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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: February 10th, 2024

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  • Legitimately playing 4K blu-ray video on a PC without cracking the DRM requires an insane combination of requirements:

    • Windows 10 (not 11)
    • An Intel processor between gen 7-10 (nothing newer because Intel ditched SGX in 2021)
    • Intel integrated graphics (no nvidia/amd)
    • Monitor that supports HDCP 2.2 for DRM (some 4k ones don’t)
    • An approved optical drive
    • Proprietary playback software which costs about $100 USD, separate from the cost of hardware and Windows
    • Miscellaneous other requirements for the motherboard features, bios settings, etc.

    Meanwhile MakeMKV can rip them on basically any Windows/Linux/Mac system with a compatible BDXL drive.


  • Likewise, I’m far less hesitant to accept buying digital console games than video because I generally can expect that once I download a game on my one device that I’ll pull out the same device whenever I want to play it and it’ll keep working when offline and even after the servers are gone, until the hardware fails. Modern games’ physical releases rely so heavily on updates and DLC that the cart/disc you get isn’t complete anyway; buying physical effectively becomes a digital game with an extra point of failure (and partial resellability). PC gaming complicates things but at least some games are available completely DRM-free there.

    With video content sold online, streaming directly from some server is always the focus. As soon as the server disconnects you become unable to watch by default. Even if some service lets you pre-download within its app and watch offline (which probably won’t work indefinitely without checkins anyway), that’ll defeat the portability expectations for watching your videos on any device interchangeably.

    Blu-ray video isn’t ideal considering you cannot watch it on a phone, tablet, or linux system without cracking its DRM, but that’s still way better for lasting access than anything else major movie/TV studios are willing to let consumers access without piracy.


  • This board has the StarFive JH7110 SoC. That processor has previously been in very low power single board computers like StarFive VisionFive 2 (2022) and Milk-V Mars (2023), a Raspberry Pi clone that can be bought for as low as $40. Its storage limitations (SD/eMMC rather than NVMe) show how much this isn’t meant for laptop use.

    Very underpowered for a laptop too, even when considering this is intended for developers and doesn’t need to be remotely performance competitive. Consider that this has just 4 RV64GC cores, the cheapest Intel board options Framework offers are 12 cores (4P+8E), and any modern RISC-V core is far simpler with less area than even an Intel E core. These cores also lack the RISC-V vector instructions extension.