It is much much better than posting on forums. You get instant response.
Agreed. Even for channels that aren’t tech-related, if I have a quick question, I typically get a faster, more in-depth response than forums/Reddit/whatever. They may not always be the correct answer, but they usually point me in the right direction. Anyone still hanging around on IRC tends to have good troubleshooting instincts.
Man, all this talk makes me miss AirStream. Only worked on Android, but it locally-streamed just about everything out of the box; combined with MX Player, transcoding wasn’t even necessary. But the devs vanished like 7 years ago and stopped updating/supporting the server software, so getting the app to communicate with the host computer was impossible.