gila

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.

Firefox blocks statcounter tracking by default. It’s an inherently flawed metric, though Firefox is definitely in the minority still vs Chrome

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

It also explicitly states in the posted screengrab that the opting-out user’s workspace won’t contribute to the underlying models. How would that be separate from using info on their workspace as training data for any kind of model? My interpretation of that is the data would be used to inference on the models, not train them.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but on PS5 you’ll need to send individual images to a friend, to be able to download them from your chat session on the mobile app. Or on Xbox, you’ll need to pay for OneDrive or it’ll be removed after 90 days. Both more annoying from my perspective.

Good news, they have had a better fix for several years now. About a month after the PS5 came out, so what you described was possibly an actual factor in it.

Yup

As an Apple hater; Apple Music. Cheaper, good cross-platform frontends, more equitable to artists (though by no means satisfactorily so), has a Wrapped equivalent (though who actually cares). Maybe Spotify added something it doesn’t have in the several years since I switched but, I doubt it

You put forward a couple of different points - I’m not conflating things, just hoping to skip past the constitutional one (which in my opinion is non-sequitur) to address the other. I might have boiled it down to a one-liner, but here’s some light further reading/viewing which may help to scratch below the surface of why this corruption as you put is probably happening: https://youtu.be/Fhgm5b8BR0k

If Tiktok doesn’t deserve to spy on Americans, is it the counterpoint that US big tech does?

I think we just need to move on from this methodology of data collection. Firefox is often cited as very unpopular because it blocks statcounter tracking by default, social networks have absorbed some search volume too. I do think it makes logical sense that people are dropping 11; I did so myself last year. But this data is likely bad, so it’s pointless to try and extract a reason based on it.

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)

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

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.

Literally the interference is with Cloudflare, i.e competing silly internet restrictions.

You can easily install a harmless Firefox extension and be blocked from all the same sites, for example.