a harmless ability to snoop in on people without their consent.