gila
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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 👴
I’m really meaning the lack of option not to consume fast-moving consumer goods, rather than the option to pay a premium for them elsewhere. When their market position is similar to like an outlet for government rations except for private profit, their net is essentially what was skimmed off the top of free enterprise. 2.66% is just the current maximum amount that is justifiably worth without doing societal harm
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
Pay for real-debrid and set up a kodi addon like Seren on a streaming box. You’ll get an equivalent experience to paid/official streaming platforms without having to pay for them all, including browsing popular shows without having to download them ahead of time or manage a home server. It’s still torrenting under the hood, just a lot more convenient
If you pirated the album, presumably it is free of any DRM. In this case the most that itunes could infer is that you didn’t buy it from the itunes store, which isn’t the same thing as inferring that you pirated it. So it’s safe to assume whatever you’re experiencing isn’t an antipiracy measure, but either a bug or some issue with the album rip you downloaded. Without knowing the source I’d lean toward the latter, because lossy transcodes, bad rips and bad tags are commonplace in many places where pirated music is available.
Feels like you’re describing growing out of p2p
I used to download stuff from XDCC bots on IRC. That was even weirder than Usenet, you’d send the bot a specific chat command for it to serve you a file.
I feel like ‘my own home streaming service’ is effectively what I have in comparison to those days.
No problem, I was drunk waiting for the train home so not very well written response but I’ll always jump on the opportunity to recommend this method to someone. There’s no downsides I can think of, just make sure to set your audio language / subtitle defaults in the Kodi settings (not addon settings)
It does have the general drawbacks of the scene such as different subtitle formats for different releases / tv networks, e.g. conflicts between English and English (SDH). You can install the opensubtitles addon to resolve this same like with Plex
I’ve used real-debrid in conjunction with the seren add-on for Kodi for years. I have the same setup on all my PCs, my phone, my Chromecast. I would say it works identically on everything but I had playback issues using the Kodi app on my Xbox (well documented issue related to that system)
- No, you just scrape the debrid cache on demand upon selecting an episode/movie, as long as someone has already cached that release it’ll just start streaming. If not, you can add it to the cache inside the add-on, rescrape and try again
- There’s no encoding happening, it’s just direct streaming whatever release you selected. For release of duplicate titles when you search it will show the IMDb/tvdb thumbnail and you just choose the one that looks right. The only releases that weren’t exactly what I was looking for was when Barbie just came out and some cam rips were floating around, the first result I scraped was for the animated Barbie Netflix series. No porn, I’m confident enough of that to have set this method up for my mother also.
- Sounds redundant. If you wanna try this method for ease of use, a simple netflix-esque experience for any content, there is no comparison. If you wanna spend time watching your logs auto scrape the episode you’re waiting to drop, this isn’t the method. The only mechanism needed for routing your search to a matching file in the debrid cache is scraping a magnet link (via a search, or trakt recommendations etc) which matches a file previously cached on the server. “It just works”
- Not if you’re using a standard implementation with A4kScrapers. Google how to set up seren on Kodi. You may run into some P2P release for older stuff, for most people this is totally fine
All in all as someone that has pirated music, tv shows and movies for several decades now it actually aggravates me how user-unfriendly the Plex/emby/jellyfin experience really is. I can certainly understand people getting enthusiastic about a new hobby of library management, but that shit gets old and I just want to watch my shows. The only reason I can imagine why people don’t do this is because it costs money. I struggle to imagine how these same people aren’t already paying money for tv/movie content and getting way less value/$ to boot.
As a honourable mention I authd this setup on my mother’s Chromecast to my real-debrid account, and we have no issues both using it simultaneously. However, one time when I was downloading a torrent using the debrid on my PC with VPN, while streaming on my TV without VPN, and my mother also simultaneously streaming in a different city, it booted us all off and I had to reauth. No issues since, mum calls it the dodgy box
It was the wrong question and I just guided you on how it was wrong. For it to be the correct question you should have qualified what you meant by using that phrase. I’m sorry you didn’t understand that.
The post headline is “each Bitcoin transaction uses 4,200 gallons of water”. This generalisation is based on one Bitcoin mining operation which upon cursory inspection is actually a LNG electric company. I’m speculating but likely the reason they mine Bitcoin is to make it worth keeping the gas fire on during off-peak.
If you’re going to use a single operation to generalise about the whole network, why use this small weird outlier and not the bigger companies like Riot, Bitfarms, Genesis? I could turn around and say “each bitcoin transaction is fully renewable” based on the operations of any of those companies, and the claim would be even more substantiated than that headline is by that report. But it would still be wrong. Neither example is representative of the energy required by Bitcoin.
Now, I’m not coming to the party trying to push Bitcoin as a transactional currency, like you seemed to have a notion of it trying to compete as. I don’t think it’s much good for that. But I’m not about to go believing some made up shit about how a computer solving some cryptographic puzzles has a comparable environmental impact to filling an entire swimming pool. Gimme a break dude.
You’d need to qualify what you mean by ‘exchanging any value of money’. If it’s handing a note of currency to your friend, the energy cost of circulating the bill is associated. If you mean someone not in the same room, then you need to accept the associated caveats of running the traditional finance system e.g. ATM costs, financed emissions, and other essential components of the fractional reserve bank concept. Totally aside from the server requirements to physically run the network. Without all of those things, you can’t exchange any value of money.
Traditional finance almost certainly consumes as much water as Bitcoin on a per-capita basis, and on an absolute basis traditional finance uses way, way more. The difference is the global network of banking operations is opaque. For Greenidge Generation, their 2.5EH/s hashrate is a part of their product, advertising it is a sales tactic. Just makes it a bit less abstract to pick apart and then make broad generalisations about the sum hashrate of the network based on this LNG-powered site the report is based on. For what it’s worth, that’s not really a feasible way to mine Bitcoin. It suggests energy generation is their real product.
The real answer is a rhetorical question: what is the impetus for the traditional finance system to operate sustainably, either now or in future? Because for Bitcoin miners it’s clear. The monetary policy essentially dictates it over time. Reward yield decreases for the same amount of work. You don’t need to get into whether it’s environmentally sustainable, because it’s not economically sustainable unless you’re generating a fully renewable energy source.
To draw a comparison between bitcoin energy consumption and water use is plainly seeking to remove context from the conditional justification for Bitcoin’s energy use, which has nothing to do with water. It’s deliberately sensationalistic. Anything that consumes energy can be described as consuming or wasting an equivalent amount of water. As a statement on whether that consumption is justified, it’s meaningless.
Whether the energy consumption of an action is justified depends on the efficiency of the energy use, the practical aim of the action, whether it would replace any more or less efficient actions, and the energy source.
Simply stating it has no purpose and that the energy use of Bitcoin is somehow analogous to mass water wastage, does not seek to investigate whether Bitcoin’s energy use is justified. It’s disingenuous and reactionary.
Here’s the link to the episodes on bilibili, my VPN doesn’t have any China endpoint so they’re blocked: https://www.bilibili.com/bangumi/play/ep748347
Had a look in my usual areas and found listings but no sources. Listings were only added recently though (11/30/23) so maybe international distribution is being organised.
Oh, so they’re aware the stated actions would have no impact on VPN accessibility beyond potentially restricting India endpoints?
Either that or they’re planning to play server whack-a-mole with overseas private companies whom themselves have no control over access from India
Edit: or it’s just a non-statement to misdirect
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