The only mmo’s I ever really spent any significant time with were FFXI (on dial up for most of the time I spent with it so my experience wasn’t great) and GW2. not mentioning eve… we dont talk about that…
There was a free MMORPG called Planeshift (I played quite a lot in 2005 or so, it’s still around and being actively worked on) that was very elder scrolls inspired, I put a lot of time into in the past too but being a small free amateur project it didn’t have a lot of players.
I just don’t have the time or motivation to give modern MMOs the attention they really need to make progress, and I was very much a solo player at the time so progress was slow and hard.
I think if I was to pick up a new one it would be FF14, it has a balance of open gameplay and story which a lot of mmos ignore, it seems like a good community but as with all mmos they really dont want you to just drop in a play a couple of hours every second weekend, they want you to get in daily and stick to a routine, which I just cant commit to these days.
I’s not a problem at all, it’s pretty sweet, just getting only about 400-500 mbits when I can get over 900 combined when testing with torrents and other services. ABB say they absolutely, unequivocally do not throttle usenet. So I just suspect it is a limitation of my server setup and I’m too lazy to try to find the cause…
I currently use both NewsgroupNinja and NewsDemon combined but still cant get past about half a gig a second but it very well may be a limitation in my download server somewhere.
Not sure about a do-all solution for the Manga side of things other than some outdated archive torrents or things hidden in the depths of usenet, but a free program called FMD2 can automate the downloading and CBZ-ifying of manga from hundreds of sources. it can act like a sonarr for manga once set up with series you follow and of course you can bulk download just at a slower rate due to the same limiting.
People have tried and failed to make the “one arr to rule them all” but the current stack is pretty lightweight, stable and mature so it is better to just install them all in containers then have some kind of frontend and request system in front of them for users and admins.
I use Organizr as a frontend (keeps them all together in one interface and optionally handles SSO across all of them) then I have Overseerr for users to add media without having to give them access to the arrs directly.
While I tend to avoid encoding wherever possible, I use H265 10Bit at low RF to archive non-critical libraries (old TV shows in some users personal libraries, 1080p movies more than 1 year old and over 20gb etc…).
my average size reduction going from a 1080p Bluray remux of 35-40gb is about 50% with no significant effect to image quality. High action or high grain movies end up a bit larger, slower movies with no action and most animations compress a bit smaller. works well overall.
basically any modern device can decode them and the image quality tends to be a bit better than 8bit.
I’d like to go with AV1, but very few of my client devices can decode it, so its not worth the trouble to save a few percent,
Theres plenty of smaller, lower volume silicon fabs doing larger scale work, like Cmos 1micron and some doing sub micron down to what was cutting edge ~15 years ago.
Honetly kinda crazy that only one manufacturer can do the current modern stuff, but barely anything other than high end CPU need to be that small.
Automatically ripping movies is pretty easy, but TV shows often need manual work to get them right.
Sometimes you’ll get individual videos with the correct chapters, runtimes and they are listed in order, but other times they will be jumbled in random order, or will be one large video that needs to be split manually into episodes.
For bulk diverse, pre-tagged and sorted collections you really have to go to p2p like soulseek.
For tagging picard is really the only option that can handle bulk tagging with some level of trust and authority, but definitely have a backup or work in chunks just in case it goes awry.
For a spotify replacement, Plexamp is really doing well as long as you have decently tagged media. It can do all the mood radio and playlist suggestion stuff that Spotify and others have been doing.
Totally different software solutions aimed at different users, and many people use both.
Plex is a Server software that handles media management, libraries, users, etc etc… and a range of player apps that have a somewhat beginner friendly layout requiring little to no setup
Personally, I run a large Plex server that provides content for my family across dozens of mixed devices in home and out of home, different users have access to different libraries and have different preferences. If needed it will automatically transcode content for remote users out of the home to fit my upload bandwidth and their available speed if they are on mobile. it keeps track of watched content and position for all users so they can move between devices seamlessly.
Kodi is an extensible media player frontend, it can play files from a remote server or NAS but there is no server management, it is just doing basic file access. there are addons for many common services and media sources but there is no user management, no transcoding, no sharing content with other clients etc etc. Having multiple kodi installs on multiple players requires each client to be configured more or less from scratch and no easy way to have multiple setups for different users with their own preferences, libraries and/or content restrictions. It is extremely powerful and configurable and has strong format support.
I have Kodi installed on one of my Nvidia Shield Pros but only use it for playback of surround music files (support for 5.1 flac on plex seems to be limited to audio within video containers for some reason) I find the interface (and all the skins I tried) extremely clunky for use as a music player, the way the remote works within the player itself is unintuitive and makes for an annoying experience restarting the track when you just want to move the playback a few seconds, a bit unfair of course as that isn’t what it was made for but that’s just my experience.
Jellyfin is great and I follow its development and test it every now an then but it is nowhere near fully featured or well supported enough or me to transfer my family over to.