• 3 Posts
  • 391 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • I know it’s a controversial take around these parts, but I’ve fallen in love with Kagi.

    If I had to rank search engines by results, in my opinion/experience:

    Kagi > Brave > Startpage/Google > DDG/Ecosia/Bing

    Kagi/Brave/Startpage/DDG all offer privacy to some degree. I haven’t really fucked with SearXNG though I’m sure its awesome.









  • Is the h264 or x264 part of the name the bitrate?

    No, that’s the encoding algorithm, aka codec. As another person pointed out, AVC/h264/x264 (all different names for what is effectively the same thing) is a lot easier to process than HEVC/h265/x265 (again, different names, same end result).

    Bitrate is just the overall file size divided by the movie duration, basically indicating how compressed the movie is, with compression coming at the loss of finer details. You can generally gauge bitrate based on file size. A 5000 Mb file that is 1000 s long is, on average, 5000/1000=5 Mbps.

    Since you’re very clearly not picky, you’re probably best off going for 720p or 1080p content with small file sizes (1-5 GB / movie). Feel free to download smaller though, if it doesn’t impact your experience, just make a mental note if you ever find anything that is too small for you to tolerate, and set your minimum file size somewhere above that.

    Based on your criteria, you probably want to steer clear of terms like Atmos, TrueHD, DTS-MA, and DTS-X. These are all terms for different flavors of totally uncompressed audio, which alone can be up to 5GB of unnecessary (for you) added disc space for a given movie. Instead you want compressed audio like DDP, AAC, or AC3

    DivX/XVID are really old video codecs, kinda like x264. I wouldn’t fuck with them even with your preferences unless you have no other choice, given your average potato nowadays can handle x264.

    TL;DR, based on your preferences, look for / avoid these terms, but know not all files have all of the same fields identified:

    GOOD

    Video

    AVC/h264/x264

    720p or 1080p

    8-bit (you’ll want this over 10-bit, if specified)

    Audio

    DDP, AAC, or AC3

    Overall

    1-5 GB file size / movie

    MEH

    Video

    DivX/XVID

    Overall

    Be mindful of files smaller than 1 GB / movie, they may be fine for you but this is where you can really start to see some gnarly banding

    AVOID

    Video

    HEVC/h265/x265 or VC1

    2160p

    HDR, HDR10, HDR10+, DoVi, or DV (not mentioned earlier but these need special, more modern, displays)

    Audio

    Atmos, TrueHD, DTS-MA, and DTS-X

    Overall

    Really large or comically small files.


  • Unfortunately quality is entirely subjective. What you may think is fine, I may hate, and vice versa.

    Generally speaking, for a given movie, quality and bitrate are linked, but two movies with the same bitrate likely don’t have the same quality because of a myriad of factors.

    For me, with a few limited exceptions of movies I know like the back of my hand, I have a really hard time distinguishing between a good 4K webrip (15-20 Mbps) and remux (40-80 Mbps), so I have no issue keeping the majority of my library encoded at ~18Mbps

    Unfortunately there’s no quality magic wand, but if you find a release group that does encodes you like, try to get to their home tracker and just let them handle it.

    If you’re good with 1080p non-HDR content, for your use case you probably want to focus on “AVC” aka “H.264” or “x264” encodes of decent bitrate. HEVC yields better quality than AVC for a given bitrate, but comes at the cost of being much more intensive to encode and decode, which may be a source of problems for your 10 y.o. box. If your bar is “tell what’s happening”, you can go to pretty low bitrates.

    Handbrake is a robust piece of software, but it’s really not beginner friendly because the automatic encoder settings will just absolutely ruin whatever you feed it.

    If you’re on windows, check out StaxRip for encoding










  • Speak with your money.

    This is tough to do when there’s often not a functional alternative. Buying old motherboard stock and a non-HDR monitor isn’t going to teach manufactures people want Linux support, they’ll just think you are saving money / don’t care about new features.

    Without some sort of clear ‘Linux Certified’ system they can compare sales against, no hardware manufacturer is going to be able to recognize the 0.1% sales increase stemming from the time random internet volunteers fixed the open source implementation of their display drivers.