Interesting reading about your early years, your parents, and the theater work.
Thanks for sharing.
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Most drama doesn’t often mention props, or the stage settings, or which side of the stage a character appears from - of disappears to… Some have “Character exits stage left” - stage managers don’t say “stage left” or “stage right” - its “prompt” (which I think is the usual side the stage manager has their desk - in my case it was stage left (i.e. to the right of the audience) - and the other side was called “opposite prompt” - which was long winded for the stage manager to call out on the tannoi (and use mechanists/stage hands had wired head sets) so it was just “O.P”…
A lot of the stuff is left up to the mind of the director, and the set and costume designer… e.g. if it was a Noel Coward piece set in the 1920’s - the fashion and interior decor had to be spot on… Other times - a director might do Julius Caesar - but (with input from the costume designer) have the legionaries and centurions dressed like WW2 Wehrmacht troopers and the other characters wearing WW2 German officer uniforms… There’s a great movie of Shakespeare’s “Richard III” (from 1995), with Sir Ian McKellen as the titular Richard - and it’s set and costumed sort of like WW2. Side note : “King Richard” (without the third) is used as rhyming slang downunder, the word its used for rhymes with “third” usage example : “I’m just going to the toilet to deliver a King Richard…”
And in Shakepeare’s day - there were no actresses, the female parts were performed by male actors… Then it all turned around with pantomime tradition, where a young male protagonist (e.g. Aladdin, or Peter Pan) was portrayed by a young actress… And the same back in the days of Sophocles and Aristophanes and Euripides in the BCE times of ancient Greece - women had very few rights - often didn’t even leave the domicile, and didn’t act in the Greek Tragedies either, women played a bigger part in Roman society than Greek…
Boy we (I mean me) got a bit off track there… Gotta wait till early Jan for my Dell Optiplex i5 (10th gen) system to arrive (to run Debian 13 and JellyFin media streamer) - but I have that week off work anyway…
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You are right… if I read Shakespeare there is nothing… only words from characters
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Chekhov does mention props in his scripts…
There’s a sort of “trope” - if a gun is listed as a prop in a Chekhov play - it will get used…
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This thing goes okay… Optiplex SFF 7080…
i5 (10th gen - 6 cores and hyper threading gives 12 CPU)
28 GB DDR4
256 Gb SSD (NVMe)
I’ll probably setup KVM on it too… But will probably point my local “virt-manager” on my Ubuntu desktop at the new box (running Debian 13)…
But I might point this install to host the KVM images on my NAS instead…
Won’t run anything heavy on it just yet - will wait and see how well JellyFin runs on it before eating up more cores/threads).
Note : this is to run as a Streaming Media server for my home network - I’d tried Plex on a Pi4 and it “didn’t cut the mustard” - and I looked at JellyFin and they recommended a Pi4 wasn’t up to the task… And with an Intel Discrete GPU - I should be able to transcode “on the fly”
One slight annoyance with Trixie - it installs systemd-timesync - but doesn’t install support for any timesync servers - neither ntp or chrony… Soon as I installed chrony - timedatectl reported the correct time :
╭─x@jellyroll ~/ResilioSync
╰─➤ sudo timedatectl 1 ↵
Local time: Wed 2026-01-07 15:47:52 AWST
Universal time: Wed 2026-01-07 07:47:52 UTC
RTC time: Wed 2026-01-07 07:47:52
Time zone: Australia/Perth (AWST, +0800)
System clock synchronized: yes
NTP service: active
RTC in local TZ: no
Having the wrong time caused my sync daemon (Resilio Sync) to not sync…
Just did some benchmarks - didn’t use GPU in either case (I think?)
Ubuntu 24.04 with ffmpeg 6.1.1 (Ryzen 7 3400x, 8 cores, 64 GB DDR4)
Debian 13 with ffmpeg 7.1.3 (i5 Gen10, 6 cores, 28 GB DDR4)
My Ubuntu 24.04 was seconds faster on each conversion… Not a massive difference… But still remarkable… That was resampling FLAC files to 320 kbps mp3…
Ubuntu :
01 - Dancing With Mr. D..flac: 100%|█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 293/293 [00:05<00:00, 58.37 seconds/s]
Debian :
1 - Dancing With Mr. D..flac: 100%|█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 293/293 [00:04<00:00, 66.17 seconds/s]
What the script does is use “ffpb” which runs ffmpeg - but shows a progress bar :
ffpb -i "$f" -ab 320k ../$MP3ALB/"${f%.*}".mp3
I guess I could try adding a threads argument and see how it goes with 4 threads on each…
Next benchmark - will be large video files… And next step will be installing JellyFin server…
Update : installed JellyFin and it’s indexing my media content now… The install was quite painless really - probably easier than Plex (which is proprietary - JellyFin is OSS)… Plex also requires you have a login they store on their infrastructure… Jellyfin lets me create local users (that don’t even need passwords)…
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Just tried side by side of downsising a 2.2 GB mp4 file x265 (software) and my AMD Ryzen was faster than the i5…
Tomorrow’s job (it’s 8:30 pm here) will be :
Write two versions of my downsample script…
- for AMD GPU hardware accel
- for Intel GPU hardware accel - not sure how to make ffmpeg use the 2nd GPU however…
But I’ll probably have to settle for h264 … x265 gives better compression - but I don’t think it can be accelerated in GPU… So - the Ryzen is better at x265 than the i5 (gen10)…
Of course the other difference is that I’m using ffmpeg 6 on the Ryzen and ffmpeg 7 on the i5…
I guess another comparison might be trying it on one of my M1 macs… But the ffmpeg version installed with Homebrew is 8!
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Practically since 2003/2005 I’ve always used Kingston but after to did upgrade for a MacBook Pro from 8GB to 16GB the original pair was Hynix. The upgrade was done practically after 10 years of the original acquisition. Therefore because I’ve never had problems with the RAM I can recommend Hynix
HTH
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I just listened to a Linux Matters podcast and one of the podcasters created a project to do something like this. It uses FFMPEG in a Go library and leverages different methods of acceleration.
Here is the link to the repo: GitHub - linuxmatters/ffmpeg-statigo: Real FFmpeg bindings for Go. Not a wrapper. Not a CLI tool. The actual libraries 
Here is the link to the podcast: Give me the Aux
They said it would support acceleration using Nvidia, Intel, Vulcan, and more.
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Damn!
JellyFin is truly awful! WTF?
On the “newer” hardware (i5 [gen10] with 28 GB RAM and a 4 GB Intel Arc A310 GPU) it’s okay at transcoding etc - that bit’s the good news…
But the algorithms it uses to scrape metadata from the intertubes are truly awful… I’d suggest about 2/3 of my content is mislabelled by the shonky metadata engine… Like about over 100 documentaries - it just tagged them as some shonky “Indiana Jones” garbage! I’ve disabled metadata completely on that collection…
It’s more work going in there and manually trying to edit the shit output than any convenience JellyFin might offer…
I shouldn’t complain - it’s a “community” effort - it’s free and it’s open source… But damn!
I thought Plex was bad… Plex was better than JellyFin…
It gets worse!
It’s updated the timestamps on all my movie folders - with some random algorithm… i.e. I have the NFS share mounted - and sorting on timestamp - it’s utter chaos…
FFS! I ordered this hardware to solve a problem and the software I used to deploy on it - created a way worse problem! Doh!
Hmmm - I’ll probably scrap this whole idea… Maybe try Plex again on modern x86_64 hardware (instead of using an RPi 4)… Not sure if Plex can do GPU accelerated GPU encoding… It was shit at it on a Pi4 …
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More “solliloquy”?
Might go back to JellyFin - tried Plex - it works - sorta - but I have to pay $11 a month for a subscription just to get Hardware acceleration on transcoding?
Here’s what I’m going to try - will take a while :
- Create a new folder - probably on the HDD (SSD) of the JellyFin server…
e.g. “/media/Movies”
2 . Create symbolic links for every YYYY-CamelCaseMovieName but in the format :
Uncamel Case Move Name (YYYY)
I have some sed regex I’ve saved to “unCamel Case” files / strings…
Interesting project I can script and test “at my leisure”… For now - Plex is better at handling metadata than JellyFin… But once I’ve got naming (via symlinks) sorted - JellyFin might behave better… Heck - might even be able to do it on a single line… All I’m going to be doing is creating symlinks with a different name… I love a powerful one liner 
- even if nested with semi-colons 
Not sure what to do about TV Shows though…
Current format :
TVSHows
├── ShowName
│ ├── Season1
│ │ ├── S01E01.mkv
│ ├── Season2
│ │ ├── S02E01.mkv
I hate the dumbass redundancy of having a file named “Show Name” in the filename when that’ should be f–king obvious because of the parent folder!!!
But JellyFin wants them like this :
TVSHows
├── Show Name (YYYY)
│ ├── Season 1
│ │ ├── Show Name (YYYY) S01E01.mkv
│ ├── Season2
│ │ ├── Show Name (YYYY) S02E01.mkv
Here’s what Movies will look like :
╭─x@mimas /media/Movies
╰─➤ ls -al
total 8
drwxrwxr-x 2 jellyfin jellyfin 4096 Jan 10 13:08 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Jan 10 12:59 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 38 Jan 10 13:07 'A Hard Days Night (1964)' -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/1964-AHardDaysNight
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 32 Jan 10 13:06 'Cape Fear (1962)' -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/1962-CapeFear
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 39 Jan 10 13:07 'Drugstore Cowboy (1989)' -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/1989-DrugstoreCowboy
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 33 Jan 10 13:08 'In the Soup (1992)' -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/1992-InTheSoup
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 45 Jan 10 12:59 'One Battle After Another (2025)' -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/2025-OneBattleAfterAnother
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 48 Jan 10 13:03 'Predator - Killer Of Killers (2025)' -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/2025-Predator-KillerOfKillers
Will probably be using find and some regex and script / loop based on this :
for F in $(find $MVZ -maxdepth 1 -type d -regex '.*/[0-9][^/]*$') ; do echo --- $F --- ; YEAR=$(echo $F |awk -F\- '{print $1}'|awk -F\/ '{print $NF}'); echo Year is $YEAR ; done
Where $MVZ is the location of my movies mounted via NFS from my NAS : snippet of output :
╭─x@mimas /media/Movies
╰─➤ for F in $(find $MVZ -maxdepth 1 -type d -regex '.*/[0-9][^/]*$') ; do echo --- $F --- ; YEAR=$(echo $F |awk -F\- '{print $1}'|awk -F\/ '{print $NF}'); echo Year is $YEAR ; done
--- /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/1967-Graduate-The ---
Year is 1967
--- /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/2015-Mustang ---
Year is 2015
-- snip snip --
Year is 2005
--- /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/1965-KingRat ---
Year is 1965
--- /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/2019-RogerWaters-UsAndThem ---
Year is 2019
--- /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/1921-TheKid ---
Year is 1921
and I reverted my host naming convention to moons of Saturn (was formerly named “jellyroll”)
And going symlinks means I don’t have to mess with the sort order… I can usually find a movie easily enough by knowing approx what year it was released…
And some regex here for removing Camel Case :
# replace CamelCase with space separator :
rename -n 's/(?<=\w)(?=[A-Z])/ /g' *
That should work with sed just as well…
(but it doesn’t - plagiarised some other examples - unfortunately - they seem to convert the 2nd upper case word to lower case… I guess I could then parse that through tr or something?
— long time analyzing —
Result :
for F in $(find $MVZ -maxdepth 1 -type d -regex '.*/[0-9][^/]*$') ; do echo --- $F --- ; YEAR=$(echo $F |awk -F\- '{print $1}'|awk -F\/ '{print $NF}'); TIT=$(echo $F |awk -F\/ '{print $NF}'|awk -F\- '{print $NF}'|sed 's/\([A-Z]\{1,\}\)/\ \L\1/g;s/\ //'|sed -e "s/\b\(.\)/\u\1/g"); LINK=$(echo "$TIT ($YEAR)") ; echo $LINK ; ln -s $F $LINK ; done
And now I have a folder with symlinks pointing back at the NFS mounted stuff :
╭─x@mimas /media/Movies
╰─➤ pwd
/media/Movies
╭─x@mimas /media/Movies
╰─➤ ls -al
total 156
drwxrwxr-x 2 jellyfin jellyfin 98304 Jan 10 15:00 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Jan 10 12:59 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 40 Jan 10 14:59 001 (2012) -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/2012-Hobbit-SHITE-001
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 40 Jan 10 14:59 002 (2013) -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/2013-Hobbit-SHITE-002
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 40 Jan 10 14:59 003 (2014) -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/2014-Hobbit-SHITE-003
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 51 Jan 10 14:59 1066the Battle For Middle Earth (2009) -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/2009-1066TheBattleForMiddleEarth
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 41 Jan 10 14:59 10cloverfield Lane (2016) -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/2016-10CloverfieldLane
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 33 Jan 10 14:59 12monkeys (1995) -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/1995-12Monkeys
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 35 Jan 10 14:59 13assassins (2010) -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/2010-13Assassins
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 58 Jan 10 14:59 13hours The Secret Soldiers Of Benghazi (2016) -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/2016-13HoursTheSecretSoldiersOfBenghazi
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 33 Jan 10 15:00 13minutes (2015) -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/2015-13Minutes
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 31 Jan 10 14:59 13moons (2002) -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/2002-13Moons
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 28 Jan 10 14:59 1900 (1976) -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/1976-1900
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 28 Jan 10 14:59 1941 (1979) -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/1979-1941
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 28 Jan 10 14:59 1984 (1956) -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/1956-1984
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 28 Jan 10 14:59 1984 (1984) -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/1984-1984
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 34 Jan 10 14:59 1984russki (2023) -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/2023-1984Russki
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 44 Jan 10 14:59 1991the Year Punk Broke (1992) -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/1992-1991TheYearPunkBroke
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 44 Jan 10 14:59 1991the Year Punk Broke (2011) -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/2011-1991TheYearPunkBroke
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 33 Jan 10 14:59 1%Outlaws (2017) -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/2017-1%Outlaws
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 41 Jan 10 14:59 20000cigarettes It (2010) -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/2010-20000CigarettesIT
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 40 Jan 10 14:59 20000days On Earth (2014) -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/2014-20000DaysOnEarth
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 41 Jan 10 14:59 2001aspace Odyssey (1968) -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/1968-2001ASpaceOdyssey
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 48 Jan 10 14:59 2010the Year We Make Contact (1984) -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/1984-2010TheYearWeMakeContact
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 28 Jan 10 14:59 2017 (2019) -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/2019-2017
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 28 Jan 10 14:59 2046 (2004) -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/2004-2046
- SNIP SNIP -
rwxrwxrwx 1 x x 31 Jan 10 14:59 'Zone414 (2021)' -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/2021-Zone414
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 38 Jan 10 14:59 'Zone Of Interest (2023)' -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/2023-ZoneOfInterest
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 37 Jan 10 14:59 'Zorba The Greek (1964)' -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/1964-ZorbaTheGreek
lrwxrwxrwx 1 x x 28 Jan 10 14:59 'Zulu (1964)' -> /mnt/BARGEARSE/MVZ/1964-Zul
Without having to touch the source folders/files on my NAS!
It’s a little bit untidy - but easy enough to sort the odd anomaly here and there - than a whole 2.5 TB of stuff
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Untidy - but - tidier than what was there before…
Laziness will always trump hardwork… Rather work smarter, than harder…
Listening to Don McLean : “Vincent” - quite easily the most beautiful song ever written - about the most amazing visual artist, ever…
The perfect song? About the most amazing visual artist?
They would not listen? Perhaps they’re still not lisening still?
Evocative about humans strugging through life - yet nobody cares… and Don was right - they still don’t care! I was naiive 45 years ago - I thought life would be better - but no - I was wrong - there’s now immoral multi-billionaires and still fellow humans who don’t have enough to eat… Why?
Why would you sit on 1,000,000,000 dollars - and eat, while others eat nothing?
That’s not politics - that’s morality… I don’t need to be a christian to know that’s wrong… I just need my humanist empathy…
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It is called capitalism. Its sole aim is to build capital… at the expense of others.
It is the things we do , of fail to do, that bring morals into the equation.
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And yes, some people sit on hundreds of billions. When do they have enough?
At some point you would think they would said, “I have enough money.” and funnel some of their money back to those in need thru a charity.
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I was thinking of letting bill gates adopt me
Why Bill Gates is Choosing Not to Leave 99% of His Wealth to His Children .
But then read the NOT clause, perhaps because they use linux ?
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Sorry - got sidetracked with a rant…
I’ve mostly sorted JellyFin - it’s running nicely…
A few anomalies here and there…
Basically - the media “libraries” points at folders in /media…
In those folders - e.g. TVShows - there are symlinks to the main share mounted over NFS from my NAS…
It’s working well…
I’ll slowly start adding TVShows, and Documentaries - bit by bit… I’ve got about 35+ TV shows in there now - and the metadata looks correct…
It’s actually quite neat really… I just didn’t think it out properly first before I tried to just add ALL my video media in one hit…
I won’t be using it for music however… It’s horrible at indexing Music…
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Update :
Over 1900 movies…
97 TV Shows / series
51 Documentary / series
Hosting my very own Netflix for my home LAN…
And yes - I can watch something in Brave (but not all content plays - I’ve noticed stuff I’ve converted to x265/h265 [using ffmpeg] won’t play in Brave - but they play everywhere else the O/S supports that codec), then continue in the FlatPak app for JellyFin - or - in Safari on a Mac - or in the dedicated iOS app on an iPad - and it remembers where I was up to!
Those 1900 movies - was done mostly with a shell script / “bash one liner” - i.e. find the folders - create symlinks to them in the naming format that Jellyfin prefers (i.e. “Title of Movie (YYYY)”…
I’m adding TV shows and Documentaries manually - incremementally…
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You might consider donating this resource to the local library.
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Was that meant to be a joke? Maybe you forgot to add an emoji / smiley-face? 
It’s not physical media - it’s 1’s and 0’s stored as files on my NAS… Some of it ripped from physical media, some of it downloaded ‘for purely archival purposes’ or “backups” or “offsite storage”…
And I’m not about to open up my home LAN to the rest of the internet to access that content from outside…
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No. Libraries keep 0’s and 1’s these days.
So what are you going to do with it?.. apart from personal use I mean… or is that the sole purpose?
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Not even to some of It’s Foss members?
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