And the sun rises in the east.

You’re preaching to the choir. That’s why we spend time making remuxes and encodes. But for release groups to make those we need the format to survive, because Hollywood won’t make the physical media if there’s no copy protection.

It’s not really dead, but they’ve definitely scaled down their operations. With streaming services increasing their prices YoY I believe the return to physical media will be cheaper in some cases.

Highly doubt you can monetize it. Most groups do it as a hobby because they care about preservation. Internal groups don’t lack the time or storage space. What we do lack is dedicated BluRay rippers from distant regions.

Yeah, really makes you wonder if it’s by design as some sort of evil anti piracy measure.

You would be surprised but in the US DVDs are still king. They sell far better than regular BluRays and even better than 4K UHD BRs. So saying it’s dead is difficult.

As a ripper myself for one of the internal groups, both DVDs and Blu rays have this annoying thing where they include the subtitles in image format (PGS for BRs, forgot what the DVD one was). It’s a headache for the rippers and encoders because we then need to OCR the subtitles for the encodes we put out there. Sometimes if we get lucky the movie is on a streaming platform making this process obsolete as we grab the .vtt files from the streaming service and sync it with the BR we’re making (as well as transforming it to .srt) . My only assumption as to why MPAA decided on image format subs for both DVDs and BRs is because it makes it easy to deal with different languages and the likes, you just display a static image and fk everything else. But for the people putting out quality releases if we ship PGS that means we’re just doing a bad job.

Support your fav trackers (and their internals!)

Haha, the excuse they like to use in situations like this is “DEI hires caused this”. Musk, have you been DEI hiring?

What are these comments? You people are vile.

S21, S22 and a Pixel 5 or 6. The latter was the one to break the camel’s break.

It was one S21, S22 and a Pixel 5 or 6. I didn’t overpay for the mux delux version, just the basic one.

That’s one way to look at it, but I doubt it’s productive. We should be trying to get a two state solution out there.

Eh, not really. I buy Apple because I’ve had 3 Android phones crap out on me literally days after their warranty died. I got tired of that shit, I paid a bit more and got myself an iPhone 13. It still works as good as it did on the first day. While I do know that Apple devices have a set death day (when they stop getting security updates), I believe I generate far less e-waste by buying 1 iPhone every 7 or 8 years instead of buying a brand new Android every year.

As far as Fortnite goes, I don’t care for the game itself, but I am happy that they fought Apple in court and gave developers the freedom to implement third party IAP, albeit I have no use for it as I only use my phone for phone calls and messaging and the occasional web browsing.

There’s too much bad blood for either side to trust another with political power. Even if they dropped their arms tomorrow, one state solution wouldn’t happen, at the very least not in the nearby time.

They’re not gonna do anything about it for the same reason any other litigious company hasn’t done anything thus far. They’re looking to benefit from AI by cutting costs. If the tech wasn’t beneficiary to these big tech conglomerates they would’ve already sued their asses to oblivion, but since they do care they’ll let AI train on their copyrighted material.

Ah great, horrors beyond my imagination.

Don’t think they’re doing this out of the goodness of the hearts, they’re just trying to avoid the “shit in, shit out” affect of their data sample.

Is this the art of the deal at its glory?

Yes, I’m fully aware we want to abolish IP law for different reasons but still, I’m onboard.

CalOut