Alpha Centauri was awesome, but so were a lot of the other games. Colonization was a lot of fun. Call to Power is the civ game I want a real sequel to. Going way into the future tech was a lot of fun, and being able to build cities at the bottom of the ocean.

Of course, I think the whole franchise has gone downhill since Civ IV, so take my opinion as you will.

Now we have murderers who just spent the last 1000 years reading philosophy books.

I think my oven/stove can be connected. I have never tried because I don’t see the need to preheat my oven when I am not home.

It works great as a poor man’s ad blocker.

I personally would not use it for anything that is being saved on your drive. Using cpu encoder is slower but I just let it run over night or whatever and it will be done later.

Save GPU encoding for when you need it smaller right now like when you are transcoding on the fly.

I generally think that for storage/archiving you should use CPU encoding and only use GPU for things like transcoding where real-time results are crucial.

GPU encoding is a lot worse quality than CPU, and you can’t change the settings to what you want. Better to just accept the extra time requirement to get a better result.

I would try making one video into the format you want and see if it plays where you want it.

This is one sector where I am actually happy for AI to be available. I want to play a game where the NPC’s can say my character name.

That being said, I also want the voice actors to be compensated fairly. Maybe the guilds can set up a deal where using someone’s voice for training data is included.

Blender is not designed as a CAD software. It is for 3d modeling. So you would use Blender to make graphics for a video game, or a 3d movie.

CAD is more for designing things to be made outside of a computer, so 3d printing, CNC or stuff like that.

Blender doesn’t consider the object as a whole, and can leave holes that a CAD setup would handle.

I can also vouch for VLC to somewhat work, but it is pretty flaky and might need some finesse to work very well.

My experience has been to just rip all the titles using MakeMKV and load the extras into Jellyfin into a /Extras directory. That way I can watch the special features, but I lose the DVD menus, which can sometimes be a good thing with forced previews and FBI warnings and whatnot.