Obligatory “just watch Andor” comment.

Seriously. Go and watch Andor. It proves that good Star Wars content can be made. It has a diverse cast. You just need good writing and a vision. That’s what’s missing from the new content.

They are: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/four-additional-states-join-justice-departments-suit-against-apple-monopolizing-smartphone

I’ve been in similar situations while renting. I ran ethernet cables along skirting boards and around doorframes and hid them inside adhesive cable raceways.

I dont understand why you want to keep a TV offline for privacy/ad reasons, but also say you’re using a Chromecast or Roku media devices anyway? Thats like wanting to keep your windows locked but leaving your front door wide open.

Anyway, LG and Sony OLED TVs offer the best image quality and will work just fine without an internet connection.

I have my LG TV offline and use an AppleTV for everything. I never see the LG OS or Home Screen or any ads or logos once it’s configured to boot straight into external HDMI device.

It wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t get coverage in half the media in the country. And most people don’t even watch the media, anyway. It’ll be bullshit stories and anti-liberal memes as per usual.

Apple lay out some details here: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

They control the cloud hardware. Information used for cloud requests is deleted as soon as the request is done. Everything end-to-end encrypted. Server builds are publicly available to inspect. And all of this is only used unless the on-device processing can’t handle a request.

If somebody wanted to actually create a private AI system, this is probably how they’d do it.

You can disagree with this or claim somehow that they are actually accessing and selling people’s data, but Apple are going out of their way to show (and cryptographically prove) how they’re not. It would also be incredible fraudulent and illegal for them to make these claims and not follow through.

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I have a 50 terabyte NAS for storing my movies and TV shows. And access it from any of the TVs in my house.

For music…I have a music streaming subscription for convenience, but also have some vinyl records for the small-ish number of albums I want to keep forever.

I wish we had a way to simulate a universe in which the GOP gets every single one of its policies implemented. Then let it run like a Sim City level. Just to see what a dumpster fire it would be.

The Bluray video quality is average because it’s just upscaled SD copy. But it’s still the best anywhere available.

The issue is they fucked up the Bluray audio. The 5.1 surround sound track is really just stereo but coming from all speakers.

Thankfully, there is a fan copy that combines the Bluray video with DVD audio.

My high end PC from 3 years ago won’t run Windows 11 because of TPM bullshit.

What made me lose interest was bad writing. “Andor” is a great Star Wars TV series, and I’m looking forward to its second season, because it has…let’s see…good fucking writing!

The show wasn’t perfect, but it felt like something fresh and different. I really hope they can get more of it. I guess HBO would rather pump out something derivative.

At a certain point, a company’s primary product becomes its stock. Share buybacks, short term gains, etc become the strategy. The goal is no longer to create value for customers, but to create value for shareholders.

It’s the tech business model. Slowly building up a sustainable business has been replaced with coasting on investment money while attempting to capture an entire global market. Because these products can scale so easily. Now they’re entering the “oh shit we need to make money now” phase of the business model.

It’s not evil capitalists. It’s people acting rationally. The incentive structure leads to this behaviour. Eventually these services will consolidate into 2 or 3 major ones, like they do in every global tech market. Everyone will complain about it. But they’ll keep paying for it, because what other (legal) choice is there?

Better support for Dolby Vision. I also prefer the Infuse UI.

Sideloading and customisation is a downside. Like other Apple devices, the App Store is the way they want you to install things.

There are ways to sideload things like Kodi through pre signed certificates but I don’t know much about it.

Dont need another Apple device.

No need for other Apple devices. It can act as a standalone box. It may want an AppleID account during setup. I’m unsure about that part.

I posted this elsewhere in the thread, but…AppleTV with the Infuse app.

I tried a bunch of different media boxes and HTPC options over the year. But this is by far the best setup in my experience.

AppleTV with the Infuse app.

Blows everything else away. It will connect to Plex and Jellyfin servers. Or a standard SMB folder share if you prefer. No ads. It never lags. Has reliable frame rate matching. And you’re likely to get 5+ years of software update support.

The only thing it won’t do is Atmos from Bluray rips (it will do lossless 7.1 but not the atmos layer). If you need that, then get an Nvidia Shield Pro.