Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Since KDE plasma 6 with hdr support came out recently, I decided to check how some of the hdr tagged movies I'd watched previously look with that. I was surprised to see that they are rather dark, even in scenes under direct sunlight. I 'tested' the brightness by opening the movie in hdr and sdr at the same time and manually changing the sdr brightness to compare.

Most scenes, including those outside and in sunlight seem equivalent to 200 nits in sdr. Only highlights (like sky if the sky isn't a large part of the shot, or glimpses of outside in indoor scenes) seem to reach 700-800 nits. I thought there was some kind of a baked in abl in the files, but then I found a scene (starkiller base firing in swtfa) that got ~~more bright than the sdr brightness slider goes~~ (while covering half the screen too), so that's not it (Edit: I think this is an hdr to sdr mapping caused error. In some frames the laser becomes gray thus much darker in sdr versus hdr. In other frames 800-1000 nits seem right. Still the brightest scene I could find.). There seems to be a conscious decision to keep most scenes the same brightness

Are movies supposed to be like that? I'd think the cameras would capture the brightness accurately and that would be what you see with minimal modifications to it. What's the point of hdr if there isn't a brightness difference between a sunny scene and a cloudy scene? I mean, the highlights have a lot more detail instead of crush and that's good.. I'm pretty sure those that I've seen in the theather were not this dark in most scenes tho.

I've tried a few web-dls and blurays. They all seem to have this issue.

Increasing contrast from the player seems to work and I guess I'll just find a good default for that and forget about it eventually, unless you have a suggestion. Expected more from the fabled hdr tho

Sorry if this doesn't fit here

Edit: Bit the bullet and booted windows to analyse the files. They are indeed dim for my taste (due to having low max brightness and/or baked in abl), with high brightnesses only being used in highlights and the rest are 400-200 nits. Took some screenshots (they're badly blooming since they're sdr screenshots of hdr). The cursor is positioned on the sky in most and in a bright area in the rest:

I took another right before this shot while they're still in the ship but forgot to save it. The tiny bit of visible sky was 600 nits in that shot, so I think this file does have baked in abl.

Star wars turned out to be pretty good with a 1000 nit target in general, but the desert is still dim for some reason (below 50 nits in this scene!)

Also tried spiderverse on suggestion. It wasn't that bright but I think that's fine for animation.

Radioarchive.cc was a huge loss. It was a torrent archive of BBC radio programs, mostly dramas and panel shows. Since it died, there have been few places to get BBC radio dramas, many of which are broadcast once, are available for listening on streaming free for a month (worldwide), then are unavailable in perpetuity. Many of them also have well-known authors or are adaptations of well-known novels or even films and many also have notable actors in their casts.

This does not make up for the death of Radioarchive.cc, but it is the next best thing.

For those of you who need an introduction to the amazing world of BBC radio dramas, may I present two for your listening pleasure:

A familiar drama with a familiar cast- https://archive.org/details/GoodOmensBBCr4

An epic with a star (Ian Holm) who later ended up in the movie adaptation- https://archive.org/details/tolkien-lord-of-the-rings-bbc

I often used this site to download flac songs that I was unable to find on SLSK or other torrents. Is there an alternative to this site that anyone knows of. It will be missed.

For this one show (John Oliver) I download, I always get ALL CAPS and poorly synced subtitles. The text seems OK, but it's barely usable because very off-sync. I'm curious: where do these subs come from?

I am over being disappointed by streaming sites.

"I wanna watch X, let's see if Netflix has it..."

*Opens webpage*

"Hmm... Netflix usually sucks, they probably wont have it. I'm just gonna say I'll watch Y off my hard drive instead. But let's still confirm that Netflix doesn't have X..."

Next thing you know, I'm watching Y off my hard drive.

Streaming services suck so much nowdays that I already resolve myself to watching something else before I even finish checking. Gotta shield myself from disappointment. Why would you pay for each channel on a TV? Just get the hard copy at that point....

I'm considering getting Google Fiber for internet service, because it's about to become available in my area.

Are the Google Fiber admins cool with filesharing protocols?

Or do they strangle traffic, ban people for filesharing, etc?

I know Calibre can remove DRM, but it seems that Calibre does not remove things like watermarks, references to the buyer by name, etc. Now maybe I can try to find those manually, but that is an error prone process. Plus, what if they embed a unique digital signature that ties back to me? I understand that this is a very uncommon practice, but I do not want to find myself in a bad place.

I suppose the only way to remove a digital signature of any sort is to buy two of the same e-book by different people, diff them, and remove anything that differentiates them.

Is there any tool that does this or automates the process? am I being too paranoid, and this is not a real threat?

I currently play most games thru emulators but been wondering whether it is worth it to get the Switch V1 version for handheld.

my plan would be putting the roms onto the Switch and then play handheld (is this possible?)

Playing when traveling, a few hours in bed before sleeping or cozy up next to the heather in the evening seems nice. However is it still worth around €300 euro for it, may I have your opinion on the matter?

Good day everyone,

I'm being denied access to my ebooks by my provider, which is Tolino.

Back then I chose Tolino because it offered many means to access my books without having to bring along a bookshelf everyhwhere I went. Unfortunately it escaped my attention that Tolino was acquired by - drumroll - Roku. Since then it seems they enshittified the android app. As long as my device is connected to a VPN the app says "no internet connection" and won't let me access anything. As soon as I disable my VPN it works normally. Yeah, that's unacceptable.

Do you guys know a way to pull my books?

Further, can you recommend me fair ebook provider? Google Books apparently works, but for one Google is known to shut down popular services without further notice and, well, it's Google.

zlibrary isn't really an option, because it doesn't have the works I'd like to read in my preferred language.

A couple of weeks ago I installed stremio from the AUR on my arch installation and it showed me an option to play the video in mpv player.

I expected the same thing on my NixOS setup but it doesn't show me the option to open in MPV. I also tried with flatpaks and it also didn't have the option to open in mpv.

As for why I want to open on MPV, I am using anime4k to upscale and sharpen my anime and I'm very used to mpv's controls.

Does anyone know how to get this working ?

Are y'all actually torrenting Linux ISOs. Cus I recommend. Its way faster and fun to have a collection of like 30 distros and try and new branch of the larger Linux tree. I just assume its a joke but I only started torrenting Linux ISO because of seeing it replied so much lol.

Any info on getting content from Hoopla or Kanopy? I have a library membership but it is limited in use.

Currently I have a library mainly in English and I would like to make these films dubbed in Spanish, the problem is that they are in 4k and it is difficult to find releases in Spanish with a quality higher than 720p in the most common free places.

First of all I would like to clarify that I don't know how the multilanguage system works in Radarr, but, would it be possible to get a spanish version of low quality video, extract its audio and leave it in the same folder so that Jellyfin can choose between multiple video tracks in the player? And is there a way to configure all this automatically in Radarr?

If somebody theoretically wanted to watch all seasons of the amazing show New Zealand Today when the official streaming is geo locked and has blacklisted VPNs in NZ - how would they theoretically do it?

Theoretical cheers

Lately F1 and MotoGP have been making it very difficult to watch live races. Can you guys suggest some ways that give stable and good quality streams ? Hopefully the method will work on android as well as PC. I use F1box mostly for F1 and liveTV for MotoGP.

Warner Bros. Discovery is telling developers it plans to start “retiring” games published by its Adult Swim Games label, game makers who worked with the publisher tell Polygon. At least three games are under threat of being removed from Steam and other digital stores, with the fate of other games published by Adult Swim unclear.

The media conglomerate’s planned removal of those games echoes cuts from its film and television business; Warner Bros. Discovery infamously scrapped plans to release nearly complete movies Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme, and removed multiple series from its streaming services. If Warner Bros. does go through with plans to delist Adult Swim’s games from Steam and digital console stores, 18 or more games could be affected.

News of the Warner Bros. plan to potentially pull Adult Swim’s games from Steam and the PlayStation Store was first reported by developer Owen Reedy, who released puzzle-adventure game Small Radios Big Televisions through the label in 2016. Reedy said on X Tuesday the game was being “retired” by Adult Swim Games’ owner. He responded to the company’s decision by making the Windows PC version of Small Radios Big Televisions available to download for free from his studio’s website.

Trying to find a ready to go image for a Raspberry Pi 5, either RetroPie or Batocera (or others I'm not aware of) for retro gaming. I know of Arcade Punks, but is there any other resource? Tried downloading a 128GB image from them and its taking forever due to no seeders. I did check megathread but wasn't able to find anything so far.

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There are a lot of videos that I'd like to watch in UHD and/or HDR but there is no streaming service that provides them. Why is that? Why do they not release them in UHD? The cameras they are shooting it with are more than cappable of providing UHD.

After reading today EA's takes on AI and strategies about ~~boosting user monetization~~ promoting and exploitation of user's gambling addiction, I asked myself "How can someone defend those company agains boycotting and piracy?".

So here I am: is there somewhere a curated list of VG companies to absolutely avoid giving money too? If not, do you thing we should do it? It would be nice to have a list with arguments and sources in order to make more publicly relevant the ethical and strateical reasons behind piracy.

p.s.I think it's ok if you pirate things even without a moral stand behind, especially if you can't afford games and other media at all, but the arguments still apply

Doing some research on things that I will absolutely never do. Let's say a nefarious party wanted to download a video from Youtube, say, an episode of the TV show Community. The downloaders I have researched for Linux (Youtube Downloader Plus + Parabolic) will not let me download any episodes that have DRM. Are there any that DO let you do so, preferably while removing the DRM so it could be used on Jellyfish or Plex?