Are you confusing CRF with CBR?

CRF is the video equivalent of VBR music. The music equivalent of two-pass video encoding is ABR music.

When tuned for a specific file, CRF and two-pass video will give similar results. They both result in a variable bitrate encoding.

When using the same config on different files, you might find that two-pass encoding produces unnecessarily large files for something with little movement like anime, or has quality issues for something with a lot of movement like a lot of shaky camera or film grain. Meanwhile the same CRF setting will work well in just about any scenario, using more bitrate for files that need it, and less bitrate for files that don’t.

2 pass encoding is only to get the benefits of variable bit rate when targeting a specific file size. If you don’t have a specific file size in mind, that’s what CRF is for.

I connect an external monitor to my tablet. It’s not a portable setup though.

• a tool for backing up offline installers

This really should be something they offer for free, and there are already some FOSS options that do this, although they aren’t as good as I’d like.

• ability to install previous versions of a game

This is a feature they already have for free and there would (or at least should) be backlash if they were to lock that behind a subscription

• extra insight into the preservation work they’re doing.

Sure, neat.

• voting rights on games to bring into the preservation program.

Sure but said votes better have an actual impact.

You can run your own LLM chatbot with https://ollama.com/

They have some really small ones that only require like 1GB of VRAM, but you’ll generally get better results if you pick the biggest model that fits on your GPU.