eco_game @ eco_game @discuss.tchncs.de

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182

Joined

2 yr. ago

I like your spirit, but I don't think a Chinese equivalent to Google Play Services would be more desirable

I find the Jellyfin webapp a pretty bad experience on mobile, compared to FinDroid.

I really like the webapp on my LG webOS TV (especially good with the Magic Remote) though.

So I guess it kind of depends on the platform.

I actually use both apps, I find Organic Maps a lot nicer for looking at a map and navigating by foot or bike, and Magic Earth seems to pick more sensible car routes some times. Also the live traffic data makes it more fitting for car navigation (Organic Maps doesn't have traffic data).

Was this with the first party Jellyfin app or with Swiftfin?

If it was with the first party app, I'd definitely recommend giving Swiftfin a try.

Jellyfin has native apps for Android, Android TV and iOS.

Does Plex offer native apps (that aren't just stripped down browsers) for more platforms?

I can highly recommend Magic Earth as a Google Maps alternative (also available for Android). It uses OSM data and has some traffic info. It's not as good as Google, but it's the closest I've found so far.

AFAIK you can enable the snapcast server and then use an app like SnapCast to stream to your mobile devices.

This program is a client for the very solid Tvheadend TV streaming server. Tvheadend supports pretty much any source you can think of, but is a little more complicated to setup.

Tvheadend is a selfhosted service meant to be run on your own server with your own TV dongles / IPTV channels / etc.

If you only want to watch TV on your PC, doing so with something like Kodi is probably a better idea, as Kodi also supports USB tuners and is simpler to setup (doesn't require a separate server).

I was pretty neutral towards Ubuntu, up until an automatic system update removed my deb Firefox and replaced it with the snap version, even though I specifically set the apt repo to a higher priority.

The entire reason I left Windows is because I don't want (for example) Edge shoved down my throat after every update, and yet Ubuntu has gone and done the exact same thing with snaps.

After literal hours of fighting, the only solution I found was to fully disable automatic updates. With Pop OS I have all the benefits of Ubuntu, but I also get a company (System76) that does cool stuff and doesn't try shoving snaps down my throat.

I really like Pop!_OS, AFAIK it doesn't have any telemetry. It's basically a Ubuntu fork but without the stupid Ubuntu stuff, and they're currently even working on their own Desktop Environment.

I also use Posteo, one thing to note though is that Posteo doesn't (and probably won't any time soon) support custom domains. If that doesn't bother you, it's a great choice.

The other alternative I found during my research, which doesn't have that limitation, is mailbox.org.

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

Magic Earth (while not FOSS, it's privacy oriented though) can do this.

There's also Transportr, but AFAIK it's been unmaintained for quite a while now, so it may not work / stop working soon.

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.

Adding to what others here have already said, I'd definitely download Signal and see if you can get any people to move from WhatsApp/Telegram/whatever to Signal.

I don't know much about iOS apps, but you could look into more privacy focused YouTube clients, and possibly 2FA clients too (although that's a bit of a controversial topic on iOS AFAIK).

I saw you mention in another comment that you use Amazon Alexa for smart home appliances. Depending on interest in selfhosting / time / motivation to move away from Amazon, you could look into using Home Assistant instead. It even has a Lemmy community: !homeassistant@lemmy.world.

Yep my mistake, I confused ShadowSocks with Cloak.

I'm afraid your best bet here will be using WhatsApp.

Edit:
\ FindMy (for Android) might also be usable for that, but honestly if you just want it to work I'd still vouch for WhatsApp.

Signal supports a single momentary position, but not live location.

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.