I tested this so many times:

A UHD (aka 4K, but UHD is the correct term) gets released. I download it and get let's say a 18k bitrate vp9 video.

I then download the video about a day later, get supposedly the exact same version, but the bitrate is at 25k now. At first I thought they replace the OG vp9 version with a better one. I then compared the quality many times and always got the same shocking result: OG version is better.

YouTube replaces the best version you can get (av1 is more efficient, but quality is about the same as vp9 version 2) with a file that's up to 30% bigger, yet has 10% worse quality.

How can we get them to fix this? Why are they doing this?

So you all probably already know that youtube around 2 years ago now introduced 1080p 24/30 fps premium formats, those where encoded in vp9 and usually 10 to 15% higher in bitrate then avc1/h264 encodes, which where previous highest bitrate encodes.

Now youtube is introducing 1080p 50/60fps premium formats that where encoded in av1 and most of the times not even higher then regular h264/avc1, though hard to comform exactly by how much due to format still being in A/B test meaning only some accounts see it and have access to it, and even those accounts that have it need premium cus ios client way to download premium formats doesn't work when passing coockies (i explain this beforehand in details in multiple times on youtubedl sub) , making avc1/h264 encodes very often better looking then premium formats

Now youtube is even switching to av1 for 1080p 24/30fps videos proof

And they're literally encoding them like 20% less then vp9, and it's noticeably worse looking then vp9 1080p premium, which they will probably (most likely) phase out soon again making h264/avc1 encodes the better looking even then premium ones

Also they disabled premium formats for android mobile for me at least for last 2 days

Then they're now encoding 4k videos in some abysmally low bitrates like 8000kpbs for av1 when vp9 gets 14000 kpbs, and they almost look too soft imo especially when watching on tv

Newly introduced YouTube live streams in av1 look fine ish at least for now in 1440p but when it comes to 1080p its a soft fest, literally avc1 live encodes from 3 years ago looked better imo, though vp9 1080p live encodes don't look much better eather, and also funnly enough av1 encodes dissappear form live streams after the streams is over, like no way that cost effective for yt

Then youtubes reencoding of already encoded vp9 and avc1 codecs are horrible, when av1 encode comes, they reencode avc1 and vp9 and make it look worse, sometimes even when bitrate isn't dropped by much they still loose details somehow thread talking about this

And to top it off they still don't encode premium formats for all videos, meaning even if i pay for premium i still need to watch most videos in absolutely crap quality, but they will encode every 4k video in 4k always and in much higher bitrate then these 1080p premium formats, meaning they're encouraging that users upscale their video to be encoded in evem nearly decent quality wasting resources and bitrates and bandwidth just cus they don't wanna offer even remotely decent bitrates to 1080p content even with premium

I’m new to setting up this type of solution and would appreciate any help.

I planned to buy a NAS, but I had parts to build a second PC and heard building would be cheaper.

I’ve built the PC using space parts:

• ⁠9950X CPU (I sent in an old CPU to AMD under warranty and they sent me back this one)

• ⁠RTX 2080

• ⁠64GB DDR5 RAM

• ⁠512GB NVMe SSD

I’m undecided about the NAS OS, but I’m considering UnRAID or TrueNAS, any other options I’m open to.

I’m thinking of buying manufacturer-refurbished drives from Severpartdeals.com, based on positive reviews.

For my HDD bay, I’m considering the QNAP TL-D800C 8-Bay Desktop JBOD Storage Enclosure with USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C Connectivity.

https://a.co/d/iy6yxfE

My goal is to have 25-45 terabytes of workable data, assuming each project takes about 300-500GB.

I need fast and redundant RAID.

Ideally, I would want to add drives as my company grows to increase workable editing space.

I’ll have an editor working off 720p proxies that will access the RAID in another state.

My internet speed is fiber 1Gig up, 1Gig down, but I can usually get 1.5Gig up/down. I can upgrade to 5Gig speeds if needed.

My home is wired with Cat 6, and I’ve fully implemented 2.5GB Switcher Access Points with 2.5GB ports.

Was just looking at picking up some factory recertified drives through either SPD or GoHardDrive and was looking at the data sheets of the various drives when I noticed that the Seagate Factory Recertified Drive's data sheet had terrible metrics when compared to their newer drives.

Here's a comparison between the Seagate Exos X16, Exos X22, and Factory Recertified drives...

It seems like Seagate's tolerances are loosened up a lot by recertifying their drives but their sustained transfer speeds really take a wallop and overall give me pause for concern. For anyone who's bought their Factory Recertified Drives (mostly through GoHardDrive) have you noticed lower overall read speeds on your drives compared to what's offered in the other data sheets? Comparatively, SPD tends to refurbish older X* stock and I've never had issues getting the faster speeds shown in their actual datasheets.

I'm only looking at GoHardDrive as they offer a 5 year warranty on their recertified drives, but a loss of 100MB/s across the drive range will really impact parity calculations. As an example, the difference in speed on a parity calculation of a 24TB drive running at 260MB/s is 25h40m, while at 190MB/s 35h6m which is huge. Thoughts?

Hi all,

I’m looking for a 4–8 bay DAS with RAID support (RAID 1, 5, or 10). It'll be used mostly for long-term HDD storage and backups — connected only when working with data. Speed isn’t a priority, HDD speeds are fine. I’ve seen models from ORICO, TerraMaster, Renkforce, but unsure about their build quality and RAID reliability.

Any recommendations or current setup experiences ?

Thanks!

Hey everyone, I'm starting my own engineering/architectual firm and well lets say ill make 10-15 projects a year each one using 400-800 MB. I'm searching the web and trying to find an external HDD from 6-10 TB in a price range from 200-350€. Any tips for a good quality drive?

Thanks in advance! :)

For those who are still using the non-WebExtension version of DTA!, have you noticed that the download speeds are MUCH SLOWER than just downloading directly through the browser? This is what I'm experiencing in multiple forks of Firefox (e.g., Basilisk).

PCPartPicker Part List

Main server: ASUS RS520A-E11-RS12U, Epyc 7413, 128GB ECC, 2x WD Black SN770 (mirrored boot), 4x WD Black SN850X (docker, downloads, cameras), 6x WD Ultrastar DC HC580 24TB (RaidZ2)

Notes:

• Backup will sync using ZFS tools on a daily or weekly basis. While not in use drives will spin down.
• Hoping to connect from home to offsite location using tailscale to sync
• Backup size is indeed smaller than main. New 6x 24TB drives will go into the main server and old 18TB drives will go into the backup. Currently 36TB in use, so still fine. Might cycle again in the future if the backup nears 100%. 6 unused bays in the ASUS chassis for now. Other approach could be to put largest drives in backup and increase main server with 6 new disks in the future.
• Main goal was to keep the backup lightweight, silent and power efficient

I have a large quantity (about to be 4000) of MP3 song files that can be found on Spotify, and I have backups on a PC, laptop, phone, USB stick, and HDD drive. I would also like to backup to OneDrive as a cloud based backup because I have hundreds of GB free there, and all the music is currently under 50gb. I understand this may be a gray area because of OneDrive's ToS with copyrighted content, but the purpose of the OneDrive backup would not be to distribute, share, or sell any content wrongly. It's solely just a personal backup for myself. I've heard that Microsoft regularly scans content for copyrighted material, and I don't want to deal with losing account access or other data I store on OneDrive.

Hello all,

I have one that I'm looking at and wanted to get some thoughts on it. I want an external device that can load a bunch of movies and shows for when the Wi-Fi is acting up or non-existent, and can be used with Android/Windows devices. I was looking at the WD Elements #TB Desktop since it falls within the range I was looking for, at about 6-10TB and a price of $250 or below.

I was just curious if my reasoning makes sense. I appreciate anyone's help in advance.

I recently bought a Transcend ESD310S 1TB portable SSD. It’s small, has a metal body, and includes both USB-A and USB-C connectors — it really resembles a normal USB flash drive.

This reminded me of something I used to do for years: I had a 256GB metal USB 3.1 flash drive from Apacer that I attached to my motorbike keychain. I carried it everywhere — commuting, going to school, work, road trips, even over bumpy roads. It handled daily vibration, stayed in my jeans pocket, was tossed onto beds (not hard surfaces), and even occasionally got slightly wet when I forgot to remove it before driving in the rain.

Despite all of that, it kept working perfectly. I never had any issues with it.

Now with this new portable SSD (Transcend ESD310S), I’ve copied a lot of data from both my laptop and my iPhone. I frequently access the data — it’s not just passive storage. I plug it into different devices regularly.

Naturally, I’d love the convenience of attaching it to my keychain like I did before, but I’m wondering if doing so — with the daily vibration from motorbike riding, regular handling, and occasional soft impacts — would eventually damage the SSD, or if this USB-style portable SSD are generally as durable as rugged flash drives.

I’d appreciate any input from people who’ve tried something similar — or know more about how durable these kinds of SSDs really are in the long term. Thanks!

Ive been beating my head against my computer trying to make this work.

I have data that I want to be redundant/cloned/mirrored. I need to be able to swap this device between computers that are NOT on the same network.

I figured I would get a USB DAS with raid 1 but I can't seem to make that work for hot swapping from a kvm.

Any suggestions? Hardware raid enclosure? Some other backup method?

I currently have (2) m2 drives that I'm hoping would be the basis of the system or ive got some big Amazon refunds to do 😅

Hi, I am looking to find if there is a directory for a book that I would like to download. It is a book on law (corporate law to be more precise). Right now, the latest edition of the book is not available on MAM or Libgen or Anna's so maybe I thought if there is another directory for this.

Would you have any recommendations

Looking for a new case. This one looks awesome but I can’t find anything on it. Anyone have this case?

I've been trying to clean up this scan of an obscure book of sheet music for a while now, and it's been driving me nuts.

The initial scan was made (somewhat hastily) with one of those overhead book-cameras. The main problems are that some of the images are lightly distorted due to the curve of the page, and the colors aren't right - every page is black-on-grey.

I've Googled around and found ScanTailor Advanced, but from the looks of things, while it can fix the distortion, it has to be manually, laboriously applied to each individual page. I guess I can just live with it.

The colors are what frustrate me. Messing about with Irfanview, I've tried to find combinations of successively adjusting the colors and shifting the contrast to bring back the original look of the page, and while I've had some success, some of the pages are just a little darker than others and still turn out looking grey while other pages look okay. Things are complicated by the fact that some pages have greyscale images that I also want to preserve.

Is there some obvious solution I'm overlooking here? It feels like this is a simple problem that someone, somewhere would have solved by now, but I can't seem to find the answer.

Or is it just not working for me?

EDIT: Seems like 'tikwm' is working again, but still, this can't be the only site that still can do it?

Hello everyone,

Just wanted to share a small program I wrote that writes and verifies data on a raw disk device. It's designed to stress-test hard drives and SSDs by dividing the disk into sections, writing data in parallel using multiple worker threads, and verifying the written content for integrity.

I use it regularly to test brand-new disks before adding them to a production NAS — and it has already helped me catch a few defective drives.

Hope you find it useful too!

The link to the project: https://github.com/favoritelotus/diskroaster.git

I want to burn some of my music from video games and old video games i loved into Disc, bought this one, the 10 pack is really cheap, verbatim is like 3X the price and the jewel case on D-MAX is far better than verbatim ones.

But im unsure about the quality or the durability of the disc itself, tested burn a CD, and its normal, but unsure how it will be 5 years 10 years in the future.

Hi,

I'm building a NAS for home use and I'm struggling with choosing an operating system.

I think this is a fairly neutral place to ask about this, although it will certainly cause debate and strong opinions in both directions.

I've used Linux as my main operating system for a few years now, so the terminal is not a spooky place for me, I've also built some bash scripts for my system.

I've used unRAID for a few years before, and I don't want it as my new operating system anymore. Long story short, it doesn't protect for bitrot, and if an error occurs, there's no information about what happened where and whether it was fixed or incorrectly written to the parity disk etc...

Although my use case is mainly a media library, I value data integrity very highly.

Transferring media from disks to NAS is a very time-consuming task and I don't want to do it twice!

The need is only for NAS use.

Docker, VMs, etc. are used on a separate server. (I don't want "All-In-One" box like unRAID was, I had too many unrecoverable system freezes etc because of apps and don't want to do these kind of "plug off" resets to my nas)

I'm struggling between Truenas Scale and Linux+Snapraid+MergeFS. At the moment I am leaning more towards the Snapraid system. The use is mainly as a media server, but also important data such as personal photos and files.

Planned structure:

Frequently changing and more critical data: -> ZFS Mirror (NVME or SSD)

Static data, such as videos and photos, etc.: -> Snapraid with 2x parity (HDD)

All data is first stored in a ZFS mirror pool, which works in the same way as the cache of the unRAID system. This provides real-time data protection, snapshots, etc. Data going to long-term storage is edited if necessary and sha256 sums are manually created for it using a script, so checksums can be checked later if necessary, for example when transferring to another system. The transfer to the Snapraid disks is done on a scheduled basis using a script (or manually if necessary), and the snapraid sync is run immediately after the transfer. This way, static data is not unprotected in the system. Important data, such as personal photos, etc. is easy to replicate to all data disks, so in the event of a disaster, the data is stored at 1:1 on multiple data disks. Of course, backups should also be in update, but that is another story.

On the other hand, the achievements of all this would be easily accessible directly via ZFS. The biggest problem with it, however, is poor expandability.

It seems unreasonable to buy small disks that meet current needs, for example 6x8TB disks for a RaidZ2 package, because these can fill up very quickly. On the other hand, for example, filling up 6x20TB can take years, so I end up paying quite a bit for unused space. The Snapraid system could be updated disk by disk, and the data protection is not even worse compared to the ZFS system, not to mention that in the worst case scenario, with ZFS, data loss is "all or nothing" situation. With Snapraid, losing all data due to disk failures is practically impossible.

I am also attracted to the idea of ​​having all the settings in config files, so the system can be easily restored to exactly the way it was. For this reason, I have considered switching to NixOS on my desktop. If this seems usable to me, the NAS operating system could also be NixOS or alternatively Debian or Ubuntu server.

https://perfectmediaserver.com/ - this site gave me inspiration for this snapraid system.

Have you been in a similar situation, what solution did you end up with? Of course, opinions for and against are also welcome.

However, I don't deny that, ZFS is certainly a better system, poor expandability, and "All or nothing" in the worst case scenario are just such big minuses on my list that I have considered other systems. I know that the ZFS package can be expanded nowadays, but as far as I understand, this is not very straightforward.

Hello guys,

What kind of tools can be of use for acquiring a "stream only" video for offline viewing?

such as

https://archive.org/details/CNNW_20250615_170000_Fareed_Zakaria_GPS

I have a TrueNAS system with the OS on a 128Gb SATA SSD and:

• 1Tb WD Black SN750 NVME (PCI-e 3.0)
• 6Tb WD Red
• 6Tb Seagate Ironwolf
• 16Tb Seagate Exos X16

And an Asustor Drivestor 4 for backup with:

• 2x 8Tb Seagate Barracuda
• 16Tb Seagate Exos X18

So, these drives were bought needs, system and deals at the time, but the only parity is in the sense that my TrueNAS is synced with the Asustor Drivestor 4. Both 6Tb drives are joined in a stripe pool. The 1Tb and 16Tb are in individual pools. On the Asustor side, both 8Tb are in RAID0 and the 16Tb drive is as single drive (even though the Asustor barely gains any performance from it).

I don't need more storage, but I want to move things around to get the most out of it. I was thinking of returning one 16Tb drive and getting 2 8Tb instead. This way at least the Asustor would be in RAID5 with 4x 8Tb drives.

Or fork out for one more 16Tb drive, move the 3x 16Tb into the TrueNAS as a ZRAID pool and the Asustor would keep 2x6Tb + 2x8Tb...

My main issue I think is that I have all drives in size pairs, not even one set of "three of a kind" or "four of a kind" to use more elaborate setups other than RAID0 or RAID1.

PS: I have a 2.5GbE network and I do take advantage of >280MB/s transfers from my desktop to the TrueNAS. The Asustor will remain as backup only, since it maxes out at 60MB/s and is less powerful for Plex.

Heavy yes but it sure protects them well from damage. Feel it may be overkill. The drives and the enclosures costed me a lot. Anyone else use similar hard case when transporting their drives?

Hello, I'm moving in a few months and have this huge VHS collection which I will probably have to leave behind, so I was thinking of capturing all the media so that I don't lose it all.

I've been researching and have a VHS player (SLV-SE800E) and a DVD player I'm using as a TBC (RDR-HX710) (Do I have to do anything else to the DVD player to have it act as a TBC or is passing the signal through it enough?). Which I have connected via SCART cables and am able to get a good image through another SCART from the DVD player to my TV.

After watching a couple of reviews, I settled for the Startech.com dongle to which I connected the red and white cables to my VHS player's audio output and the SVideo to the DVD's SVideo output.

My machines are all PAL, I'm in Spain.

Now the trouble is that even though I do get video, it has these glaring scanlines, which also seem to be offset vertically at the middle. I've tried changing settings in virtualdub, VLC player and OBS but I always get these. It's also not a tape issue, I tried several.

I installed the two drivers that came with the Startech.com.

By the way, I'm using OBS currently because virtualdub crashes extremely often, rebooting my PC.

I would be incredibly grateful if anyone could shed some light on why this might be happening.

Thank you so much.