gila

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

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

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

Doesn’t happen in Aus anymore following multiple investigations into banking sector misconduct over past couple of decades. Informal overdrafts are now illegal here for most accounts. But it sure as fuck happened to me too. Multiple times, I still remember it was a $35 fee anytime my balance went below zero. I was just a teenager with undiagnosed ADHD overestimating how much I had left. We didn’t have online banking yet, I couldn’t just check. And that was a significant part of my pay. Cunts.

Red Rock Deli Sweet Chilli & Sour Cream. Unfortunately they changed awhile back and aren’t as good anymore, but still pretty good.

Well at least we get ours back when we geoblock them from watching the AFL/NRL grand final. Right? Oh, no one watches it? Oh.

You sound like you aren’t from Australia! Vast majority of geoblocking is for free content actually (selectively free, that is). Things like Netflix US having different titles to Canada isn’t really geoblocking, unless it’s for a Netflix Original (not aware of any such cases)

“Dear” to someone you aren’t familiar with has a slightly different purpose I think, it communicates that you’re seeking the recipient’s mutual participation in a social group by engaging with your communication. You acknowledge their position of being ‘dear’ to general society to positively reinforce their participation in it, specifically with regard to your letter.

These days it’s fairly trivial to contact pretty much anyone about any matter. Being more connected we are continuously engaged, so it sounds funny/out of place to use in an everyday context. You could use it sarcastically to imply that the recipient is careless or doesn’t like you (they need encouragement to engage in communication generally/personally with you).

But it would still be appropriate in a context where the recipient is hard to contact, like a public or official person with whom communication is sought after

They didn’t oversize the recommended video thumbnails in the old UI. Either they couldn’t figure out what to do with the whitespace resulting from stacking recommended videos horizontally so they just made em bigger. Or they just want persistent ads in your peripheral vision (the first recommended video will always be an ad for users not blocking them)

Look for a dvdrip. At the time the episodes were originally aired they would pre on p2p sites as like 35mb .avi’s in 240p, you don’t want that

Same issue, merger buyouts. e.g. Safeway into Woolies in Aus, Progressive into FAL into Woolies in NZ. (not to mention FS NI was just created 2 years ago via the merger of FS Auckland and FS Wellington, and now is merging with FS SI). Nothing short of stopping merger buyouts creating monopolies in essential services will stop this problem, and I have no confidence it’ll happen anytime soon. The fines they cop will be less than the revenue generated by increasing margin 1%, so it’ll forever be on that edge where you’re just not quite ripped off enough to let yourself and your kids go hungry