gila

GNOME on my laptop, using the trackpad. Three-finger swipe up to switch tasks/search. Two-finger tap for context menus. Three-finger tap for things like opening in a new tab, or closing a tab. Simple, intuitive, efficient, comfortable.

I think you can just add archive.md or archive.ph etc before the URL of the article, e.g. archive.ph/https://vox.com/whatever to skip that. I’ve never had to do any captchas this way

Debian laptop user here, left Windows on my gaming desktop for a decent while. Now that I’m more accustomed to Linux DE’s I installed Nobara on it about a month ago. Zero issues with the NVIDIA variant on my 3080 so far

How were the trackers added to these torrents? Assuming either a) you added them manually, or b) the tracker you downloaded the torrent files from bundled them into the torrent file?

If b), if you downloaded the torrent file again now that one of its trackers is defunct, would it still be bundled?

If no, or if a), you could remove the torrents without touching the downloaded data, then locate your “snatch list” on the private tracker (a list of all torrents you’ve downloaded), batch download them all and add them to qbt, assuming same output folder they will detect the downloaded files and go to 100% without downloading anything.

If yes, there isnt a way I can think of to remove the trackers as a batch, but aside from tidiness of your client there shouldn’t be any actual problem resulting from them being there.

FWIW you can fix the aspect ratio issue on the firestick using ADB to force the device to display in a 4:3 resolution (except when using streaming apps that force 16:9)

If you want something privacy oriented you’ll probably need to build some kind of NUC. To my knowledge no off-the-shelf streaming device respects privacy

There are things like torrentio now which lend BitTorrent piracy a more integrated UX, and that has definitely extended the lifespan of its usefulness to me. Torrents rarely max out my line speed these days, mostly because I have 1000X the bandwidth compared to when I first started torrenting 20 odd years ago. But it’s still one of the fastest and simplest methods to get any file you want, so I think it’s relevant

After seeing this post, I tried streaming the newest episode of Silo and found it wasn’t working in my addon (which uses a4kscrapers).

My mother tried streaming Slow Horses (using same addon) after I told her and she said it worked fine. I guess it had already been cached and was therefore unaffected since the file I streamed was only released today.

Anyway I luckily only had 8 days left of RD, so I subscribed to Premiumize and it only took a minute to reconfigure the addon to use that instead.

This app live captions any output to your sound device locally https://github.com/abb128/LiveCaptions

Whether I mute my output device, or selectively mute a tab or app it still works fine.

There’s a similar feature baked into Win11, not sure whether that is processed locally/privately though

I’m sorry, I meant to respond about the lack of BBC archival footage, as it had to be archived to be able to compile it. You’re right that it was probably shot straight to VHS.

I remember the VHS we watched was presented as a compilation of episodes with a new introduction and interludes so my guess is there was some kind of professional reproduction of the episodes themselves

The groups forming the roots of digital media piracy established ‘the scene’, which holds itself to rules and has particular distribution methods. For example Usenet was popular for many years. https://scenerules.org/

By P2P I’m meaning these are ‘non-scene’ releases, just something a random person on the internet cooked up and released somewhere, in these cases by feeding some prior standard definition release through an upscaler and creating a torrent from the output, which involves certain considerations.

We can’t exactly determine the pedigree of these files, but we can say they are lossy transcodes, that is they first existed in a compressed format and later were re-encoded by the upscaler to another compressed format.

While the upscaled may look sharper to your eyes, data from the files as they were before that process was inevitably lost due to this transcoding. If we define “quality” as the amount of information from the original presentation that was retained in the output, then the standard definition versions are definitely higher in quality than the upscaled ones.

I’m not meaning to use the term in any perjorative sense, but it’s useful information to have. If an official HD presentation is ever made from the original film, it would certainly get a ‘scene release’ that would look better than these ones.

Yes, that is the quality of the original presentation. If anything it looks worse because it has been converted from film to a digital signal, as well as being stretched to be a bit larger than normal. Lmk if you young whippersnappers have any questions about this, I grew up watching this on VHS back in the dark times 👴

Yes, both are upscaled p2p releases

Just used this to load up some concerts for my long haul flights tonight and it worked great, thanks for the rec

I’ve had a lot of thinkpads and currently use an ideapad flex 5. I prefer the smaller form factor for a portable machine I take travelling or out to biz meetings etc. The autorotate and touchscreen work great in Debian with gnome-shell out of the box. No pinch-to-zoom but I believe that works on KDE plasma out of the box.

I use Shotcut for more or less any video operations that require re-encoding. It’s great for basic editing but also simple transcoding jobs too

Losslesscut is what you want for this. It’s basic and concatenates without re-encoding. And it’s open source (as is handbrake)

2 simultaneous sessions on different devices/IP’s = inconsequential. A 3rd simultaneous session = auth tokens revoked on all authorised devices, and you get a warning that lasts for 1 week. If 3 simultaneous sessions occur again within that time then your account gets removed.

I’m mostly only using CCWGTV, both the original 4k model and the budget 1080p one. Neither have performance issues for me (except before filtering out 4k releases on the 1080p model)

I’m just aiming for the simplest/smoothest experience as possible, not so much for myself but so that I can mail it out to my mum who lives out in the bush and just tell her to enter her wifi password and open kodi. She’s able to manage from there without having to worry about hdr/dv content compatibility with her display, or default audio language/subtitle display etc.

In kodi you can edit settings.xml for IPTV Simple Client addon to point playlist items to a given category in Seren, make a playlist linking to those categories a favourite, and configure Kodi to open to the favourites menu on launch. That way she has a fully on-rails and custom experience based on her preferences from the point that she runs it.

I’ve heard good things about Stremio + Torrentio. Does it have trakt integration or similar equivalent? I think the discovery in addons that have this makes a big difference. I have many different categories to browse that might sound similar, e.g. Trending, Trending New, Most Watched, Most Popular. But each one has a specific and plainly disclosed ranking methodology and that’s very useful to avoid constantly being recommended to watch The Office, Breaking Bad, cowboy soaps etc