I buy loads and loads of old vinyl records from various discount bins, flea markets and thrift stores. If it’s 1 or 2 €: I often just buy blind if cover is somewhat appealing to me or because artists names ring a bell for me.

If I like what I hear, I obtain an mp3 copy of it (various sources) for my library. If I really liked it and can’t find it digitally (it happens): I record my own vinyl record to have a digital copy. My file preference is mp3 VBR. I think flac is overkill for most basic soundsystems and human ears and they are not worth the enormous filesize difference.

37" :')

Filesize itself usually isn’t relevant. A high resolution video in a very large file size will rarely cause playback issues on most devices. In my experience the bottleneck of a setup is almost always first encountered with highly compressed video with a large resolution.

Also, not everyone hoards. Some people look for 4k, watch once and delete. They don’t even seed.

Anyhow, the main thing to me is content quality. I can watch a solid movie in poor quality, but I couldn’t watch certain crappy movies in super duper high resolution quality even I would be paid for it

Depends on your TV, taste, budget.

A good movie at 480p can be watchable. A good movie at 720p is usually very fine for me.

1080p is my upper limit.

I have a small TV. Resolution doesn’t matter all that much if your TV isn’t 2 meters wide.

Small files with high resolution are very strongly compressed. Some devices might struggle with playing them causing lags or difficult to fast forward or backward etc. That would be more annoying to me than a lowish resolution.

Also depends who ripped it (did they know what they were doing?) and from which source. Webdl or DVD sourced are normally very watchable in lower resolutions if ripped by skilled people.

Some records sell for crazy prices…

Bigger expectations = bigger disappointment

For me GTA peaked with the originals in 1997-1999 and had a nice little comeback in 2013. Hyperreality is not what I need in games…

It shouldn’t be allowed to be pirated, it should just become open source/society’s property by default in that case. You don’t want to sell your digital only item or maintain it’s platform anymore? Fine, now everyone can have it.

Lidarr works okay-ish with soularr

Yes, immich sends all my pictures to the homeserver AND I can immediately see all my partners pictures pop up on my phone. Immich is very cool for that.

I too dislike that immich “scrambles” my pictures. I had it quite well organised over multiple decades (folders per year & location), but how well immich works seems worth losing this idea of organisational control over the collection. The immich duplicate detection for example is superb (it isn’t on nextcloud). It for example detects very easily that a 400kb sent or received picture is actually the same as a 4Mb much higher resolution original picture with a completely different filename and different metadata.

I still have my pictures collection organised old school from before immich on various back-up media and the hardest part to me now is deciding to keep that or convert it all to the “immich style” directory… Since it’s now very difficult to add new pictures to it without loads and loads of duplicates.

I did find the setting in immich which will somewhat still organise it in folders per month now, but it’s not the same, since a month often isn’t a logical grouping directory, for example if you go on holiday last week of December+ first week of January: pictures will still be spread across various folders.

My main downside on immich currently is that we can’t easily “share” metadata over a few different users (locations added later, recognised faces etc) although we share many faces/locations in pictures… It’s a hard choice wether I still want to make the few users all use the same account after all because of that (which will have other downsides like no personal private folder)

Yes filebrowser is ending it’s a shame, very simple tool. Copyparty works fine too but too many features I don’t need.

I don’t have a better suggestion for mobile backup. I only have pictures (immich) backed up automatically. Everything else on my phone would be lost or it already sits somewhere else from the beginning (like music)

Look at dietpi. There is a regular pc version (x86).

Their own “we do it for you” software choice is somewhat limited, but everything is really easy imo. You can always install other things they don’t offer, with apt or docker or … But the basic dietpi system is a super reliable, super lightweight, easy to manage OS.

For the music: dietpi+jellyfin+ tailscale+finamp on phone. Tailscale on phone, point it to only use VPN for finamp. It works incredibly stable and reliable for me. I tried many other “make it work remotely” options first, tailscale is just magic. If it’s only for streaming music to your phone, I don’t consider tailscale a privacy issue at all.

I suggest to skip the nextcloud. It’s a mess. Use immich for pictures and paperless for documents.

If hosting some other files that don’t fit those 2 categories, things like filebrowser or copyparty are great. Nextcloud is really quite the challenge tbh and imo not worth the hassle it is for a typical selfhoster… It’s hard to get the most out of it. It pays of for medium organisations maybe but not for just you and a few other people…

The trick in many genres seems the market border crossing. Country might sell low priced in USA, where it originated, but might sell higher priced in Europe or Asia. In Brazil many vinyl records that in Europe easily sell for double or triple digits can still be found for silly prices by crate diggers. Similar until a decade ago with classical music: super common garage sale 1 € records could sell to China for 15 € or more if they were NM…