what’s the cheapest / best value option for buying a 4k uhd blu-ray player?
This is a frustrating device category because it’s such a single-function device; I’m always aware I can watch very good streams of these movies but I’m doing this because I want to see a movie I love as nice as it can possibly be rendered.
I have a Sony UBP-X700; it works fine but you obnoxiously need to manually switch between Dolby Vision and HDR-10 colorspaces when you move between discs; you can leave it on Dolby Vision but it will be tonemapping standard- and HDR-10 into Dolby colorspace (Dolby Vision is superior but not on every disc; it supports per-frame tonemapping as opposed to per-disc tonemapping).
I had a refurbished LG UBK90 but the disc drive broke within a year. However, it auto-detected HDR mode.
The new consoles and especially the Xbox Series S (oh wait only the Series X has a disc drive) should be the best option now, but none of them support Dolby Vision HDR playback, which, given that the entire point of watching a 4k blu-ray over a 4k HDR stream is that you care about the highest fidelity picture, isn’t acceptable to me.
Are you serious? MS I get I guess but Sony what the fuck
the Series S/X just got Dolby Vision patched in i think, but i can totally believe it does not support blu rays.
this media category seems really, really, really difficult to justify engaging with rather than just downloading rips
like it’s ever been thus but in this case I honestly don’t think it’s even close. you can get all the lossless or remuxed UHD HEVC you want
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yep, not for discs
yeah but I don’t have the hard drive space to download 80 gig files for 1 movie. nor do I have the bandwidth. It’s far less of a hassle at this point to just start collecting discs again.
the multipass reencodes are typically in the neighbourhood of 30GB fwiw but fair enough
thanks, looking into that LG player now
What program do people use if they want to monitor the CPU and GPU load and such while doing the gaming? Also temperatures and stuff.
Preferably something that adds it as an overlay during the deed.
I just use hwinfo or the windows xbox overlay, I’m sure there are more gamer-centric options
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somebody has to buy the discs so the rips keep existing for me to steal
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MSI Afterburner does what you want, and it works with non-MSI GPUs.
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ive never played diablo 2, i had a p133 on release that couldn’t handle it and just never got around to it in the last 20 years
i’m sort of acutely aware of it as the origin of a lot of things i don’t like about modern games??? but still vaguely curious about playing it. is the remaster good??? should i do this???
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yes.
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I have been playing the remaster and yes it is good. Thinking back I always remember it as the build-maximizing, instant room-clearing grind game you can turn it into (and what its future imitators focused on as The Juice), but that really is an optional/endgame way to play - starting out, playing alone and just going linearly through the campaign, it’s a lot more like Diablo 1 than I gave it credit for.
An absolute blast on co-op as well - if you can arrange yourself regular partner(s) with dedicated play-together characters it’s a whole new awesome way to play.
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Remembering Diablo 2 I don’t think there’s a single interesting thing about it in 2021 if you don’t particularly like the genre TBH
The aesthetic is better than Diablo 3’s but it’s still a Blizzard game
It’s a time waster
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depends on what you want in a video game! the remaster is basically 1-to-1 with old d2. most of the reviews i’ve seen complain about it not being “modern” enough.
i think it’s fun time-waster but you probably need to appreciate it on either a nostalgic or aesthetic level to get much out of it. i think parts of it feel uninviting in a way that d3 never manages and i appreciate it for that. it’s fun to watch the numbers go up – sort of a clicker that requires slightly more active participation.
it’s definitely more fiddly than modern action RPGs. sifting through loot is sort of a pain, your inventory is small, holding potions and consumables compete with actual items you want to hold. there’s a stamina meter and it depletes really quickly when you try to run anywhere. town portals are a consumable and running out often means wasting a bunch of time running back and forth. i imagine these points are what are annoying reviewers, but those rough edges are kind of endearing to me in 2021. i’m pretty tired of the best-practice standard template every modern game tries to follow so it’s nice to have something a little more player-hostile.
EDIT:
i do agree with this too!
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Yeah - my read here is that all the logistical difficulties the game introduces are what make it an actual game with an appreciable experience and not just a clicker. You can’t actually run around mindlessly clicking on enemies, there are certain types that your particular build will be vulnerable to and you have to make split second decisions on tactics and power use and consumable use based on enemy type. Last night I got in a big fight and died with only a couple minor enemies left when I ran out of health potions, got down to 1 hp from poison, and then got hit by a stray rando little mook I didn’t clear when I backtracked to try to find a health potion. In retrospect I should’ve just tp’ed, but yeah - it’s choices and consequences, baby.
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This is how I remember D2 and it’s also what has always been the source of my disappointment with how D3. There’s more peril to D2 than there ever was in D3, things feel dangerous. I also love the look of it too.
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