Also have to make sure that the public WiFi network one’s device is connected to doesn’t block VPN connections, as was the case at at least one Walmart I tried using the WiFi at.

I’d hardly count something like a simple Solitaire clone app that could be otherwise played for free as a full game release… In terms of actual games, I’d much rather support mobile ports that can be bought for a one time price tag than those that are locked behind a subscription in perpetuity.

Admittedly I did need a guide at times for Quern too; I think the best compromise is what Cyan did for Firmament and just include an optional hint system in the game itself. By avoiding the need to consult walkthroughs, not only would excessive spoilers be avoided, but the experience would remain self-contained, something especially important for a VR game.

Something they didn’t fix for the Myst remake that the Myst-like Quern is much better at is not making puzzles so obscure as to essentially require a guide to complete the game. Was anything done about that problem for the Riven remake?

It’s $3 a month and called RealDebrid + Stremio

If a homebrew game is popular enough, such as Micro Mages, you can sometimes find them in romsets. Unfortunately some cartridge-only and less popular ROMs take a while to get uploaded; took me a year to find a specific Genesis ROM that was cartridge-only.

Good on the EU for supporting consumer rights over corporate profits.

While its implementations thus far have been totalitarian, technically true communism (something even the leaders of the USSR admitted to having not achieved) wouldn’t be totalitarian, so in an academic sense, focusing on it when asking such a question doesn’t make much sense. The question itself is sensible, as people wishing to become American should respect the country’s democratic institutions, though in asking it perhaps there should also be a greater effort in improving the quality of those institutions to be closer to those of a true, rather than flawed, democracy.

Also, in my opinion at least, framing it as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ moral judgement reflects an outdated view that morals should be regulated, and thus should be restated as simply being in agreement with the principles of the US constitution.

No need, Firefox buffer settings (media.cache) can be adjusted via the about:config page.

From the perspective of a piracy community, however, that’s not a win.

They need to self-host their repository if they don’t want to end up in the same situation…

As long as someone backed up the repository, it can still be forked, right?

Wouldn’t SimilarWeb not be counting people who watch streaming services via apps rather than their websites? As that would be most of the traffic for those services, it not being counted would skew results in favor of FMovies, since it doesn’t have a comparable app.

Unless it’s just taking a while to come down from the scene group heavens, some 4K TV show seasons seem to be perpetually missing, presumed due to Widevine L1. Oddly, sometimes half of a show’s 4K seasons are released while the others aren’t.

They still won’t listen; they want an excuse to raise subscription costs again while using it as a means of lobbying Congress to pass bills that favor them…

Private torrent trackers, usenet, and debrid services aside, qBittorrent + Jackett lets you search multiple public torrent trackers at a time, helpful for when one indexer has a release missing from another.

Depending on the situation, up to #13 for me. A caveat to that might be whether or not the creator has appropriately priced their product so as to justly compensate themselves without charging consumers excessively. While I had it in my Steam library already, Factorio deserves to be pirated for breaking with the standard practice of not raising game prices with inflation. Same with Sega’s anti-consumer move to remove the Sonic ROMs from the Sega Genesis collection to boost sales of Sonic Origins.

While it doesn’t do live TV and doesn’t work directly on an Apple TV, Real-Debrid is only $35 a year and is a relatively seamless Netflix replacement when used with Torrentio and Stremio.

BlastEm is the one I use; it’s both open source and cycle accurate.

Does Telegram have anything that torrents and usenet don’t?

Aside from hosting cloud saves and Steam workshop data, there aren’t many other services that justify a high fee to offset long-term costs. Steam trading cards, for instance, are just another source of revenue for Valve given that they also take a cut of sales from marketplace transactions.

Given that Valve’s costs in developing Proton are offset by the higher Steam game purchase rates of Steam Deck users (myself included), the main benefit to developers is Steam’s user base. As with Apple and the iOS app store, however, having what amounts to a monopoly in a market segment is not a justification for high platform access fees.

Considering that Valve makes more money per employee than most major tech companies, it definitely seems like it would still be turning a profit if its share of sales were reduced to 15 or 20 percent. Steam’s services aren’t free; the 30% fee inflates the price of games by 43%. As with any company Valve needs to have a high enough profit margin to cover long-term costs and R&D budgets, but the 30% cut is an outdated industry standard from when server operating costs were substantially higher than today.

Codeberg next?

As long as they participate in Steam sales, assuming they’re on Steam to begin with, PC games are more convenient to have in a library where I don’t have to manually update each game. Valve’s not perfect, with its 30% cut of sales being arguably too high (as is the case for all other platforms that defend its use as being an “industry standard”), but given Nintendo’s monetization of online gameplay and replacing the Virtual Console system with what is essentially console library rentals, I don’t mind putting up with updating Switch ROMs once in a blue moon if it means not supporting anti-consumer practices. Any games I had in my Switch library that are also on Steam I simply repurchased for the sake of convenience, however.

Message boards like that have dedicated userbases for their subject matter though, something that is missing on Lemmy for most subject matters. Since I’d like to be on Lemmy for more than just, for my interests at least, a piracy message board, more users are needed to build interest in communities that weren’t promoted by a subreddit.

The active user count is the one that really matters.

For me it’s about all the subreddits that didn’t migrate to Lemmy, and the ghost town feeling caused by only having 55,000 monthly users versus Reddit’s 850 million. With Lemmy’s active user count slowly dropping instead of rising, everything needs to be done to bring more redditors to Lemmy, whether they are supporters of piracy or not.

While it’s great to have a thriving piracy community, it being one of the only thriving ones inevitably makes potential users associate the platform with it and convinces them to either choose another Reddit alternative or simply avoid the inconvenience of switching platforms. While we may disagree with them, the failure of the Reddit blackout demonstrated that they make up the lion’s share of users from large communities that have yet to materialize here. Better to have many communities with a diversity of opinions than only a handful of echo chambers.

If we’re to have any chance at convincing more Reddit users to join the Fediverse, the main Lemmy and Kbin instances need to stick together. While the piracy community being among the biggest arguably doesn’t make for great optics (having a greater variety of communities above the 50k user mark would help bring more users to Lemmy), a fragmented federation only helps Reddit. Beyond that, this community has rules in place to ensure that posts stick to the discussion of piracy, and not piracy itself.

I use a similar setup myself, though also make use of a Newsdemon block plan as a secondary usenet provider for any files Eweka doesn’t have. Since the two providers are on different nodes and in different copyright jurisdictions (Eweka implements NTD requests while Newsdemon implements DMCA requests), Newsdemon can often finish releases that Eweka is missing a portion of. Since Newsdemon is only useful on the off-chance that Eweka can’t finish a download, getting a one-time purchase block plan for it avoids needing to have another ongoing subscription.

On the off-chance that both fail (has yet to happen to me after switching to Eweka) and you don’t mind also using torrents, I’d suggest joining TorrentLeech as another source for many such releases.

As I don’t want to reduce the quality of an already lossy codec, I’m instead comparing identical audio tracks of the same release that differ only in their codecs and bitrates. For instance, would a stereo 224kbps AC3 audio track be equivalent to a 128kbps AAC audio track, or is one of the two better than the other?

Got Wii Sports for $1 at a thrift store like that, whereas their glassware was usually significantly above comparable eBay listings (despite the labels sometimes claiming otherwise). Unfortunately, at least where I live, the odds of computer stuff showing up are few and far between.

The subtitles could be for an alternate release of the show that is either offset by a fixed amount or runs slightly faster or slower.

With 25Mbps internet, for me harddriveflix is often the streaming service with the highest bitrate…

A Brazilian government agency acting in the interest of its people over that of Hollywood? /shocked_pikachu

If that were the case there would at least be some value in selling the division to another company. Perhaps by not selling it they can claim the division lost money, artificially reducing the tax burden on profits from divisions corporate management is more interested in.

It’s surprising how many relatively recent movies were upscaled to 4K rather than natively shot in that quality. While it’s something I’d expect for movies from the early 2000s, having neither the benefit of rescannable film reels nor high quality digital cameras, it doesn’t make sense for more recent film series such as Maze Runner, The Hunger Games, Now You See Me, Divergent, and Jurassic World, among others. Especially odd is that some of those series have one movie natively shot in 4K despite the rest being upscaled.

Leaves me undecided on whether it’s worth keeping releases with such a large footprint in my media library if they’re not in true 4K…

Good to know; thanks!

More important than maintaining the source code though is forming a new group to manage the continued development of Yuzu and Citra. Hopefully they don’t fracture into ten groups all making parallel improvements.

Are there any viable Yuzu or Citra forks?