The "What did you buy today?" thread...

[olds97_lss]

To late now, but I would have skipped the external drive and bought a Backblaze subscription instead. I've been using them myself for a year or two and have been very pleased with them.

External drive backups are still reliant on the user to connect the drive and perform the backups manually. Unless you leave the drive always turned on and connected and if that's the case then people are better off just installing an internal drive. In addition an internal or external drive isn't going to protect you if you drop the drive, the computer/drive gets stolen, fire, water damage and so on.

Backblaze is $5.00 a month for unlimited storage and everything is automatic. Just install the software and connect to the internet. You'll have backups available anywhere and even versions which is nice as well.

Just my two cents.

$5 a month for unlimited? That's crazy! That would be useful for normal stuff in Documents or Photo's. Any idea if it can replace a mirror backup of a boot drive? I have SSD's in all 4 of my home computers/laptops and I keep a mirrored backup of the main SSD in a safe in case the SSD dies. I mirror them once a month or so.

Not sure that's something I'd want to use for my 4TB of movies on our media server... Comcast has a 1T monthly limit of bandwidth usage that we've skirted close to a few times the past few years.

Spend $900 on an HVAC issue in my 300c... stupid recirculate door broke.
Also ordered a hot racing bellcrank/steering parts for my stampede 4x4 as I'm getting a lot of slop making that thing sketchy to drive.

Was going to buy an Arrma outcast now that they are available again... then the car thing happened. Oh well, perhaps I'll ask my wife to get it for me for Christmas.

 

[WoodiE]

Spend $900 on an HVAC issue

Funny that. I have guys under my house right now putting in a new HVAC unit and duct work. Sadly mine costs about 10 times your bill.

 

[olds97_lss]

Funny that. I have guys under my house right now putting in a new HVAC unit and duct work. Sadly mine costs about 10 times your bill.

Mine was to replace a $35 part in a car. The rest was labor to get to the stupid thing... ended up being $200 part because the door/flap was only purchasable as part of a module.

 

[HPIguy]

A Rise Armament RA-140 cassette trigger group and anti walk pins, some MTM ammo cans and carrier, an Aero Precision cantilever scope mount, Lee Precision .308 dies for reloading, and some .308 snap caps for trigger tuning and function checks.

 

[olds97_lss]

Bought a roku yesterday and FLM hinge pin retainers for my flux a few days ago.

Was on my 4th bulkhead/case, hinge pin and brace this season after a crash a week or so ago with my flux. Figured I'd try the FLM braces to see if they hold up better. I'd rather replace an arm than the entire bulkhead and hinge pin. While the flux is pretty tough, working on it can be a chore.

Been watching hulu for old tv shows like NYPD blue and others. Our blu-ray players have hulu, but it doesn't work well. Gets about 3 minutes in, then goes back to the beginning. Over and over... or it just hangs. Seems Sony players don't like hulu and they blame hulu while hulu blames them. So, we used our PS3 for it, since we really don't use it anymore. It would work fine, but the audio was abysmal. I have it all wired through a 7.1 yamaha RX-V681 receiver. The PS3 seems to force the receiver to be in 5.1 mode, but the audio is coming in stereo. The receiver doesn't down mix it to pro-logic because the PS3 is forcing it to be 5.1. Also, the volume is 50% lower than it should be, unless there's music, then it was blaring. As it was, we only got sound out of the front left/right speakers.

So, I got a roku, hoping a device made solely for streaming would do a better job. Overall, it does a much better job than the blu-ray players or PS3. It doesn't send 5.1 through for hulu (could be what we are watching, not sure yet), but at least it tells the receiver that it's stereo so the receiver mixes it properly and now it sounds fine. I'll probably end up using it for everything now instead of the blu-ray. It has a better interface for amazon prime, netflix, serviio (DLNA media server), youtube and of course, hulu. Should have bought one of these a long time ago isntead of fighting with blu-ray players I never use. I rip all our movies and put them on our network. Haven't watched an actual disk in 5 years.

 

[WoodiE]

@olds97_lss I love my roku's. I've got most all my movies on a PLEX server and a couple large totes full of DVD's that sit up in my attic that haven't been touched in years now.

I'm in the process of re-doing our deck right now and am thinking about getting a TCL or Vizio TV with a roku already built in so I can watch movies while I'm out there grilling.

 

[olds97_lss]

@olds97_lss I love my roku's. I've got most all my movies on a PLEX server and a couple large totes full of DVD's that sit up in my attic that haven't been touched in years now.

I'm in the process of re-doing our deck right now and am thinking about getting a TCL or Vizio TV with a roku already built in so I can watch movies while I'm out there grilling.

I'll probably end up getting another roku for the bedroom TV. I took all our disks out of the cases and put them in a 500 disk binder. Gave my mom all the DVD's (she still has a CRT TV, lol), but kept all the blurays. On occasion, I'll rerip one because it was an old rip and I want it to be higher quality audio or something. Going to be a new nightmare if/when I go 4k... I envision that taking a lot more hard drive space and even longer to rip/convert to a decent quality mp4. As it is, I convert to 7MB average and I can't see a difference between blu-ray or the rip on a 70" TV.

One nice thing the roku does is it remembers where I left off while watching a movie. Not sure if it does that for just the last one or all of them in the serviio last viewed history. My bluray players didn't do that.

 

[WoodiE]

Not sure if it does that for just the last one or all of them in the serviio

If serviio is anything like Plex, then it will do it for every movie you start to watch then stop. It's a nice feature indeed, but can be annoying when you have little kids and that will watch about 30 minutes of a movie then flip something else on. Suddenly you have a huge list of movies that are partly watched.

 

[HPIguy]

Most Roku apps offer a start from the beginning option. I don't run Plex or Serviio either one, just saying. My Roku is hands down one of my all time favorite purchases. Been a cord cutter for over 6 years, and don't plan on going back.

 

[hamz9561]

I got my Roku to watch DirecTV Now without having to Chromecast all the time. The app just works without any drama.

 

[griff7373]

So how does plex work? I run a Roku box in my den and have converted most of my movies over to VUDU so I can watch them on my Roku. I also run the charter app on it instead of sling, charter was a better option for me as I can pick the channels I want. I found with Sling I had quite a few channels I never watched and was wanting some they didn't offer.

The downfall of VUDU is you have to pay to convert the old movies that didn't come with a code. Anywhere from $2 to $5 depending on if you want standard or Hi Definition. You have to own the movie and scan the UPC code off the box. I have since just started buying the movies directly off VUDU for new releases, so I can quit having to put the discs in the attic.

 

[hamz9561]

Plex works by having your movies stored on a local computer or NAS and running the free Plex server app. They have upgrades, but they aren't needed if you just want to run everything only at home. Plex has apps for almost every platform.

 

[olds97_lss]

So how does plex work?

I use serviio as the media server software. I rip all my movies using anydeskHD, then I compress the movie down to a H264 mp4 @ 7Mbit bitrate and 5.1channel AC3@640k mp4 file. That file type/codec combo worked natively with my bluray players and didn't require on the fly transcoding. It also works natively with the roku. Then I upload it to my media server and add the movie to my playlists as needed. Then I can either access them via a folder name (a,b,c...) as I created folders for the first char of the video and drop it in the appropriate folder, or, I skim through one of my playlists I create. I have a playlist with everything alpha, blue-ray only alpha, added to library by date asc and desc.

Was a lot of work and many many days of ripping when I started a few years ago. Now I just buy a movie, rip it, convert it, run a unix shell script to do all the above stuff automatically. My issue is I kept running out of disk space. Think I have an 8TB in my media server now and an external 10TB mirror drive I also copy to automatically. Even at 7Mb bitrate, a normal bluray is around 8-10G. I think we have nearly 500 movies on the server now not including hundreds of ripped TV shows I converted off blu-ray and DVD.

Oh yeah, this is the "what did you buy" thread... lol!

I bought an Arrma outcast today! My first Arrma truck! Taking next week off, so guessing it's going to get a beating very soon!

Started a thread for it over at ArrmaForum.com:
https://www.arrmaforum.com/threads/got-an-outcast-finally-a-card-carrying-arrma-basher.7469

 

[WoodiE]

I bought an Arrma outcast today!

Nice!

 

[griff7373]

OK I was wondering about the plex service I will just keep the VUDU.

 

[olds97_lss]

OK I was wondering about the plex service I will just keep the VUDU.

Running a media server is more so you have everything locally at the quality you want vs the quality provided by streaming.

 

[EvhCo]

Bought some chrome skull decorations and an ignition switch for my moped project. I don't usually put skulls on things but these ones looked kinda cute, lol.

Oh, and some coffee.

 

[hamz9561]

Picked up a new counter-top ice maker because the compressor went out on my old one.

 

[wacmartin]

I ordered a Proboat Recoil 17" on Thursday, it will be here on Wednesday. Depending on how I like boats I might spring for a larger model as well, just waiting on my Rustler and SCX10 to sell.

 

[griff7373]

Apple TV 4K time to get rid of the ROKU unfortunately. The ROKU started giving me audio issues with the netflix and VUDU, that don't seem to be going away. The audio cuts in and out and sometimes it crackles during playback, no issue with any of my other devices I used the apps on my other smart devices with no problems. I even hooked up the apple TV on the same HDMI cable and input on the receiver that ROKU was using with no problems.