Drathro

Cheaper than Spotify for the number of users it gives you (at least where I live) and the app itself has functioned significantly better than Spotify's has in my experience so far while not depriving me of any of the artists and albums I listen to regularly. Early on in its life it was big time selling snake oil, but at this point it's just a solid alternative to Spotify and YouTube music which have both, frankly, gotten "too big to fail" and have begun enshittification because of it. Man we need more competition...

You seem to be arguing it's all about the implementation of the phoning home itself- I'm arguing that running the entire executable/binary through a virtual environment likely has far more drastic performance implications than a phone home, regardless of frequency. It probably IS mostly an implementation problem, but I'm more inclined to believe that the implementation of the Denuvo virtual environment is at fault, not just a server call and response delay. **EDIT: Apologies, forgot to include a link- see HERE. Looks like a substantial/measurable difference. Not massive, as measured here, but certainly enough that if your hardware is just barely able to run a game it could easily make or break the entire experience.

Regarding performance implications: I believe Denuvo DRM runs through a type of virtual machine environment. While this theoretically should be relatively transparent, there are definitely documented instances of it negatively impacting performance, sometimes severely. Maybe the VM it runs in is just bad with certain instructions/calls on certain CPU's or api's, hard to tell for sure. But it's not nothing.

To be more clear I was more focused on the not wanting a car that needs software updates part of the argument, less so the means of delivery. Obviously, having an always on connection absolutely sucks and I'd personally be super down with just pushing an update via a USB drive or whatever like you can a BIOS update. But a lot of manufacturers have it set up so that you have to either pay a dealership to plug in the USB for some arbitrary reason, or demand the always on connection to do it. In a utopia of software development where there are no critical bugs, we would all prefer a car that doesn't need updates. I didn't mean to imply that I was arguing in favor of remote connection by manufacturers, and it's absolutely my bad in not wording it properly.

On the flip side: if a car stereo has a known firmware issue causing problems with say Bluetooth connection, I DO want the manufacturer to actually provide an easy means of fixing/updating the borked software. Better that the system was properly tested and feature complete to begin with- but I'm not delusional enough to believe we can truly have nice things.

Possibly dumb question: why not use an Authentik outpost with a reverse proxy to enforce SSO? It wouldn't be "baked in" so to speak, but it would be fully OIDC and as long as you're just running it through a web browser. Biggest downside is you'd need 2 logins (one for the outpost and one for the app). I'd assume the sso is specifically for the extra security though, so that shouldn't be a problem outside of it being a little hassle.

Showerthoughts maybe?

Why would I recommend Fileflows? It was a little more user friendly in my experience without requiring pulling in configurations from other sources. I know there are repos chalk full of Tdarr settings and configs, but for simple setups and DIY I preferred the Fileflows interface. The end result is basically the same, so pick your poison.

Isn't AMD's HEVC/265 still decent, specifically? I feel like I read that somewhere years back. 264 has always been a weak spot for them, however.

Isn't this almost the inverse argument to the android vs iPhone thing? Like the iPhone being (traditionally) more expensive for the "same technology from 5 years ago"? I don't really have a horse in this race, I'm a firm believer in use what you like and is easiest/best for you. But I do feel compelled to call this one out a bit.

I might recommend fileflows over tdarr- but either way some kind of similar solution is almost mandatory with the grab bag of arbitrary encodings you find out there.

Very true. But brute force checking through tons of different settings for each camera you need to configure is not fun. I couldn't seem to find any kind of "known working configs" database or anything either. Every camera seems to be different in what it expects, outputs, authenticates, etc. Once it's set up, I agree, maintaining the config is easier. Having all your cameras match in model and firmware version probably makes the whole endeavor MUCH easier.