You can absolutely re-encode h265 video, but you can’t do it losslessly. In the end, it’s always a balance between quality and filesize.

I decided for myself, that 1080p30 crf28 h265 is good enough for home video, which lead to a 50% to 80% storage space reduction on videos from my phone.

If you don’t obsess over quality, I would highly recommend just messing around with ffmpeg a little bit and decide how much quality you’re willing to lose in order to save disk space. When you’re happy with your settings, you can either use ffmpeg itself or some fancy batch program like Tdarr to transcode all (or parts of) your video library.

My goto command is:
for file in *.mp4; do ffmpeg -i "$file" -movflags use_metadata_tags -map_metadata 0 -vcodec libx265 -crf 28 -vf scale=1920:-1 -r 30 "${file%.*}_transcoded.mp4"; done

Magic Earth (while not FOSS, it’s privacy oriented though) can do this.

There’s also Transportr, but AFAIK it’s been unmaintained for quite a while now, so it may not work / stop working soon.

My personal gripe with mobile Firefox is searching by using the address bar.

I have had countless times where I put in my search prompt, followed by pressing the little X all the way on the right and thus clearing the address bar. My brain just really expects an enter button to be there.

I think my current record is entering a search term and then clearing it literally directly 3 times in a row, getting more and more confused each time.

No clue how that guy is zooming with one finger, but zooming while recording a video on my Pixel 6 works just fine when pinching with 2 fingers.

I’ve never used a Pro Pixel (so can’t comment on telephoto), but I never noticed it if there is one. From just clicking around between ultrawide and 1x on my Pixel 6, it seems fine and if I had to guess I’d say it roughly takes 0.5s to switch.

Indeed, they all use UFS 3.1 (so does the 128 GB Galaxy S23 though). I have never looked at storage type and my Pixel 6 doesn’t feel slow in any way.

I have no idea what you mean with the camera, it is one of the best Android cameras out there. This is also true when running Graphene OS, as long as you download the ‘Pixel Camera’ app from either the Google Play store or APK sites (must download as an APK bundle then!).

AFAIK you nailed the differences between NewPipe and NewPipeX.

As for FairEmail, I’ve used it for well over a year without paying and it’s been great (I plan on buying the pro version soon). It has kind of a pay what you want model, technically you can unlock all features for literally 10 cents.

I’m not that knowledgeable on security for hosting services with external access either, I’m sure there are some great YouTube videos out there.
A Raspberry Pi should be perfectly fine for hosting something like Seafile or Nextcloud though (Nextcloud might be a pain in the butt to host).

DP altmode means being able to output HDMI over your phone’s USB-C port, the Pixels are famous for missing that feature. But I believe from Pixel 8 onwards it was added again, if this is important for you you should do your own research on it though.

Here’s what I use:

• YouTube:
  • LibreTube has really nice UI/UX and integrates SponsorBlock and DeArrow. It relies on Piped for fetching subscriptions (since the newest version it will play just fine with a broken Piped server though).
  • NewPipeX is what I use when LibreTube doesn’t work and for downloading YouTube content. It is a fork of NewPipe which integrates SponsorBlock.
• Mail:
  • I use posteo.de as a provider, but it isn’t fully liked here due to it not supporting custom domains.
  • mailbox.org is another solid provider (with support for custom domains AFAIK) if you don’t want to use Proton for E-Mail.
  • FairEmail is my mobile client of choice (Geary or Thunderbird are good for Desktop).
  • k9 Mail is an equally good choice.
• Cloud Storage:
  • For Cloud Storage I prefer the selfhosted Seafile.
  • If you just want to share files temporarily, Wormhole is a good tool for that.
• Gallery App:
  • Aves Libre is solid if you don’t want to selfhost, but it doesn’t have fancy features like automatically (od manually) detecting faces.
  • Immich is pretty much the selfhosted Gallery app.
• Video Player:
  • Just (Video) Player is what I use, but honestly the stock player should be fine.
  • VLC will play pretty much anything you throw at it, but I don’t like its UI that much.
• Music Player:
  • Vanilla Music is alright, but nothing special. Musicolet, while not FOSS, is a privacy respecting Music Player that has a bunch of handy features, most notable one for me is the ability to have multiple queues.
• 2FA App:
  • Aegis has never let me down, although you should keep in mind it doesn’t have any sort of cloud sync.

For password manager and weather I use the same apps as you.

I run a Pixel with GrapheneOS. I actually also came from Samsung, and for me there are quite a few creature comforts missing that I didn’t even think about (eg. Samsung Dex, DP altmode, I really like the One UI Dialer, Miracast, Brightness Slider in notifications, switching recents and back button, headphone jack, SD card slot, …).

As for the Pixel being worth it, I’m ok with it as I was due for an upgrade anyway (Galaxy S10 -> Pixel 6). I’d recommend, if you value your privacy and are fine with losing some Samsung features, to either go all the way and upgrade to a new Pixel when your S23 gets old / dies or buy a cheap used Pixel (Pixel 6 and 7 currently has pretty decent value) to just test it out.

What’s the issue with PIA? I’ve used it for quite a while and am quite happy with it.

The choice that surprised me was them recommending 1Password ($40/year) over Bitwarden ($10/year, solid free plan).

From reading the Magic Earth FAQ, I believe the user data actually isn’t used for traffic at all (at least the manually reported events certainly aren’t).

Edit: never mind I missed a later part in the FAQ:

Do you share data with third parties?

We send position data to our traffic provider to generate real-time traffic information. The data is anonymized on the phone, using a changing key (so it’s not linked to you), and it is deleted after 5 minutes.

The first quote is taken out of context:

Not only are privacy and data protection founding principles for both Mobifree and F-Droid, the use of tracking-based in-app advertising poses a moral dilemma as well. If someone wants to gain access to an app, but does not have the financial means to purchase it, they can use it at a different kind of price - their user data.

For me this reads as them explaining and condemning that dilemma, instead of considering it as an option for F-Droid.

If the main battery isn’t “meant to be replaced”, it will often act as the CMOS battery (e.g. MacBooks have been doing this since roughly 2008).

I find it even more puzzling as surely it has to be a decent increase in server demand to constantly be streaming video. How can that be worth it??

Push Notifications don’t really exist for Lemmy yet, as they aren’t supported in the backend currently:

https://github.com/aeharding/voyager/issues/1027 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2631

As someone else here said, your best bet is probably monitoring your Inbox RSS feed.

+1 on OnlyOffice, it has 1:1 formatting compatibility with Microsoft Office. Unlike LibreOffice, it doesn’t have to translate documents between odt and docx in the background.

In the same vein, OnlyOffice has poor compatibility with odt files etc.

Yesss fcast looks incredibly promising. Sadly the only app implementing it seems to be GrayJay, I really hope it will catch on more.

Not OP, but this instantly made me think of the worst-case scenario PDFs I stumbled upon on Lemmy recently.

TVHeadend is the way, I’ve been running it with a USB satellite tuner for 5+ years. Setting it up can be a little confusing, but once it’s running you pretty much never have to touch it again.

As for clients, there’s a Jellyfin plugin, however it seems to not work for me right now.

My client of choice is Kodi with the TVHeadend plugin, and that works great. If you still want Jellyfin integration, you could just add your recordings folder as a library in Jellyfin.

Could I purchase two different brand drives and use them with btrfs?

I don’t quite remember the source for this, but I believe I read some time ago that it’s actually a good thing to have separate drives. The reasoning is, if you buy two identical drives (at the same time), the likelyhood of both drives failing around the same time is severely higher.

This is then amplified by the fact that rebuilding a RAID puts a lot of strain on the non-dead drive, so if ie. drive 1 dies and drive 2 is about to die, the strain you put on drive 2 in order to rebuild your RAID onto drive 3 might kill drive 2 before you even finish rebuilding your RAID.

Again, this is just from my memory, it might be worth doing some more research on.

+1 on the mobile draggging issue