And that's the biggest bonus imho. Most people will watch pirated content on XBMC (torrented TV shows etc) and transcoding everything is pretty annoying.
Bought content is usually an even bigger pain in the arse to transcode. I am currently trying to rip some DVDs of mine and it is an incredibly frustrating experience.e
Aside: although Lifehacker's day to day quality seems to have declined, I've found searching their archives for common tech problems like this to be extremely good at returning results. How To Geek (frequently linked from LH) also has a lot of similar solutions. Any other recommendations?
I would suggest subscribing to the type of posts you like the most by tag.
My recommendations for tags would be:
#hivefive/ #hivefivefollowup
#feature
#downloads (you can specify which OS, see link above)
#featuredworkspace (I like them, you may not)
#featureddesktop (again, I like them)
#howto
#diy
There are more I can't think of right now. I definitely agree that the overall quality of LH has declined, however HN and LH are still my number one and number two sources of tech information on the web and I typically check both multiple times a day. Some of the best tips and software I use comes from LH - Dropbox tweaks, XBMC, CCleaner, BitTorrent tips, Launchy and many, many more. Check out their recommended bundles of apps also available for Windows, Mac and Linux, e.g:
And that's the biggest bonus imho. Most people will watch pirated content on XBMC (torrented TV shows etc) and transcoding everything is pretty annoying.