Ah, good ol’ Microsoft. Always finding ways to “surprise” us.
I know you can use AutoHotKey to map controller input as well, but I totally understand why you might not want to after that other mess happened (and I imagine you may have actually tried this already anyway).
Anyway, no prob. I’ll look around as well and if I come across anything, I’ll let you know.
In the meantime, I hope your search goes well!
Ah, sure.
Yeah, I get it. I hope my post wasn’t unnecessarily overwhelming or anything. Didn’t mean to be all “come to the light, Kodi has all you need”. I see now what you were getting at. Not that Kodi is missing those features, but that you want something simpler with those features.
I actually wanted something similar before I even bothered with Kodi. All I wanted was to maybe go through my files and play my videos with SMPlayer (I just prefer that over VLC).
Too many features can be unnecessary, so I get you.
Even for me, Kodi can sometimes be too much. My setup is so basic that it might as well be a glorified video player, but there are a few features I still use and the laptop isn’t for anything else, so no reason to use anything else at this point.
Now, this might sound like an odd idea, but have you looked into maybe trying to launch a video player via Steam’s Big Picture mode? I ask because you can set up your controller to work similarly to mouse and keyboard with Steam Input and then you can control the video with your Xbox controller.
You could probably make a custom layout and then map certain buttons to their respective keyboard shortcuts.
You then wouldn’t need to install or set up anything else, and it’ll allow you to use whatever media player you want.
I know this does add a bit more complexity for the initial starting up the player, but once everything’s mapped, you just launch it from Steam and watch your stuff (admittedly, you would need to open your files from within the media player, which could be annoying due to most standalone media players not really having their own “big picture” mode).
- fullscreen mode (dark mode / theme preferably, even if I would have to make it manually somehow)
- option to navigate my drive or external drive
- xbox controller support
- subtitles support
I’m a bit confused as to why Kodi isn’t working fine for you when it comes to all of this.
I use it on an old laptop specifically for media and all that stuff works perfectly for me, although, admittedly, I do sometimes find that Kodi can initially be somewhat unintuitive (I also had issues when I first set it up, and I think the official wiki is basically required reading at this point).
Either way, no idea why you’re finding issues with those features.
It should be fullscreen by default, but if it’s not, (I think?) there should be a fullscreen button somewhere in the top left of the home page if you’re using the default skin.
There are dozens of skins/themes you can install, some of which are pretty dark by default.
I personally disable the entire library scanning thing and just browse my external drive because I prefer doing that due to my own organisation of media.
Multiple controls are natively supported, including most game controllers like Xbox (provided the kernel has the drivers, and if you’re using Windows it absolutely does), and you can also use your smartphone/tablet as a remote control, if you’d like.
Fully supports most popular subtitle formats, as well.
The reason it’s messing with your files is because of the way sources can be set up. Don’t add anything to a specific “media library” and disable all media scraping add-ons.
You can just add your drive (or specific directory) as a basic source and browse it via Kodi’s native file manager that way. You’ll still get thumbnails and basic metadata info, but nothing else (which is perfect for me, personally).
I’m not at my machine right now, so I can’t really give instructions on that specifically, but for any other stuff, the rest of the Kodi wiki is fairly detailed.
Again, I also think it’s sometimes a bit unintuitive, but once you sort it out, it can just be left alone to do its thing and shouldn’t bother you with anything you don’t want. For me, I use it as a pretty basic media player, just using a few extra features here and there, but not really as a library management tool like most other people do.
I would install the backup add-on, though, so you don’t have to go through the whole setup again if you happen to lose the configuration or accidentally enable features you might not want.
I didn’t realize that reddit formats the link completely differently when you “share” from its shitty app.
My bad, and sorry about that. Should work now.
You’re better off buying a cheap USB optical drive, re-ripping those CDs, and transcoding the files to something like Opus, which offers comparable quality to 320kbps MP3 files at lower bitrates (which also means smaller file sizes).
Or you can just “download” the FLAC versions, transcode those, and delete them after.
Also, kind of funny how this was posted just after someone complained about the same thing in the audio engineering subreddit.
It’s also for Debian Stable/Testing users who only have ESR in their repos.
You can set up APT pinning and pull it from Sid, but I prefer not to fuck with official repos other than Backports. Even then, only if I really need to.
As someone who uses it somewhat regularly… It’s terrible. Apparently the next update is supposed to fix some of the UX issues people have had for years. But they said that last time as well.
I just use Krita now for most stuff. The only thing GIMP does better (or did, I haven’t checked recently) is textboxes. Adding text to images on Krita was a nightmare a few years ago, but maybe they’ve fixed it.
Seconding this.
Krita’s made so much progress over the years. One of the best FOSS image tools. It might be intended for painting and artists, but it’s just as good at regular image editing.
Second rule, subsection B: Arch, btw.
I actually agree with you entirely. I was just trying to play a bit of Devil’s advocate with admittedly some exaggeration on my part. I would much prefer keeping our cookies free of their sticky fingers and we can all still do our best to minimize their influence.
They have their reasons for funding and contribution, but it’s often than only in their interest to do it, rather than being “good to the community”. Their Linux kernel contributions, for example, often end up predominantly being for things that affect Android.
I do my best to minimize the amount of Google stuff I do/use as well. It’s just that I often find the Firefox-Google talking point to be missing the bigger picture and it’s not as simple as "Google gives money to Mozilla, therefore Firefox = inherently bad for taking their money ".
The irony of all of this is that I was typing my previous comments on Brave on Android due to my constant browser hopping. Mull is my default, but sometimes I just go with Brave or Vivaldi for random shit (Firefox mobile is really bad for live streaming video compared to most Chromium browsers, in my experience, but it might just be my set up or something).
Ooh, I didn’t know that. Thanks for sharing!
That’s actually quite the sum, but I guess considering Safari’s reach, it makes sense.
I just think that if you consider that, they are more dependent on Google than Brave is.
I think we’re defining “dependent” in two different ways here. There’s financial reliance (which applies to far more than Firefox when it comes to major FOSS projects) and software reliance. I don’t particularly think either is better or worse, but there are significant differences in the result of either.
Financial contribution in exchange for defaulting to a specific search engine is very different from using a Google-led project as the base foundation of your software.
Unless Brave actually hard forks Blink/Chromium, they’re literally depending on Google’s work for the entire base of their flagship software.
They can choose not to implement certain features, but without Google, their browser as it currently is wouldn’t exist. Theoretically (this is highly unlikely, but just as an experiment) if Google were to somehow move to a closed source model for future versions or ditch all work on Blink, Brave would very likely die.
If they wanted to keep it alive, they’d have to fork the last open source version of Chromium, maintain it alongside everything else, and still push out something secure that adheres to web standards. None of which is easy and requires a lot of work.
Financially, yeah. Firefox has more reliance on Google than Brave. So do GNOME, KDE, and the Linux Foundation.
When it comes to their software, Brave is far more reliant on Google than Firefox could ever be.
The only major browser not reliant on Google at all is Safari. (Edit: ignore this; Google pays Apple a shit ton to be default on Safari as well.)
Despite my dislike of web monopoly, I don’t particularly care what browser people use, provided they’re being honest about it.
I don’t like Google. I don’t trust them. But it would be incredibly shortsighted to dismiss their contributions (financial or otherwise) to open source. Whether people like it or not, without them, we wouldn’t have a lot of shit we take for granted.
If people want to “get away from using Google stuff”, they might as well just ditch tech altogether. Google’s fingers are in just about every big FOSS cookie jar, whether financially or via software contribution.
Think about it this way. Brave needs Google. Google doesn’t need Brave. At all. Mozilla needs funding from Google. Google doesn’t need funding from Mozilla. Google requires very little of either of them, but they both rely on it for different reasons. One approach isn’t worse than the other, but the effects are very, very different.
At least they are financially independent from Google, which you can’t say about Firefox.
I absolutely love it when people bring this up.
It’s always funny, mostly because Google is, let’s see… A member of the GNOME Advisory Board, a financial supporter of the GNOME Foundation (scroll to the bottom to see their supporters), a supporting member of the KDE e.V., a Gold member of the Linux Foundation, and a major contributor to the Linux Kernel (you’ll see some other companies you absolutely hate in that list as well).
Almost nothing in the major open source space is untouched by Google. But sure, Firefox in particular is evil because “Google money”.
If you don’t want to use something with financial support from Google, feel free to run FreeBSD and browse the web with, I don’t know, Lynx or something. Or Apple devices with Safari only. That’s a pretty good option, actually, provided you like proprietary software and a super locked down system (except WebKit which is open source and I honestly believe more browsers should be based on it). Lol, edit: Google pays more to Apple than Mozilla to be default on Safari, so nevermind that.
Don’t do it often, but if I need to pull a particular loop from a video or something, ffmpeg works perfectly fine.
You can use LosslessCut or Avidemux or something to trim the video to the few seconds you want to loop and then do the rest with ffmpeg. Technically, you can do it all with ffmpeg, but LosslessCut is just a nice GUI for that exact purpose (pretty sure it uses ffmpeg as a backend).
Actually, LosslessCut may be able to export to GIF, but I think I tried once and had issues with that. Could be misremembering.
Need to add in some flags and filters with ffmpeg, though, otherwise it just straight converts it to the absolute highest quality in the highest resolution and at the same source framerate, which leaves you with a massive file.
I’m not certain about editing actual GIF files. ImageMagick might help there, and I know you can throw a GIF into GIMP and make changes there, but it’s really cumbersome.
For creating new GIFs entirely out of unique static images? No idea, unfortunately. Never done that, I don’t think.
Yeah, and also Leap is going away due to SUSE rebasing SLE on their proposed ALP, which will essentially be the downstream of Aeon and Kalpa.
Tumbleweed is still the way to go for general desktop use. Can be fun to experiment with the others, though.
Good resource for all platforms: https://lemdro.id/post/4319
Constantly updated, so make sure to check in there every couple of weeks.
I think most apps are decent in their own way and appeal to different users. Some want a simple client that just does what it needs to do, some prefer complete customization, some prefer having the exact same interface that they had on reddit, some prefer something a little different.
Infinity, Sync, Liftoff, Jerboa, Thunder, just to name a few, are all good for different reasons. Some upcoming ones look really nice (particularly Artemis which will be for Kbin and, shortly later, Lemmy) and several are cross-platform, which is a benefit when suggesting something that everyone can use.
I personally really like the Photon web app UI. And since it’s a web app, it’s platform agnostic as well which is nice. (Another bonus is that any instance can use it and other web app interfaces as potential alternative interfaces for the entire instance, like lemdro.id using Photon for https://nu.lemdro.id/)
To be honest, I just stick with the web interface at this point. I’ve become so used to it and I don’t feel like using apps that were reddit ones or try to emulate them or reddit in general. Prefer Lemmy feeling a bit, if only a little, different from my previous time on the orange nightmare site, but I get why others prefer them for familiarity.
I wonder when SUSE is going to have their turn at annoying a bunch of people.
Canonical’s been doing it for years, Red Hat decided to run with it as well, and I’m pretty sure SUSE is the only major enterprise left that develops their own distro.
Oh, don’t worry. They played for both sides and helped America as well.
And by “helped America”, I mean helped facilitate the internment of over a hundred thousand civilians of Japanese descent.
But still, they helped in the war effort, I suppose. Who they helped just depends on your perspective at any given time.
Don’t get too attached. SUSE have their own plans for the future with their whole ALP thing. They say they’re going to leave Tumbleweed alone, but we’ll have to see how long that lasts.
Then again, ALP could fail miserably and they just go back to the traditional model.
Lol, actually that’s on me. I was an idiot and confused AHK with Joy2Key for some reason.
However, I did find this on the AHK wiki, although it seems like Microsoft, as usual, makes things harder than they need to be:
Still, it’s worth a shot regardless. Seems like it does support gamepads but there might also be some tinkering required.