Amazon Black Friday Deals week started today

My life is perfect, I don't need anything... is what I keep telling myself :D

I do hate Novembers, it seems that no matter what is the month I spend the most money and not necessarily on things I want or even need.v:cry:
 
Amazon is starting to remind me of a flee market. That being said, I only plan on buying my immediate family and a few friends gifts this year. I don't plan on buying myself anything.
 
Amazon is starting to remind me of a flee market. That being said, I only plan on buying my immediate family and a few friends gifts this year. I don't plan on buying myself anything.

screw that my family and friends can buy their own stuff, i'm buying things i want for myself.. lol otherwise they'd have to deal with choosing between socks or a coffee mug from the dollar store..


that being said only thing i'm really interested in buying is probably the kindle if it goes on sale.
 
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Went thru about 5 pages, didn't find anything notable. Anyone find anything good?
Pretty much why I gave up on any sort of Amazon sale, whether it's Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Prime Day, all of them are fucking horrible. A bajillion items that are "on sale" and the site's interface is not always the best at excluding or narrowing down to a very specific category, so yeah... nope.
 
Not sure how anyone feels about the Ring products, but I noticed the 8piece kit for the home security is cheaper than the 5piece unit. http://a.co/d/2oxZdb6

History shows it dropped $80 2 days ago
 
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Agree with sfsuphysics
Amazon has the worst interface, not worth my time trying to navigate through it..... and
it's been like that for years ........
You'd think with all the money amazon has they'd be able to hire some good programers
to re-do their webpage search and sorting engines....
 
Agree with sfsuphysics
Amazon has the worst interface, not worth my time trying to navigate through it..... and
it's been like that for years ........
You'd think with all the money amazon has they'd be able to hire some good programers
to re-do their webpage search and sorting engines....
They probably want you "lost" like a casino - and I'm willing to bet Bezos is smart enough to have done the research to know that they'll make more off of people stumbling across impulse buys than they are losing from people who avoid their site because it's hard to find exactly what you want.
 
i have always used newegg to drill down to what im looking for. then use amazon for price checking. i hate their search options. they are more worried about cramming advertising into the results pages than what your actually trying to find.
 
Yeah if you have a use for it, most general users (including me for most of my use cases) won't notice the difference, other than one is already full :)
It also really depends. I've seen m.2 slots that are nvme only, mix, or sata-only. If you've got one slot left & it's nvme....you kinda need nvme if you are going to use it :)
 
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Sweet, I'm curious how well it handles Kodi.

Its codec support is ridiculous for a stick. I don't even need 4K right now but the speed and compatibility should be amazing and pretty future proof with the 10bit HEVC/HDR/Dolby Vision support. They supposedly even fixed the WiFi in the damn things.
 
Its codec support is ridiculous for a stick. I don't even need 4K right now but the speed and compatibility should be amazing and pretty future proof with the 10bit HEVC/HDR/Dolby Vision support. They supposedly even fixed the WiFi in the damn things.
Okay, you sold me dude. Thanks! Will report back after the holiday on how it runs as a Kodi player, using my home media server.
 
I don't use Plex. I play files direct from NAS in VLC.

Plex on the Roku and Android is awesome. I stream my 400 DVD movie collection through it. The only annoying thing about it is they are pushing more and more to upgrade to a subscription service after you pay $40 for the license. I didn't agree to that and there's no way to turn that off.
 
Plex on the Roku and Android is awesome. I stream my 400 DVD movie collection through it. The only annoying thing about it is they are pushing more and more to upgrade to a subscription service after you pay $40 for the license. I didn't agree to that and there's no way to turn that off.

The point I'm trying to make is the new sticks support enough formats now that you don't need Plex at all. VLC can see a NAS or shared folder and play the files directly. Cut out the middleman. Even my 1st-gen Fire Stick still works with VLC, but tops out at H.264.
 
The point I'm trying to make is the new sticks support enough formats now that you don't need Plex at all. VLC can see a NAS or shared folder and play the files directly. Cut out the middleman. Even my 1st-gen Fire Stick still works with VLC, but tops out at H.264.

Well that's great, but if you don't have a media box connected to your TV that supports VLC, then you are screwed. Don't get me wrong. VLC is nice. But I see regular lockups/crashes and a non user friendly interface for the big screen.

Plex has more support than VLC across platforms, and the interface is much cleaner. You can even install plex servers on NAS boxes
 
Well that's great, but if you don't have a media box connected to your TV that supports VLC, then you are screwed. Don't get me wrong. VLC is nice. But I see lockups and a non user friendly interface for the big screen.

Plex has more support than VLC across platforms, and the interface is much cleaner. You can even install plex servers on NAS boxes

Forgive me, but what are you storing 400 DVDs on then? VLC sees Windows shared folders and Samba shared folders from my WD My Cloud. What else does that leave out? Playing files direct is subscription free.
 
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Forgive me, but what are you storing 400 DVDs on then? VLC sees Windows shared folders and Samba shared folders from my WD My Cloud. What else does that leave out? Playing files direct is subscription free.

You don't need to run a PC as a server. A number of NAS os boxes, and even NAS4Free, Xigma/FreeNAS with jailbreak are great alternatives as they are always on and extremely low power. I don't run a server on my PC because it uses way too much energy.

But it's the end user experience that really counts. Seeing a movie cover poster and using 4 arrows keys + [ok] is what sells PLEX. It just works without having to navigate menus or read file names. For a media experience, this is crucial.

VLC is great when you run transcodes or need a rare format supported. But it's very rare the plugins for video "enhancements" are needed. In fact those enhancements often crash the player.
 
You don't need to run a PC as a server. A number of NAS os boxes, and even NAS4Free, Xigma/FreeNAS with jailbreak are great alternatives as they are always on and extremely low power. I don't run a server on my PC because it uses way too much energy.

But it's the end user experience that really counts. Seeing a movie cover poster and using 4 arrows keys + [ok] is what sells PLEX. It just works without having to navigate menus or read file names. For a media experience, this is crucial.

VLC is great when you run transcodes or need a rare format supported. But it's very rare the plugins for video "enhancements" are needed. In fact those enhancements often crash the player.

My MyCloud is a NAS and I've mentioned NAS as direct play option with VLC twice now so, yes, I know you don't need a PC. What "media boxes" don't support direct play or sharing? We'll have to agree to disagree on GUI issues and necessity of Plex. My media is properly sorted into folders.

Anyway, I just got the 4k stick and you're right about VLC Android quirks. With 4k/hevc files I couldn't play with the 1st Gen stick, I was seeing aspect ratio and audio sync probs. Kodi cleared them up and has a good GUI as well.

The new stick flies!
 
Definitely use Kodi. Enjoy!
I'll apologize in advance for not knowing what any of these things are that you all speak of. Plex, VLC , NAS, etc. But I do use Kodi quite often and it is very sluggish at times.

Buffer...buffer...buffer....

Will this 4k fire stick solve those issues?
 
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