I really like the one I have. A relative has a much older model and it still works fine too.
It’s very responsive and the 4k models are quite powerful and future proofed IMO. If you have an iPhone you can quickly use it as a remote too.
Paired with infuse app it even does local streaming from my media server well.
And it’s cheaper to get this year’s top of the line Apple TV than it is the 2019 Nividia shield pro.
As others mentioned having a good encoder is an issue for AAC. And some skills in using it, tuning, etc.
Nearly all quality releasers now use AC3/EAC3 or FLAC. Tigole is the last one who uses AAC to my knowledge and the rest of the QXR group rolls their eyes at it.
You’re not going to get a meaningful reduction in bitrate and file size with AAC over EAC3/AC3 without loss of quality. We’re talking maybe you can shave 2-300kbps off an AAC version versus an AC3 5.1 track. And it’s tricky. So much so no one other than that one person I mentioned bothers. At least no one accepted in the higher echelons as competent in creating acceptably transparent encodes.
If a source has EAC3 (itself capable of up to halving the bitrate required vs AC3) or AC3 I’d recommend keeping it as they tend to already be efficient. They’re also universally compatible as codecs. Re-encode those big 1500kbps DTS tracks and those even bigger monster lossless Dolby and DTS tracks but I’d leave efficient codecs like AC3 alone.
That said it’s up to you what sounds good. If you’re using lower end stuff and can’t tell the difference after trying a few different test videos with different types of sounds then go for it.
/r/opensignups (sadly the lemmy version seems abandoned at the moment).
Monitor that daily if you can. Torrent leech in particular should be opening their doors soon for open registration (they usually do in spring, if not it won’t be long as they do so twice a year anyways). TL is a great starter and honestly many people will never need more. Very easy to maintain on with great free leech on anything over a certain size which ends up meaning all remuxes and most TV show seasons.
/r/opensignups (sadly the lemmy version seems abandoned at the moment).
Monitor that daily if you can. Torrent leech in particular should be opening their doors soon for open registration (they usually do in spring, if not it won’t be long as they do so twice a year anyways). TL is a great starter and honestly many people will never need more. Very easy to maintain on with great free leech on anything over a certain size which ends up meaning all remuxes and most TV show seasons.
Don’t bother with M-discs. They only provided a meaningful advantage in the DVD era. I’ve researched this a bit myself and consensus at least in the data hoarding community is use 2 Blu-ray Discs from two different batches (bought 6 months apart). Which still comes out cheaper or the same as branded M-Discs. (Though that may be overkill and truth be told as long as you test the disc and it’s data done months after writing you’ll tend to catch any rare bad ones)
Truth is, quality Blu-ray Discs have all the features that would engender M-disc type longevity in the design spec. Just make sure they’re not low to high (LTH) discs which are inferior but always marked as such at least.
Don’t get no-name cheap ones either, get Verbatim, Sony, some other good Japanese brand. For Verbatim specifically their discs marked MABL on the package are better.
Always burn data at lower speeds too, less errors.
Blu-ray remuxes (even a public site like rutracker keeps a lot of English commentary tracks in the fuller size releases), certain releasers like QxR, Sartre, HEVK who tend to include them. Someone called budgetbits on leetx also tends to include them alongside rifftrax. Important thing is to check the media info these include on the website to see if commentary tracks are present.
Disgusting that the shutdown note tried to play off their serious issues with grooming and sexual abuse and claim they did a lot. Fuck that asshole.
Edit: Uh oh I’m being downvoted by his fan boys. The article (and successful lawsuit) say’s exactly what I’m saying and anyone who at scale enables mass sexual abuse of children is an asshole. Omegle had no other uses for most of its existence, hypotheticals sure but as the article mentions in practice it was overwhelmingly full of naked men trying to find women and children to interact with sexually. The site runner was flagrantly negligent.
Gosh I love certain types, you’ll rightly jump on a pastor who looked the other way for sexual abuse happening in his church as being responsible, yet a guy who runs a big website for years full of abuse is taken at his word as a sweet, innocent, helpless, benevolent advocate for a better web because he talks right. (Never mind he deliberately obfuscated the horrors happening on his website with his closing statement which people here ate up. It takes a lot to lose safe harbor)
The music app has gone downhill and been badly degraded ever since ohhh IOS 10? When they moved to streaming services they prioritized that and removed clear ratings, access on Home Screen to volume and progress of currently playing song and many other things.
Felt the same way. The soul was gone, the delivery felt off and stilted. The show just felt different. I kept on thinking to myself “they would have never done that or done it like that in the old show”.
Charm just isn’t there and I really wanted to like it. I even watched every episode twice and while there are some enjoyable moments the tone just is off-key enough it becomes frustrating because it’s close but not the same.
In particular as one example the universe simulation episode and particularly Bender’s actions (in the face of what he and the characters thought they meant would happen to him) just seemed out of character and random, like forced for the sake of delivering the point. As a speculative what-if machine episode it would have worked.
You are who you say you are to a network though, at least at layer 2.
If you say you’re one MAC address one time and another next time then so you are.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say I’m a device trying to connect to a network. Among other things I tell it “can I have an IP address, my MAC address is Majestic”. It says in turn, sure and notes down Majestic and routes or switches things to me when another device says it wants to reach my IP. In Wi-Fi it basically shouts out it has a packet for Majestic and sends it out onto the air with my unique encryption key I previously negotiated and I am listening for packets for Majestic and grab and process that packet. Now if I go back and connect again and call myself Dull it’ll do the same thing. Those names being stand-ins for MAC addresses of course.
This is simplified of course. And this is why MAC whitelisting is a futile attempt at security.
Most remuxes have commentary tracks passed through. Heck, good encoder groups like QxR, TAoE and many Internal’s retain them.
I’ll agree remuxes generally drop extra video files though you don’t strictly need an iso for those, just a full BD disc dump in folder form which are far more common than ISO’s though far less common than single file remuxes.
I don’t think LoTR 4K’s changed the extras and behind the scenes from 1080p either so finding disc folder dumps of the old HD releases should suffice for OP if that’s all they want.
House centipede. They eat other bugs and while scary looking are harmless. They like spiders appear from time to time without anything being wrong. They’re just looking for other bugs to eat.
Brave words divorced from reality.
Cable companies wouldn’t insert ads, people pay for a premium experience with cable instead of getting their TV free over the air. If they did people would just cancel and watch free tv.
Then later: Streaming companies wouldn’t insert ads, the ability to watch on your time, terms and without interruption is part of the appeal, if they did their customers would leave them and they’d collapse. It would be the death of any company foolish enough to do so.
🤡
Markets and competition will save us cried the fool with no knowledge of history.
If they grow they need to keep growing, if their results are good enough they’ll introduce “limited” tracking for “trusted partners” with limited ads that are “valuable and relevant”. And from there it can spiral more but you’ve already lost.
As revenue, tracking, taking a big yearly check from Zuck or whoever to share your data with them. It’s a good source of revenue and unless this company is privately financed by one weirdo entirely out of their own pockets they have a responsibility to investors to get them ever increasing year over year returns.
Of course the typical thing to do is to get big enough first like streaming. Train the fool consumers to pay for something they’re getting for free, normalize that, grow, then sock them with ads, tracking, inconveniences and train them to accept more and more of it.
Most useful unique website thing rarbg had by far was full mediainfo listing for every single upload on site. You could immediately tell what you were getting and even dead torrents became useful by virtue of retaining chapter data that could be applied to another release.
Also, call me skeptical but IMO without access to scene FTP’s or week-1 access to (and automation on a large scale of re-uploading from) cabal trackers like BTN to get the good content from your site frankly risks ending up just another mirror among many others like lime torrents for existing public net and low hanging private tracker fruit. (If you have mediainfo for all files that adds a lot of value though)
IMO the real need left by rarbg is not for more re-hosting of content many others have but for publishing web-dl’s others don’t have, not of just new series (which everyone does as ep’s drop) but older movies and older series without other good 1080p or 4k releases available. Even today I see many old TV series the only HD releases available are old rarbg packs and this includes across multiple of the biggest PT’s.
Of course I wish anyone willing to run a big general tracker luck (assuming they’re honest and intent isn’t to distribute malware ofc).
You could look into MOCA adapters if the house has existing coaxial cable installed through walls for an old cable TV system. Plug an extra access point or two in and connect back to your main router via a few sets of adapters. It can cost a bit up front but it’s pretty reliable and if you buy old used 2.0 models you can save some money. (Just make sure they’re the same manufacturer)
Otherwise your options would be power line adapters to access points (bad, lots of chance for interference, neighbors adding a heavy appliance could break it).
Or nicer extending units located more closely together though if your walls are masonry or brick that may not help.
Also, inelegant and I hate to mention it but you could buy long, flat Ethernet cables, run them along the baseboards with the special retaining staples and connect that way to access points, though it does require space of a few cm door clearance in every doorway it has to traverse. Also flat cables technically violate Ethernet spec for preventing interference but in most single family homes interfere isn’t a big issue away from power supplies and runs so it would probably be okayish.
Honestly it’s great. I’ve had some really great stories there and met some amazing partners and learned things about kink I just had no idea about before. There are a certain amount of people there clearly for in the moment stuff but also so many passionate, knowledgeable people including some of the most capable DM’s I’ve ever met.
Looking up technical specs for the drive it’s often mentioned on data sheets (often as conventional magnetic recording drive or else shingled if SMR). Other than that third parties have compiled lists and many but not all Amazon pages in tech specs mention it if you look closely. Try searching drive-model and cmr and then smr and see what comes up. Beware some drive families different sizes of drive may be cmr vs smr. WD red pro and ultra star DC line are all CMR, WD blues many are SMR. WD black as far as I know are all CMR. WD red (non-pro) can be SMR I believe.
I’ll be honest, the real difference is getting a 7200 vs 5400 RPM drive, particularly one with a larger cache, I’d always go for 7200 except for purely offline backup stuff.
In terms of external drives and shucking, it’s largely a crapshoot. You can try searching what drives others found in a model, however they’re subject to change.
Bottom line: If money is tight and it’s just you, you can absolutely do SMR and 5400 RPM external drives and have a smooth experience as long as we’re talking re-encodes not raw Blu-ray remuxes (I have seen an external 5400RPM SMR drive choke and fail trying to smoothly play a file at 24MB/s bitrate but it worked fine with 10MB/s re-encodes, even those with burst rates of 17MB/s). If you can afford a bit more try to go 7200 and CMR.
Beware MDD at the top is alleged to sell drives they’ve refurbished which are essentially used but with wiped smart. Other cheap deals… check sellers. If it’s not sold and shipped by Amazon it could be slightly used drives (usually third party sellers do a mix so some people get brand new, others not so much). Also beware third party sellers and Amazon itself often sell OEM drives without warranty. I always check the serials online before opening the anti-static bag to make sure it’s in warranty.
Also: shucks.top
You need to wait and watch for the good deals but they come around multiple times a year.
Also, understand there are certain storage ranges to get these prices. Generally 8-18TB drives are best deals per TB. You pay a premium for 20-22 top size drives as well as for smaller drives like 2-4TB. 14TB seems to be the current sweet spot most of the time.
Lastly. Understand SMR drives are alright for backups but not ideal for streaming high bitrate content from or using to seed files. CMR is better.
OP said money was tight.
And why pay more for less? Over the purchase of 3 hard drives I save enough to get a fourth “free” off the difference in savings.
$4x14tb=$56 for example.
But please. Continue to pay whatever you want. More cheap drives for me.
Nothing. It’s an automated. Just stop doing it and it’ll decay with time.