neckro23

The layering of compression really does get you. I've noticed (both in "Plexamp in my car" and "playing music on Twitch" contexts) that using a FLAC source makes an audible difference, even compared to a high-bitrate MP3 source.

This might seem pretty obvious, but I wasn't expecting it to matter as much since the end result was compressed again (and yet again on my car's Bluetooth) using a different codec.

This isn't on anything close to audiophile gear either. My car stereo is thoroughly mediocre and my home stereo is speakers I literally found in the trash.

Now I'm (belatedly) rebuilding my music collection in FLAC...

The 4k remasters of the classic Cameron films look awful. It's like someone cranked the denoise filter up to 200 and left it there.

Pretty much all dramatic American TV shows were shot on film (at 24 fps) before the digital camera era. It's why so many old shows (ex. Star Trek TNG) are now available as HD remasters, they simply go back and rescan the film.

It's more complicated in other countries (the BBC liked to shoot on video a lot) but it was standard practice in the States.

Sure it is. Smart watches even do it using the simplest possible “camera” (an LED).

At least for the PC versions of Vice City and San Andreas, the originals are missing the music too. A bunch of licenses expired 10 years after release and the Steam releases got updated accordingly.

Milkdrop and Project M are both available as vis plugins for Foobar2k, on Windows at least: https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_vis_milk2

Also one of the first DOS games that had Amiga-module-style music (mixed samples) instead of Adlib or MIDI. This later evolved into the UMX system used in Unreal and Deus Ex.

Psst, you can get uBlock Origin (lite) for Safari now. Works pretty well.

Soulseek is still around (somehow) and thriving. Of course on there, discovery is more or less "check out the library of this person who had something you were looking for".

The GEP gun is ironically the pro choice to make if you know what you’re doing. All of the other weapons on offer can be found in the first level, and the GEP works as a fantastic “lockpick” even if you never fire it in anger.

Original iPods (and early iPhones) weren’t locked down as much. There were a number of utils that could manage your library. ml_ipod plugin for WinAmp comes to mind.

Outside of a private tracker (which takes measures to keep random untracked peers from getting on the torrent), not really. Individual seeder clients can detect bad behavior like leeching and ban by IP, but each torrent is likely to have a different seeding pool.

So the penalty is mostly just on individual torrents. Of course, trying to pull something like this on a private tracker would get you banned real fast...

Not necessarily. A lot of video software either leverages the Windows/MacOS system codecs (ex. Media Player Classic, Quicktime) or proprietary vendor codecs (Adobe/Blackmagic).

Linux doesn't really have a system codec API though so any Linux video software you see (ex. VLC, Handbrake) is almost certainly using ffmpeg under the hood (or its foundation, libavcodec).

In my experience it works ok. The "English" model actually knows a lot of languages and will translate directly to English.

You can also transcribe it to Japanese and use a translator to convert to English. This can sometimes help for more semantically complex dialogue.

For example, using faster-whisper-xxl [1]:

Direct translation:

    faster-whisper-xxl.exe --language English --model large-v2 --ff_vocal_extract mdx_kim2 --vad_method pyannote_v3 --standard <input>

    faster-whisper-xxl.exe --language Japanese --task translate --model large-v2 --ff_vocal_extract mdx_kim2 --vad_method pyannote_v3 --standard <input>

Pre-processing with a vocal extraction model (bs-rofomer or similar) helps a lot with the hallucinations, especially with poor quality sources.

The Vista-style minimize/maximize icons on the inner windows look way out of place, and the style changes entirely when I maximize. Can't seem to minimize a window either.

Windows 10 is applying smooth scrolling to the windows, which I can disable in Performance Options but you might want to override the setting. Waiting for the scrolling to catch up is pretty at odds with the "fast, lightweight" aesthetic you're going for.

Silent films used several different speeds. The rest are for telecines.

No tracker necessary, you can just use DHT: https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/

You could do this with any terminal program. Your modem won't emit any noise until it hears a carrier tone, so you could just dial, pick up the extension, hang up the modem.

Android is overwhelmingly preferred by working-class people, in my experience. The phones are simply cheaper.

It would take a ton of work, especially for a show as long-running as The Simpsons. The original materials probably aren't even available anymore.

I believe the reason they were able to remaster lots of old Japanese anime OVAs in HD is because the animation was recorded to film first. I wouldn't be surprised if the Simpsons just used videotape instead.

It's a travesty. I was sourcing video for an Alien/Aliens watch party (for a couple of adolescents who had never seen either) and I had to hunt down a copy of the older HD Bluray of Aliens because the 4k remaster looked so awful.

(By contrast, the 4k of Alien looks fantastic.)

I picked this tape at random and just got to this part. Imagine my surprise.

If you mix a square wave of one duty cycle with another of a different duty cycle, they partially cancel each other out and you get a new sound.

I'm not sure, but I believe the original NES Castlevania does this in some places, like in the "you died" jingle. (It's possible I'm misremembering and it's simply two square notes separated by an octave.)

It is even worse on MacOS, because Apple bundles the BSD versions of common Unix utilities instead of the (generally more featureful) GNU versions. So good luck writing a Bash script that works on both MacOS and Linux...

IME some web security gateways block the Tailscale domains entirely, presumably because it's a VPN that can bypass said gateway.

Usually, but it depends on the state. Remember, America isn’t a country, it’s 50 countries in a trenchcoat.

It’s often a mishmash of services too. I was told in-person at the DMV that I couldn’t renew my registration since I’m not the registered owner of my car. So I just went to a DMV kiosk at the local grocery store and did it there without a hassle.

I run a regular movie livestream and Whisper has been a godsend. It's really impressively accurate for the most part, at least when the audio is relatively clear.

Lots of the stuff I play is long-forgotten 80s Z-movie trash, so there are frequently no official subtitles/captions available. Whisper has been a very good substitute. (It's not perfect, and it sometimes has bizarre omissions or hallucinations -- once it hallucinated a racial slur, yikes!)

The English model even knows the common non-English languages pretty decently, so you can for example subtitle anime with it if you really want to.

I've seen enough bad and desynced subtitles from opensubtitles.org that could easily be fixed up with a transcription.

This is what made me be wary of free subtitle sites: I discovered that sometimes (often?), the English language subtitles are simply auto-translated from, say, the Romanian subs. Amusing yes, accurate no.

An oscilloscope does not plot pitch vs time.

You're right, it doesn't, and that's not what's happening here. It uses the X/Y deflection mode of the oscilloscope, plotting left channel vs right channel.

If you don't believe it, play it on an oscilloscope yourself. (I have!)

You probably get the same result in the end, but yt-dlp can also do this if you point it at the m3u8 file.

(Actually I just checked and it also supports downloading Twitter videos directly.)