According to the email they sent me:

https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/18730324957213-How-do-I-back-up-my-cloud-saves

You can do it from gog galaxy. No idea if the game has to be installed though :/

What are you average file sizes for movies and series?

Movies? 4-8GB for most 60-120 minute features. TV shows. For live action 800MB/episode, 500MB/ episode for animation. For hour long stuff probably 1.2-1.6GB/episode.

What would you do? what’s your target size for movies and series? What bitrate do you go for in which codec?

HEVC 10 bit. I target in the 7000-9000kbps bitrate range generally. For animation that can be as low as 3000-5000kbps. Sometimes a bit higher for very grainy old films, occasionally a little lower for grain less modern digital camera work that hasn’t had digital grain added.

If you want to maximize space savings without losing quality you have to understand what needs more bitrate and what can do with less. Across the board you could do something like CRF 20 but you’d have outliers where you don’t get enough bitrate and those where you still end up with rates of 14,000kbps.

The above is for 1080p content.

If you can stand HD video content at 2-3000kbps more power to you but on a large TV I can tell. I think even being reckless and not caring about future-proofing less than 6000kbps is a bad idea for anything but TV shows. Even those I think outside animation you want minimum 2000kbps for 1080p.

Nothing. It’s an automated. Just stop doing it and it’ll decay with time.

DVD’s max out at about 580p (for PAL, NTSC is 480p), resolutions are measured by the number of horizontal lines of pixels (counted from top to bottom of video/screen), not vertical which at 4:3 square aspect ratio on dvds does tend to be 720 pixels (by contrast full resolution HD video’s number of vertical lines is 1920 while it’s horizontal lines are of course 1080, hence 1080p). You’re not the first person to be confused by this.

Professional encoders who fully understand the encoders and the schemes in use and care about not seeing artifacting or low quality would never intentionally go as low as 300mb for a feature length movie of even an hour. Yes there are people who do such things but they’re not well regarded and it won’t look even passable on anything larger than a phone screen.

Recognized quality groups that seek low sizes might get an animated feature (less bitrate needed due to lack of fine detail in animation vs real film) in SD quality down to around that. But for most live action content the sizes I see from the best of the best concerned with smaller release sizes are in the 900mb to 1.5GB range for 60-90 minute features.

300mb for a 90 minute live action feature even in SD is just not going to look good, some of the groups who get those sizes make them look even half-passable by running pre-filters in virtualdub that smooth, reduce grain and detail, etc before passing to the encoder. That kind of thing is way beyond anything you’re going to learn in a few youtube videos though, that’s advanced stuff with scripting.

Think about it this way, if you shoot for 1GB encodes with 265 or AV1 you can store over 900 movies on a 1tb drive which can be had for well under a hundred dollars.

I would like the best and fanciest algorithms to have least dataloss.

There is no magic that will get you where you want. If you want detail preserved you need more bitrate which translates to larger sizes. Modern codecs like HEVC and AV1 mean you need as much as 1/5th the bitrate you needed with old MPEG2/4 encoding schemes used on DVDs, that’s darn good savings but it has its limits.

Do as you will but anything live action (non-animated) significantly under 1000kbps average bitrate is going to look awful on a 1080p screen and much worse than what it would look like if you popped your dvd in the disc drive and played it from there.

Opus is fine if you’re not worried about compatibility and just playing on a computer.

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.

Well re-applying thermal paste is a big matter. I’d try stressing it and seeing if you can force it after cleaning the vents.

So do things to stress the processor and see if you can force it to happen repeatedly. If it is a thermal issue you should be able to cause it by inducing high load. If you can’t it points more towards other issues. A fault in RAM or the motherboard for example, a loose module or connection, etc.

And just FYI if you need more help in future this community isn’t intended for it. Try posting in a tech or computer help community for a better chance more people engage.

Randomly or after a set time of use or intense use? Could be processor is overheating past safety thresholds (new thermal paste could fix this IF that’s the issue).

I’d try cleaning vents and fans before changing thermal paste though. Could be they’re clogged and not working right.

Failing that it could be multiple things. But I’d try to address cooling being adequate first. Make sure vents are unobstructed during use. Use it on a flat hard surface, clean the vents with a vacuum and/or canned air duster.

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 venture capital dollars started running out. Returns started being demanded. Companies that made slightly improved and/or more accessible versions of more open products extinguished those products using venture capital dollars then started rolling out the enshittification, demands for money, intrusive ads, spying, dark patterns, sabotaging, paid tiers.

Back in those days the internet was a curiosity. A hobby. A fun thing to share, something a company might hope to break even on or earn minor profits with, these days big profits are demanded, centralization. Addiction to high resolution and size video and image content which is expensive to host and serve. The network effect drained smaller sites and resources, concentrating people in larger venues that had the investment dollars to support them at the cost of their privacy. Combine with search engine optimization and it became harder to even find smaller places. Add in digitally uneducated kids who thought fb and such were most of the internet and never bother to venture beneath the top 6 google results and older people and this is what you have.

Take something like Omegle. I don’t want to defend what it was for most of its existence as the bad outweighed the good IMO (like 4chan) but something like that if made today would require linking your facebook or google account and serve you video ads every 5 minutes on top of banner ads. But back then it was just something some random guy could make for fun and not think “hmm I need real identities to monetize these people to ad networks to pay for this and turn a big profit selling the data they input”.

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.