you can pirate on a kindle it’s just more annoying to do

Kobo is the go-to for bang for buck readers that don’t care where your files are from and have good format support. got my dad a libra 2 and it’s great, especially with the physical page turn buttons. the default reader opens most files just fine, but you can also put KoReader on them for more functionality without too much hassle.

Personally I use an older Boox Note 3 which is easier since it runs android, but is massive overkill to be used as just a reader, i use it as my main tablet and a notepad/sketchpad.

I have some rare media that I know would be extremely difficult to replace, so I back that up, but the general stuff is less important.

However, with rights holders constantly trying to move away from the idea of permanent physical ownership, some media will become harder and harder to find in their best or purest forms, disks will go out of print and the used market will start to slowly die as media ages and rots.

The difference you see is probably due to different post processing presets, you could probably tune kodi to look better but in general it was designed originally for very low power devices and never added a lot of enhancement functionality outside of a few plugins for it. Try using the older kodi+dsplayer version for more tweakability or look I to madvr for massive image enhancement capabilities

The only reason I have kodi installed on my main nvidia shield is because it’s the only player ive found that will play back surround and atmos audio files (multichannel Flac and Atmos M4A) without then having to be in video containers. So it works well for my surround hifi rig.

I use plex and jellyfin for video

Jellyfin is great but it’s nowhere near feature parity with plex. I run them side by side. Jellyfin for my personal local playback and plex for everything else.

I’ll switch over eventually but for now, for someone with over 110tb of content and over a dozen remote streaming clients there is nothing better than plex.

These are definitely the way to go, plenty of fanless mini pcs with at least 2 NICs aimed squarely at this use case.

And even the little n100 chip is more than most normal people need for a router, even with an encrypted VPN or deep packet inspection, so you can virtualise and run some light services alongside the router OS, like jellyfin, a caching service, or something like Grafana

One of my mini PC’s is an N95, which is similar to the n100 but with a higher peak power. It’s faster than the old legend 2600k and has a decent little igpu for video processing or general desktop use.

I run a jellyfin test server from it, transcodes high bitrate 4k HDR H265 to 1080p SDR tonemapped H264 at over 200fps, while running my security camera Dashboard with multiple video feeds.

Their only limitation is they usually only have a single memory slot so keep that in mind.

Transflexive displays can work, but they arent as easy on the eyes as e-paper and they have poor contrast in direct sunlight.

I love my Boox Note 3. It’s am older device but still gets updates lots of tweaks for tuning the display on a per app basis, runs Google apps etc. I use it mainly as a reader for books and manga but also for drawing notes and browsing the Web.

I wish TCL would stop referring to it as electronic paper, it’s a matte LCD with some desaturated modes for eye comfort.

for me, the major selling point of a true e-paper display is sunlight readability, if your “electronic paper” LCD cant match e-ink, then it’s not good enough.

The main E-ink patents are due to expire in 2026, so we should see some rapid development after that.

If I was to rebuild it from scratch with new parts but equivalent performance and capacity it owuld only be a couple of grand honestly…

my AV distro gear on the other hand… oof… decent small car money, and a terrible investment.

Well my main server is currently at 16 drives plus 2 SSDs, so 18 total counted for the licence, arranged as 12 drive unraid array and 4 drive ZFS, plus an appdata+vm disk and a general cache disk.

I’d like to go with Ceph eventually, because I think it’s a solid platform, but multiple nodes and a heavier duty network backbone would be required to do that properly, also the extra disks required to protect a ZFS array of multiple Vdevs, which is safer and faster sure, but the costs are significantly higher than just buying an unraid licence.

Unraid pro is expensive (compared to free DIY linux or Truenas for example) but it is extremely flexible and very easy to get started with.

Their free trial is very flexible though, and once set up and running most people will already be set and happy to pay for the licence.

Most of it just runs on my unraid box, bunch of Docker containers and a vm for a couple of windows apps I needed running. I also run a small secondary proxmox server with some home automation amd networking stuff that I wanted to stay online when the server is off-line for updates or maintenance.

That’s why unraid was (in my opinion) a good starting point, you can use whatever disks you have regardless of size and speed and pool them all together pretty easily. Stick jellyin or plex or both on it and you have a great starting server.

Not sure it’s more than 10years of slow upgrades. Nothing compared to the true datahoarders out there

Too much probably.

mostly unraid, some ZFS ontop for high priority storage, a couple of TB of SSDs on top of that for caching and ingest.

Just added it all up, its 110TB at the moment, with another 16tb to add in a couple of weeks.

Sonarr/Radarr will do this for you automagically for most TV and Movies, never have to visit a dodgy torrent site again.

Started setting it up years ago and over time re-downloaded all those shitty yify rips with full fat bluray remuxes wherever available and the highest quality possible otherwise. Hit 100tb pretty quickly lol.

I have my rig set up to automatically upgrade to bluray remuxes when available, then once they are older than 1 month and over a certain filesize they get automatically compressed with a fairly slow, low crf H265-10bit encode with FileFlows to cut their size roughly in half while still being visually perfect on the normal TVs, all 4k content stays untouched for the main theatre.

I stopped using Calibre a few years back since I didn’t need any of its advanced management/conversion features or e-reader integration any more so I switched to ubooquity, which is much simpler and doesnt need to rename or move files, you just point it at a folder and it makes books available via a simple web-ui and OPDS service. I dont actually even use it though, since I just pull the files to my Boox tablet when I need them.

I also run that alongside Komga which does the same thing but is better suited for comics and manga etc, I do access that via OPDS.

It is SIGNIFICANTLY easier to just download properly done rips than to try to either capture or dump the Netflix streams yourself.

I just rip any disk I get, I haven’t had to think about region locks for at least 15 years.