Basically nothing, it'll just work.

Basic local wifi is plenty fast for any local video streaming situation unless you're operating on the edge of signal range due to distance or problematic physical materials in the way.

I can literally stream UHD Blu-Ray Remux's over an Asus AC68U wireless access point to my unremarkable Wal-mart purchased Asus laptop or my Steam Deck.

Multiple concurrent clients could be an issue at some point of course, but for just 'you'? Nah, most stuff is more than enough.

Not asserting this isn't the case, I've not noticed it, but I can't see why this would be the case for the actual encoding. Decoding I've seen it make a difference but that's mostly the pre-Skylake iGPUs using a poor implementation of QuickSync.

No, it's totally a fact. Software encoding yields you better results in terms of 'quality per megabyte' over hardware encoding unless you are using some real bad sloppy software encoding results. If size efficiency matters more than anything, you use software encoding or you're basically leaving money on the table. Of course the downside is that hardware encoding is a whoooooooooooooole heck of a lot faster.

How about 'Not Your Drive, Not Your Data'?

If your family member's who leave their TV's frame interpolation setting enabled are the bad guys, this OP is the boss fight.

black friday deals havent been that great in 20 years. it used to be a major deal.

This is bullshit.

Black Friday was insane for a handful of years following the Great Recession of 2008. Lasted till the very early 2010s. Retailers were desperate, desperate, to get you in the door or buying things on the website.

I've seen it, but I collect a lot of magazine cover discs, 90s PC games and stuff, it's def pretty darn rare. 'Did the previous owner(s) abuse the disc?' is a vastly higher concern for me in my eBay adventures.

That's not a foot print. The patter exactly follows the bubbles in the envelope. It just got dirty, and dirty in such a way that the dirt only contacted the slightly raised bubbles, so it must have come into contact rather gently.

And seriously, your drive packaging is not crushed, wouldn't that have been you first hint that it had not been stepped on? Like, for comparison, put the drives back in the envelope, stomp on it with your foot, and compare the results.

By 'DVD Player' I'm gonna assume you mean 'DVD DRive' on a computer, and not a box you plug into your TV.

The drive region only matters for legit playback on licensed DVD playback software. For ripping software, they're effectively agnostic, they'll rip any disc no matter the region code of the drive or disc.

Have you tried using the Perif1 port on the PSU? THat's actually identical to the SATA ones, it's just technically supposed to be used for SATA connectors, but they're actually all the same thing on the PSU side. I have Supernova P2s and I've run SATA cables out of the PERIF1 for years.

This is a big part of it IMO. Even 'streaming exclusive' stuff that see's no physical release gets pirated enmass so many copies exist. Few people copy YouTube content however, since it's already online, free, and easily accessible. ...Until the day it's not accessible of course.

One could safeguard thousands of movies, song, art of any kind, that might disappear because some of it becomes lost media. Instead some prefer to backup content made for an ad platform.

Let's be clear here, movies, songs, and most art are also vehicles to serve you ads or generate admission/purchase revenue off the consumer. Like you criticize YouTube for being an 'Ad Platform' but elevate 'Songs' as if you've never heard of a radio station?

Funny enough, most films, music and other content are much better protected from being lost. They are mass produced, mass released, and have many many many pirated copies not to mention retail physical copies. YouTube on the other hand? People take for granted that it's there, online, easy to access from anything, and much of it doesn't easily have redundant copies on the internet so it vanishes in a flash when removed from YouTube.

Were these recorded with a DVD Recorder? Probably never closed the burn on the discs so they are 'open' and that gets funky with drives that didn't burn the disc in the first place.

I've been pretty selective, mostly YouTube channels that do 'Tech Documentary Stuff' cause I enjoy re-watching that. LGR would be a prime example.

However, I integrate all of these in my Kodi infrastructure, so only large channels have metadata online in the TVDB or the like.

For those without, I'd love some tips on something to generate Kodi compatible series metadata directly from YouTube.

Wait, you mean you had years of photos, the only copy of which was on a MicroSD card, the least durable storage media known?

...Geez.

The secret is just don't do that. Never trust a MicroSD card as the only copy of anything.