After changing my blog over to Hugo, I had to go through many posts to clean up conversion issues and I noticed that I hadn’t mentioned anything about my media setup since 2018. I have since changed the hardware, OS, and softare I use for playback.
Hardware
For the hardware I bought a “Phantom Canyon” Intel NUC. This machine only needs to have RAM, SSD, and OS added to it and it is ready to go.
I selected this machine because I wanted a gaming machine as well as use for video playback. This machine comes with a desktop version of the Nvidia RTX 2060. While I use it for video playback much more than I do for games, the games requirement imposes a need for a graphics card of at least this performance. I also bought this machine before the crypto currency crash when you couldn’t get a GPU of any consequence without paying around twice the retail price or more.
I selected a Razer Turret for playing games across the room. Many like to use controllers but I absolutely love to use a keyboard/mouse. So the difficulty was finding a good keyboard/mouse that can be used from the lap across the room and this one fits that bill, albiet a bit expensive. While multicolored lights have unfortunately become an epidemic for gaming hardware, it’s at least not distracting.
Operating System
Given that I wanted a machine for gaming, I decided to run Windows on this machine. While a lot of my games do function on Linux, many are Windows only. However, Windows does have a large set of nuisances built into the OS. To mitigate this I used Winaero Tweaker to significantly improve the OS.
Additionally using Windows lends itself better to video playback. HDR support has very limited functionality in Linux at the time of this writing and I’m not sure I would be able to get it working at all. However on Windows HDR worked at least decently well.
Software
For the video playback softare, I use Plex HTPC. This is the successor for the old Plex Media Player (PMP) and supports many of the previous apps configurability but with a newer UI and support for the new features such as Skip Intro.
I haven’t had to do as much customization as I did in the past with PMP. Mostly it is around making certain remote commands change audio tracks or subtitle tracks and experimentation. Currently I’m playing with rendering the video through vulkan using the gpu-next in MPV.
So there you have it, my current media setup.