It depends what you're looking for. In the AV enthusiast circles a lot of people flock towards the Ugoos AM6B Plus (with CoreELEC).
It is one of the only devices (alongside Oppo clones) that can play Dolby Vision Profile 7 FEL (Full Enhancement Layer) with 100% accuracy. The Shield can play P7, but it ignores the FEL data; the Ugoos actually processes it.
That said, people don’t generally use Android on it, instead you boot to CoreELEC from an SD card and use Kodi.
This is the only reason I know about this Ugoos device. I find it so strange that Profile 7 is effectively unsupported outside of Blu-ray players and this one device. It doesn't even seem like it can be a processing power issue because the documentation says that the other profiles have higher maximum pixel rates.
I don't have the Ugoos box myself though. Instead I'm running a series of processing steps on my Blu-ray rips which converts the file to Profile 8. For every movie I've tried so far this has been fine, though I've read that some movies lean far too heavily on the FEL and have color problems without it.
> I find it so strange that Profile 7 is effectively unsupported outside of Blu-ray players and this one device.
Since DV Profile 7 is only used for Blu-Ray discs, and playing backed up BR copies from a non BR player is not really supported, it kind if makes sense that it's not supported.
For the Ugoos device, I'm not sure, but I thought the chipset inside supports it, but you still need to flash custom firmware (CoreELEC) and provide a Dolby Vision file to unlock this. So it's not supported out of the box.
I have an am6b+ but in reality the shield is a much nicer device to use if one wants to use anything outside of their local media.
I actually wish we could run android in a container on the CoreELEC side and switch back and forth between Kodi and the android UI/apps (without needing a reboot, and having a better managed android environment than the provided one).
except, I don't care so much about the high quality widevine playback. Plain youtube, MLB.TV and many others don't need certification. yeah netflix does, but that's less important to me.
The unfortunate part is that CoreELEC only works when you get all your content from a locally attached disk. You can't even really stream it from your beefy NAS/server, and you definitely can't use any streaming services.
I'm constantly surprised how many people are in that narrow category of just dipping thier toe in the water for "self-hosted" content that it's little enough it fits on disk storage you can have in your living room (mine is a half-height server rack in the basement), but also have progressed past thr point of using any streaming services. I guess there are a lot of people without families that also never travel out there.
> The unfortunate part is that CoreELEC only works when you get all your content from a locally attached disk. You can't even really stream it from your beefy NAS/server
This is not true. Streaming from a NAS at high speeds is fully supported and works fine. I would suggest to use NFS over SMB though, SMB gives me issues for higher bitrate content
Streaming apps do indeed not work. It's a device for local / NAS media playback.
I used it with plex (in kodi) just fine. With that said, I'd agree that its mostly for local media (where local can be whatever plex can get to). Outside of plex, either you are using plain kodi or some simple kodi extensions (say youtube) that just aren't as nice to use as their android app equivalents (in regards to streaming services, it does support MLB.TV for those that like baseball, but again, not quite as nice an experience IMO as the android app).
Him, I hadn't tried running it myself, but I couldn't find any indication if anyone using it for Plex (or equivalent). I only saw people going thru complicated schemes to Terry and setup network shared drives, or directly attaching external harddrives. I stand corrected.
If my entire world was plex, I probably would have kept it as my main device, but I really like a lot of the android streaming apps i use and the experience in kodi land just isn't as good when it exists.
CoreELEC is a godsend for FEL compatibility, IMO. With a little luck, you can get a device to do FEL for under $100, and you don't have to deal with some random, poorly maintained Android release that probably won't keep up with security updates, etc.
WP says that manganese deficiency causes skeletal deformity and inhibition of wound healing. So I'm guessing that you could survive weeks in a severe-manganese-deficiency situation before you noticed any ill effects.
> So I'm guessing that you could survive weeks in a severe-manganese-deficiency situation before you noticed any ill effects.
Your guess would be wrong. Your body needs manganese for similar reasons that Lyme disease needs it. You also produce MnSOD.
If you starved your body of manganese sufficiently (which I doubt you could do without eating a completely synthetic diet for months) then you'd be killing yourself in parallel with the Lyme disease.
The idea is not trivially wrong. It's the same idea as chemotherapy. Sure, it is a poison for you. But it hits the cancer harder than you, and so can also be an effective treatment.
That said, it is very unlikely that simply reducing manganese is preferable to existing antibiotics. But that doesn't rule out the potential effectiveness of a combination therapy.
Here is how we'd do that combination therapy. We'd mix a standard antibiotic with oral para-Aminosalicylic acid (PAS). Orally delivered PAS is the the standard treatment for treating excess manganese in humans. (Sorry, but you're dead wrong about needing a completely synthetic diet for months.) While PAS does harm a few kinds of stomach bacteria, it is far better than a broad spectrum antibiotic. And if the target disease is under stress already, then you need less antibiotic to finish them off.
Sure, a medicine that targets manganese in Lyme disease bacteria would be even better than this combination. But that medicine does not exist. And the combination in question is something that can be experimented with today, using drugs that have already been approved by the FDA.
Furthermore this is a combination that we already have a lot of experience with. Back in the 1950s, a variation on this, working on the same principles, was the standard treatment for tuberculosis. It was abandoned not because it was ineffective, but because we developed treatments with fewer side effects.
> Here is how we'd do that combination therapy. We'd mix a standard antibiotic with oral para-Aminosalicylic acid (PAS).
I responded to your comment above with this same claim. I cannot find any sources that say reducing manganese was the mechanism of PAS in TB.
A recent research paper on PAS in TB doesn't even mention manganese once. It identifies Dihydrofolate Reductase related actions as the mechanism against TB: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5395024/
> orally delivered PAS is the the standard treatment for treating excess manganese in humans.
EDTA has been the standard treatment. PAS has been explored and trialed. It can be used, but I don't know if I'd call it the "standard" treatment.
> (Sorry, but you're dead wrong about needing a completely synthetic diet for months.)
I was talking about a low-manganese diet, which the comment above me suggested. I don't know why you're so set on calling me "dead wrong" so much when you can't provide sources and aren't even reading what I'm writing.
> While PAS does harm a few kinds of stomach bacteria, it is far better than a broad spectrum antibiotic. And if the target disease is under stress already, then you need less antibiotic to finish them off.
You're really going to have to provide sources for PAS reducing manganese as a mechanism for fighting TB.
As I pointed out in my other comment, manganese is an essential cofactor for one of the other anti-TB drugs in the triple combination that was used in the past.
You could probably add enough phosphate to all your food to prevent you from absorbing any manganese, then inject iron, calcium, and magnesium? Just guessing here.
How long would it take you to die on a zero-manganese diet? If it's longer than it takes Borrelia, you still win!
I regularly find myself on a zero manganese diet for hours at a time, and I've yet to experience immediate death, screaming in agony.
Furthermore we have lots of data on how well humans can tolerate extended low manganese regimens. The standard treatment course for TB in the 1950s resulted in humans having low manganese for 1-2 years. This was unpleasant, but not lethal.
Any google search on PAS and manganese will show that it eliminates manganese from the body by chelating it, and is therefore used for treating manganese toxicity.
I don't have a specific reference for manganese levels in people undergoing the old TB treatment. But I'm sure that it should exist somewhere.
Well, the android is roughly mimicking a mammal. But more to that point, I've seen snakes yawn, and I then yawned. Reptiles generally seem to yawn and I'd bet they yawn when they see mammals yawn too.
Aww, snakes are cute though. You should think about spending some time around some docile snakes to challenge your aversion. Even through a glass tank wall, so you can feel rationally safe.
Good advice. Additionally, I’d recommend that with any supplement you evaluate the source you’re buying from. I typically use Nootropics Depot (avoiding linking so this doesn’t look like a full blown add - check my history though, not a shill) and they use 3rd party lab testing to back up claims.
The article and the FAQ (https://nuwapen.com/en-us/pages/faqs) on their site don’t include details regarding where or how the data is being stored, unless I’ve missed something?
I love Blender and was majorly responsible for getting our university to switch to Blender from 3Ds Max. I have written easily 100 pages of support for Blender and have been evangelical in converting my colleagues to it. Nonetheless we lost some things in this move.
I was speaking to someone who worked at a very large animation production studio. They took a serious look at Blender to see if they could accommodate it in their pipeline. This would have saved them a ton of money. Some of the reasons they did not I list below. At the top of the list are the things that affected us in our move.
- Max and Maya are insanely fast at loading large files. On our school computers, importing a 5 gb .obj can take minutes, as opposed to seconds in Max/Maya.
- In Blender Managing large files is similarly slow, only possible by using linked proxies.
- In Max/maya the Arnold render engine comes with proxy management that makes loading large textures manageable.
- May/max are much better for chartecter animation, though Blender seems to be catching up.
- If Max does become unresponsive, it has cool tools such as delaying the screen re-draw for a defined number of seconds.
For the studio in question
- any bug they encountered could be addressed overnight by Autodesk support. Maybe Blender has got close to this with their long term support plan. Don’t know.
- max/maya are comprehensively documented, Blender is not.
All that being said, Blender is certainly finding a place in smaller studios. Simply: it inspire love. The re-factor and UI re-design a few years ago kick-started this.
The artists I know have very little love for max/maya. They use it because they have to. There has been near zero new features in these apps for years and max in particular can be clunky to use. Developers like Tyson Ibele have taken over adding new features with their plugins (check out his tyflow add on which replaces pflow).
Houdini is another matter. Development has been fast and users love it. I believe that in a few years this will have taken a large chunk out of Autodesk’s business.
Houdini really is a different thing. Its procedural-only focus is all-encompassing, resource intensive, and difficult to combine with other paradigms. People that talk about Blender overtaking Houdini as a professional tool have no clue what they’re talking about. It’s not that it can’t, it shouldn’t because they’ve got totally different focuses that make for a pretty awkward fit. Blenders sims are making great strides but to shoot for feature parity would make blender a worse program. So much unnecessary complexity if you don’t need that niche toolkit.
I know more people that love Maya then love Max, which is funny because IMO Max is much better for modeling. Maya, however, really is great for spline-based animation, generally, but specifically character animation. Blender has been making big jumps there though. The reason I’m glad that I learned the big propriety clients in school— Houdini, Maya, Max, Zbrush, Nuke, Mari, etc.— is because it’s a much more marketable skill for big studios, and much more difficult to get that experience yourself. Our program’s tooling was entirely focused on getting students into the big studio career pipeline be it in vfx, animation, tech art, game design, etc. I guarantee that students would have come out of that program better artists, fundamentally, had they learned how to do all of that stuff in Blender. Given my career ambitions, I’m not sad I got what I got though.
Completely agree that Houdini is not currently in the same class as Blender, Maya, Max etc…. It is a different animal.
that being said, it is hard not to see how much their character animation tools are improving without seeing this as a direct threat on eastablished ‘trad’ 3d tools.
What fundamentally sets it apart is that (in my super limited experience) under the hood it closer to being a language than an app in the traditional sense. This makes it more future proof than its competitors. Lack of future proof is what has almost killed Modo, an app I adored. In the end, it proved far too slow and no amount of updates addressed this fact.
It’s not even like a language — it’s several languages spread across half a dozen purposes -built environments. I’m definitely interested to see where apex goes, but it’s going to need a lot of work in both the workflow and how they communicate its value before it gets any real adoption outside of some tech artists working on super complex skeletons and rigs. As of now, everything I’ve seen has been essentially a coding demo with visuals. Working with Advanced Skeleton in Maya is just so elegant and capable— between that and industry inertia, I have a hard time imagining it’s going to be the standard anytime soon. I think the real sleeper here is UE. You can model, make skeletons, rig, paint skin weights all right in there with a pretty smooth UI. I think they’re doing to lap everyone in like a decade.
I’m setting aside UE because Blender isn’t and was never trying to be a game engine. When it comes to high-end physics sims of any kind— particles, pyro, rbd, liquid, cloth, hair, etc– blender isn’t close to Houdini. The blender toolkit will get ‘something’, but the Houdini toolkit will get you ‘anything.’ More broadly, it’s so easy (well, “easy” like you don’t have to modify the program source. This stuff is going to be complex and fussy no matter what) to infinitely control absolutely anything using everything from node-based no-code stuff (VOPs)that compiles down to performant machine code, to their built-in c-like for performant calculations in complex networks (vex), to popping in nodes where you can write your own openCL if you really wanted to, all animatable using anything from key frames to their built-in non-time-bound math system (CHOPs… I know… the names…) originally built to process wave-level audio. If you’re clever enough, you can even use all of that to drive your geometry, audio and shaders to some extent simultaneously, without (textual) code. The geometry nodes in blender are cool, and they seem to be developing them the right way – ensuring quality rather than racing for feature parity with bifrost or Houdini or wherever — but last I checked you couldn’t even animate their parameters. Huge progress, a great tool, and many people’s preferred tool for modeling. Frankly you wouldn’t catch me dead sculpting in Houdini, and Houdini has a way to go before their compositor is on par with Blender’s, even if the procedural bent makes it more useful for some unusual use cases now. But for the really deep procedural stuff and simulations, anything involving volumes, and also fitting into complex pipelines, we’re talking etch-a-sketch vs oil paints. Imagine if blender started as a purely procedural tool and only focused on that use case? The differences would go so much deeper than the feature list would let on.
I think the differences are a lot less significant with other modeling-focused DCCs like Maya, Max, and C4D. All great programs in their own right. Maya really is an incredible tool for character animation, C4D is so killer for motion graphics type stuff… but they’re all much closer to blender for their intended use cases.
Oh and I forgot to mention that it’s all glued together with python, which replaced their previous non-compiled scripting language based on csh. (No shit. Yes, that csh. I do believe the first version of Houdini’s precursor came out in the late 80s. Wasn’t tcsh the application that spawned the turn-of-phrase ‘considered harmful?’) You can do pretty much anything with Python— not just glue work and making procedural parameters. But from what I gather, it’s not nearly as performant as vex or VOPs for doing per-particle or per-voxel operations when you’ve got more than a few million. I’ve never pushed Houdini’s Python that far, though, so that might be old news. Vex and VOPs are stricter on type, but are still garbage collected, etc so I don’t know where the efficiency lies.
> US automotive design standards are lax compared to those of Europe, where manufacturers must meet tough safety-first rules before mass-market “type approved” cars can be registered for use on public roads.
It is one of the only devices (alongside Oppo clones) that can play Dolby Vision Profile 7 FEL (Full Enhancement Layer) with 100% accuracy. The Shield can play P7, but it ignores the FEL data; the Ugoos actually processes it.
That said, people don’t generally use Android on it, instead you boot to CoreELEC from an SD card and use Kodi.
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