🏴‍☠️

Obligatory “just watch Andor” comment.

Seriously. Go and watch Andor. It proves that good Star Wars content can be made. It has a diverse cast. You just need good writing and a vision. That’s what’s missing from the new content.

They are: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/four-additional-states-join-justice-departments-suit-against-apple-monopolizing-smartphone

The realpolitik answer is that they’re the only country in the region with highly functioning western-style market economy. That is valuable to other functioning western style market economies. Its a system trying to help itself propagate.

This is one area where Apple have actually done a decent job.

Even the article reluctantly admits the AppleTV is the best media box now. Because it’s the only one that doesn’t throw ads on the home screen.

HomeKit also enforces local network control so you don’t need the manufacturer app or third party cloud services.

But the industry as a whole really needs better standards and accountability. And people need to stop buying products from an ad company (Google).

The worst part is that even buying SG1 on Bluray gives a bad experience, because they fucked up the 5.1 audio.

So what did the pirates do? Combined the Bluray video with the better DVD 5.1 audio! Best of both worlds.

I’ll be honest I’m not trying to preserve knowledge I just want high quality stuff for free. Private trackers weed out the low quality files and keep the system healthy by also weeding out people who just leech files without seeding anything back.

Ok this is an idiot question but how does the global average temperature change so much over the course of a year. Is the northern hemisphere warmer overall during its summer compared to the southern hemisphere in its summer?

It’s rare to get a high quality pirate copy until the movie is released on disc or streaming services. Once that happens, you’ll get perfect copies. Until then, it’s probably a “CAM” version which means somebody filming it in the cinema. The betting/casino ads are common with those these days.

I pirate my stuff anyway, so it’s safely stored in my NAS. But it’ll be a shame to see high quality Bluray media go away.

We need a “premium” streaming provider that can offer the same audio/video quality as 4K Blu-ray Discs. And then I’ll download those rips!

I’ve personally found it better to pay for a seedbox and connect to it via encrypted FTP than to worry about VPNs and downloading torrents locally. I share the cost between a couple of friends and we all access the seedbox and download/stream what we need from it. I don’t have to worry about keeping my computer running either.

Get an Nvidia Shield or AppleTV. They are best-in-class devices and anything else is going to lead to some sort of compromise. They’ll last for years and are worth the money spent.

Then set up an app like Jellyfin, Plex, or Infuse (AppleTV only) to stream the files over your local network. You’ll be able to play back everything from those small 200mb rips to the 80gb+ 4K Bluray Dolby Vision remuxes with 7.1 lossless audio.