REVERSEDSKIES

Yeah see I download a bunch of videos online and I don't want to have to transcode all my videos just for that. It's too much work. Especially since VLC can still play most vids. Currently my Sony Xperia 10 IV doesn't play 4K vids in VLC well but I'm guessing the better hardware in something like the Xperia 1 V would be able to play 4K vids in VLC just fine. But I don't know yet until I get it.

Okay so let's say that Sony doesn't include support for as many codecs as Motorola does, how does that explain the resolution thing? Because one H.264 AVC video at 1920x1080 works fine, but another H.264 AVC video at 3840x2160 does not. They appear to be the same codec but just a different resolution. So how does that work?

Hiya I know you might first think like well, that depends on the app. But let me explain. My previous phone, a Motorola Moto G8 Power, was despite its low specs even for a 2020 phone (it ran worse than my Moto G4 from 2016) able to play 4K videos quite well. And not even in VLC player or something like that. There's this app I use that's literally called "File Manager" by the developer "File Manager Plus" which has things like a video player built in. This app can on my G8 Power play 4K videos without much of a problem. Only ones where the bitrate gets so high that the phone's SD card reader seems to be the bigger problem have difficulty playing. Now fast-forward a couple years and I upgraded to a Sony Xperia 10 IV. While I'm pretty pleased with this phone, it has trouble with the very thing that my Motorola does without much effort. Despite my Sony having better specs, it refuses to play most of my videos. Using the same app. One thing that's for sure is that any video with a resolution higher than 1920x1080 refuses to play (except in rare cases where a 4K video might play) and results in the app giving me the error message "codec not supported" but a video with the same codec but at a resolution of 1920x1080 or lower will play just fine. VLC can load basically any video, but most 4K videos get stuck on the first frame. The ones that don't will run at a low framerate. The videos I'm trying to play are just downloaded from the Internet, but I've tried a bunch of the same videos on both phones. I just don't understand why this is a thing. My main concern is, now that I'm considering upgrading to Sony's 1 series Xperia phones, that they'll suffer from the same problem. I mean heck, even my G4 with it's 2GB of RAM that's always full for some reason, seems better at playing 90% of my videos than my current Sony. Now, I asked Sony about this, but without much hope. Which was justified. Their first reply (despite giving them the same story as I've given you) was that it differs per app and that they'd recommend me to use Google Photos. Which I don't want to because I hate that app just like most gallery apps. After asking again whether the Xperia 1 V could properly play these videos and if not, why, they simply said they couldn't guarantee this. Which is fair, but they still ignored my "why" question. I did find online that it might possibly be a licencing thing, but that was a post from 10 years ago so I don't know how well that still holds up. Especially since Sony is such a big media company. So can anyone explain me why this is a thing? Why with the same app, some videos play perfectly fine on one phone but refuse to play on another phone even if it's newer and faster? Thank you! I'm still catching my head over this one so I would really appreciate proper, in depth answers!

Sorry for the late reply, I had some other things to do. Thank you very much for all the help though! I think what I'm gonna end up doing is get a relatively simple micro-ITX board for something like a 2200g or similar, whichever ends up being the most power efficient when I do finally build this. It's not something I'm gonna put together today or tomorrow. As for drives, I've decided to go with 2 4TB samsung 870 EVO drives. Since they're SSDs they make 0 noise, are very power efficient and since it's the EVO they'll last longer than the QVO which really isn't much cheaper anymore and considering the EVO can write another 1000TB extra, I think it's worth the few extra bucks. If I don't forget I'll let you know how it ends up!

I have been thinking about going all SSD. It's not going to see heavy use. It's gonna be for probably 3 people total. It's not gonna have a huge amount of data written to it constantly. Mostly just moving everything on there first and after that just simple use. A few pictures maybe, some documents a week. Nothing too crazy. So going all SSD, especially considering the Samsung 870 EVO 4TB isn't too much more expensive than its QVO sibling. The speed isn't the thing, it's gonna be on a gigabit connection (it'll be faster than my cloud storage since my ISP connection is 500Mbir), but for the power draw mostly, and less noises as a benefit. I'm pretty sure the durability of the 870 EVO is going to be just fine for a simple home NAS. I don't think I've heard of OMV before. As for Umraid being paid, the basic license would be fine for me. I don't know how TrueNAS is gong to work with SSDs so that's something to look into. As long as I can set the drives up in a RAID comfig, make multiple accounts for multiple people and have a way to automatically sync files between computers and the NAS (preferably one in a different house too) then that's all I really need as far as I can think of. I do still need to do a little digging on what board + cpu I'm gonna get though

Thanks for all the info so far. I'll read up on some of the things mentioned. I do know that TDP is never the average power consumption number. I mean my 5700X is rated at 65 but uses 75W without PBO and 100W with PBO but runs at about 35W idle. Indeed some Atom based systems would be a good start. I should have maybe noted that I don't intend to stream from this. It will be purely storage with redundancy. How I got here is by taking my current cloud subscription cost and dividing that by my KW cost. In Romania it might be €0.24 still but for me it's currently €0.36 and that's only going up. To break even with my current €7.25 subscription cost, at 27W average power consumption per hour it would work out to be roughly the same. That is with the current costs of course. Preferably I'd like to go as low as possible. I'll definitely read up on that article and take a look at things. Also, if TrueNAS isn't the most efficient option, what would be? I mainly just want to put 2 4TB drives into it in a RAID comfig and probably run the OS off of either a USB drive or a simple SSD so it's nothing special. I just want full control over the system and get rid of cloud storage subscriptions. And, if possible, still have the option to automatically sync files between my PC to the NAS

Hiya, Think you can already guess what I'm asking for. I want to build my own NAS so I'm not stuck with pre-built solutions so I can choose not just my own hardware (to an extent) but also choose my own software. I want to use something like TrueNAS or alike but I need it to be very power efficient. I love in Europe, energy prices keep rising, but if I can keep it at or below 27W of power usage it will be at worst as expensive as my current cloud storage subscription, but a NAS will offer higher capacity. So what kind of system should I be thinking of? What kind of CPU choice do I have and such? I hope together we can work something out. Thanks for any suggestions!

Well I would trust meta a little more than....bytedance. No thanks. I don't have a wifi 6 router, only a 5GHz one. But I'm not gonna get the link cable, there's cheaper alternatives. I was already looking at the Quest 3. I mean it is the newest so it's the most obvious choice. Especially here in the Netherlands, the prices are kinda similar between the Quest 2 and 3. I just hope the link cable isn't gonna make everything laggy. Otherwise I'd have to get a specific wifi 6 router lol But thanks for the info! I didn't know about Pico yet but am glad I didn't come across that one

Hiya! You already know what I'm looking for. But lemme at least get you some context here. I already owned a VR headset, that broke. (Not gonna say I did it so don't tell anyone okay). I had an HP Reverb G2. The displays are good I'll give it that. It's very sharp, and the 90Hz refresh rate is good enough for me. I am fine with my game running at 60 even in VR lol. My main issue with it though, apart form the audio, the controllers being kind of flimsy, the fact it has a battery that just adds weight and especially unnecessary heat into the darn thing, is the fitment. It just does not have a wide enough adjustment range for anything. My head's a bit on the smaller side, and even on the smallest size and the lowest IPD setting, it's too big and just doesn't fit right. It's kind of right on that edge where I could get away with it, but the more I used it the more noticeable and annoying it became. What I'm looking for is a headset that works well with Steam VR and preferably doesn't need Windows Mixed Reality to work, doesn't need a facebook account or something like that. Something that works well with Steam VR and other non steam games that hook into Steam VR. I only want inside out tracking. I was okay with the tracking of the HP even though many people say it's not great, I didn't have too many issues with it. I just don't want to bother with lighthouses. My brother has an Index and those lighthouses give me a genuine headache within 5 minutes. So, I don't really know what options I REALLY have here. So I'm hoping some of you could help me out here. That would be ver much appreciated! Thanks!

I quickly googled thunderbolt for my motherboard (the Asus ROG STRIX B550-F Gaming, the none wifi one) and it does actually have a thunderbolt header to connect a thunderbolt I/O card. I've looked at this manual several times and completely overlooked that haha. So I think I should be able to get a thunderbolt card working

Hiya, As you can probably guess from the title, I'm looking for a thunderbolt add-in card. I'm on an AMD motherboard with a B550 chipset. It doesn't have any native support for thunderbolt, only has a USB-C port that functions like a normal USB port but I'm looking for a thunderbolt card for my audio interface. It doesn't seem to function entirely at 100% and according to some research with my previous audio interface there seems to be a little issue with audio interfaces sometimes on AMDs B series chipsets. Since thunderbolt has more use cases than just audio intefwce I wanted to try out my audio interface on that. I do have space for one more add-on card on my motherboard but I don't know what a good one is. Or if it will even function properly. I'm expecting it to work fine, I just need to know what some good options are. It really doesn't need to be super fancy, just one thunderbolt port is more than enough. But a black PCB for esthetic would be nice. So any suggestions are very much appreciated!

Yeah if I were to go to OLED I'd have to basically double my budget at least which isn't reasonable. And I know that every IPS monitor is gonna have glow but one can be better than the other. 2 monitors of the same size and similar specs can have panels from different manufacturers and maybe one is known for a bit more consistency than the other. It's the same with the Samsung neo series. Cheapest I can find that isn't basically TV size and isn't ultrawide is close to 1000 euros. And they're all curved too so that's out of the question for me. Yeah I was hoping maybe one would be known to be maybe slightly better than the other. Indeed every monitor is gonna have backlight bleed when it has a backlight, But my former TN panel did have pretty decent uniformity and backlight bleed even for a TN which never really bothered me. I just found the LG 27GP850 to be worse with uniformity and backlight bleed. Not to say that TN was amazing, it definitely wasn't but I found the overall experience to be better. So I guess I'll just buy the 32GP850 and see how that does compared to that 27GP850 and see it maybe I get lucky with it. My brother's former LG ultrawide IPS monitor (forgot the model) was a whole lot better with the glow so it was quite disappointing to see it be this bad on a newer 16:9 monitor from the same brand. I know same brand doesn't really say much but you kinda get a certain expectation

Hiya, I recently decided to upgrade my monitor. Had been using a 21.5 inch 1080p TN monitor from dell that I bought second hand. I tried an LG 27GP850-B but was really not impressed with it and also wanted something bigger after all. I then switched to an Asrock PG32QF2B which is a VA panel. The reason I made the switch to a VA panel was because my LG 27GP850 had (in my opinion) terrible IPS glow. I even got a replacement unit which to me had slightly more acceptable IPS glow in the bottom right corner but got significantly worse in literally all other 3 corners. I personally couldn't stand it even when watching slightly darker youtube content. I find this asrock VA monitor to be more acceptable but it has terrible ghosting and such. Especially at darker scenes it becomes more and more noticeable and I am starting to notice it more and more while gaming too. So I thought I'd try another IPS monitor but this time a 32 inch one. I know the M32Q uses a different and apparently a slightly better panel than it's little brother the M27Q but I don't know about the LG. From what I could see from the reviews of these monitors on rtings (Link here: https://www.rtings.com/monitor/tools/compare/lg-32gp850-b-vs-gigabyte-m32q/21826/26016?usage=3623&threshold=0.01) there is no orange glow in their unit when looking at the black uniformity. My 27GP850 had a lot of orange glow especially in the corners when sitting right in front of it, which is the main reason I sent it back. Is there anyone here who has either one of these or maybe has experience with both? I do intend to use these in a dimly lit room as well for watching anime and movies as well as gaming. Not looking for a do-it-all monitor but just one with decent colours (IPS is gonna be better than my current VA so no problems there as I'm perfectly fine with the colours of my current Asrock monitor), little to no ghosting/overshoot and somewhere between 144 - 180hz refreshrate with at least decent black levels. I do know that VA does much better when it comes to contrast which I am a big fan of but I have a feeling that if I set my budget to about 550, I won't be finding a VA panel that performs well with black smeering. I know Samsung has some Odyssey varients with VA that don't have as much ghosting and blur and all that but they're all curved and I do not want a curved display. I live in the Netherlands so my buying options are a bit different and I can get the LG for 449 euros and the Gigabyte for 530 so I just wanna know if it would be worth spending the extra money on the gigabyte. if I'm leaving any questions out of this just lemme know. It's the first time I actually started shopping for monitors. Also no I won't 2x the price of my GPU to use that as the budget for a monitor because I bought my GPU at the wrong time so that would make for an insanely high budget that I do not want to spend on a monitor lol Thanks for the help!

I'll be sure to take a look at that and see if I can figure anything out. This has also gottne me interested in DPC latency and what it's all about/what can impact your DPC latency. I mean as long as I still ahve my M-Audio I'll be testing things out, so thanks for that! I do sure hope the Focusrite will work fine tho haha

After testing pretty much everything suggested, it hasn't really made a diference. No ethernet driver installed did make the stutters less but that's not a viable solution at all. Disabling hyperthreading didn't do the trick either. The biggest diference still seems to come from disabling HPET. It doesn't get rid of the stutters entirely but it gets rid of most, to the point my PC is usable again without having to try any workarounds. The stuttering still shows up mostly after running a more CPU intensive task like gaming for example, after closing the game it's like the system goes back down to a more low power state which causes the stutering to appear and generally having to try the mouse polling rate workaround again. It is probably down to a very unfortunate compatibility issue of this audio interface and my PC components. Whether it's the motherbaord and it's USB configuration, the B550 chipset or even the R7 5700X. Heck maybe even the memory running at it's rated 3600MHz instead of the default of like....2133 I believe? I have no clue. I have now bought a new interface, a Focusrite Scarlet 18i8 gen 3, which I hope will perform just like my old Bheringer did. Without issues. But that's for later when it arrives. I do wanna thank everyone for leaving suggestions on what to try and helping to figure out what the problem is. Sadly it is just much more complicated and I don't think any one of us wants to put in the time to figure out the nitty gritty lol. Big thanks to you especially @Fred Castellum for the fast and detailed help. So that's all for now o/