You're confusing a container format (MKV) with a video codec (AV1)
MKV is just a container like a folder or zip file that contains the video stream (or streams, technically you can have multiple) which could be in H264, H265, AV1 etc etc, along with audio streams, subtitles and many other files that go along, like custom Fonts, Posters, etc etc.
As for the codec itself, AV1 done properly is a very good codec but to be visually lossless it isn't significantly better than a good H265 encode without doing painfully slow CPU encodes, rather than fast efficient GPU encodes. people that are compressing their entire libraries to AV1 are sacrificing a small amount of quality, and some people are more sensitive to its flaws than others. in my case I try to avoid re-encoding in general.
AV1 is also less supported on TVs and Media players, so you run into issues with some devices not playing them at all, or having to use CPU decoding.
So I still have my media in mostly untouched original formats, some of my old movie archives and things that aren't critical like daily shows are H265 encoded for a bit of space saving without risking compatibility issues. Most of my important media and movies are not re-encoded at all, if I rip a bluray I store the video stream that was on the disk untouched.
Neat. I did something similar but simpler. I put a cheap zigbee motion detector in the mailbox and hooked it to a routine to toggle a flag and trigger a notification. Yours sounds like more fun though.
A big differentiator in how you might want to tackle this depends on one question, are you planning on getting into Linux systems administration, like for work? Because if you actually really want low level Linux skills then that’s a whole slew of things you’ll need to learn from scratch. And it’s not just your Windows-only experience that’s holding you back, managing a server is different from managing your desktop.
But if you’re not really interested in working in IT or all you really want to learn how to self host, you’re probably better off with an appliance, like UnRAID. These OSs abstract away much of the low level stuff so you don’t have to worry about it. Not the best way to learn how Linux works really well, but the easiest way to manage your self hosted environment.
There's prometheus node exporter which can collect such data from several hosts. You can hook it up with Grafana for neat dashboards and I'm almost sure it also integrates with Homeassistant.
Its not exactly lightweight, but the Netdata integration will get you all of that.
Securing Netdata itself can be a bit of a chore, and then the integration requires creating sensors of interest in your configuration.yaml file. Have a look, it might be an interesting project if you're up for a challenge.
When you put mail in the box, unless it's a REALLY small bit of mail it'll land so it obscures at least one of the proximity sensors. This then sets the 'got mail' statue to 'on' in Home Assistant. From there, I have HA set up to send me notifications to go and check the mail.
Before you say so, yes this was a lot of work for something so trivial, but it was fun. Plus I actually get so little physical mail that I can forget to check the mailbox for weeks at a time. Which would be very bad if I got some actually important mail. And actually, that exact thing happened just days after I finished installing the thing. So it has already potentially saved me from a fine.
Really nice project! I wanted to get into esp home for a while, but am missing some kind of starter kit hardware wise. Do you have any recommendations?
I'm sorry to say I don't. :/ You can grab dev boards off aliexpress for cheap, and they're really easy to play with. Just connect the to your PC via USB to load your initial ESPHome script, and they spring to life. From there you can do basic testing, since they'll get power from the USB. It's just a matter of what you decide you want to hook up to them after that. I assume you're looking for like a hobby kit, like you can get for arduino boards? Something that comes with a bunch of LEDs and I2C components you can fiddle with? Unfortunately I don't know of any that come with ESP32 dev boards, but I'll admit I've not looked. Sorry.
Yes exactly, when looking for it I find only Arduino kits. Some time ago I got interested in pine64, was reading a while and bought a soc board plus some stuff around it (like a touch screen and emmc storage). Turned out that particular board didn't come with the display output and to install a system on emmc you need an UART Adapter, so I ended up buying more stuff, which I was missing. Don't want to do the same again ^^
With esp32 I have the problem that there are so many different and I don't see how they differ (except the price)
Okay so that is an issue with the ESP32, sure. There are a lot of variants.
So from what I can tell, the ESP32 is the SoC chip and what you usually get is a dev board which has that plus a bunch of power regulation bits, a USB connector and UART so you can easily program it, etc. That part varies mostly by pinout. I.e. Same features, different pin location.
There are also variants of the chip, but those are usually more costly and will be named things like ESP32-S2.
Every one I've seen can run off 5v or 3.3v and uses the latter for logic, so if you got yourself an arduino kit and then just bought an ESP32 dev board it would almost certainly work with whatever is in the kit. Both are microcontrollers, not microprocessors, so they tend not to have OSes or screens.
Is there a trick to this? I have attempted several times. It always says the path is wrong... I've opened terminal for the container and CD into the directory and LS to see all my photos. Copy the path name and put it into the external library and it still says bad path.
I don't understand the fascination of other commenters with mini-PCs, as the mini-ness was mentioned nowhere in the OP.
any used and decomissioned old office PC, any i5/i7 is way more powerful than you'll need for that setup. you get everything you need right in the box and you can cram it full with cheap RAM and hard disks. you get to repurpose something that's useless as a desktop workstation and not buy more future e-waste.
yes, the mini-PCs and the Rpis are more power efficient, but the operating costs of a $30-50 PC don't come close to the price of buying one of these mini-things, not to mention - figuring out how to run large hard disks with it.
I agree that desktop/ATX tower PCs are the most useful form factor, you can stuff all your old junk hardware in there and offer it a second life without much investment.
However with current electricity prices buying more power efficient hardware can be a better medium-term investment. 1kWh bills at 0.2516€ currently where I'm at (~EU average price), assuming an average power consumption of 50W this gives you (50×24×365)/1000×0.2516=110€/year. At this rate a 200€ investment in hardware would pay for itself in 2-3 years.
Buying a <100€ setup is not worth it for general purpose servers in my opinion, it will either be underpowered or power hungry.
My current solution is to to run all my services in KVM (libvirt) VMs on my beefy desktop computer which is already on most of the time anyway. Best of both worlds.
If I had to redo everything I would probably buy a NUC/mini-PC with a good CPU, 64GB RAM and low power consumption, stash a single huge SSD in there, migrate my VMs there and call it a day. But this is not a cheap setup.
It really depends what purpose the seedbox serves. I think they usually come with tons of (non-redundant) storage and fat bandwidth for seeding, right?
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