Ahh, good ol’ WinCE.

Just wanted to follow up since I took a poke at this. Your best bet is still DVD Decrypter, which you can run through Wine. For some reason drive detection fails unless you set the operating environment to Windows NT 4.0, so use Winetricks to make an application-specific override for that. Once you do that you should be able to use it.

Try installing libdvdcss or libdvdcss2. That may make Handbrake work correctly.

Past that, VLC also supports pulling content from DVDs, though it again uses libdvdcss. MakeMKV is probably the easiest option to use, though it will only extract the video/audio content and won’t preserve menus and the like.

Quite honestly though this is one of the things where the bulk of the best tools are Windows-based. The original DVD Decrypter is still rock solid for most DVDs, and anything it can’t handle you can usually get with DVDFab HD Decrypter or AnyDVD. All of those have pretty bare bones minimum system requirements, so your laptop should be able to run 'em. Whether you can do it via Wine/etc. or need to use a Windows VM I can’t tell you, but that’d be where I’d go.

EDIT: You can in fact run DVD Decrypter on Linux through Wine, you just need to use Winetricks to make an application-specific override to set the operating environment to Windows NT 4.0 so it doesn’t error out trying to access the disc drive. Program works great once you do that.

Mind you I tested this on a machine running Linux Mint, but it should work on Debian 11 as well.

It’s honestly surprising how bloated Windows has become, and for no clear reason either. Even with all of the obvious bloat disabled and resource-intensive features turned off there’s still a significant overhead, it’s just so constant that you don’t notice it. Then you load up Linux on the same hardware and realize what you’ve been missing.

The future of piracy is going to be running your own LLM with all the corpo-mandated guardrails disabled.

A VM is going to incur a pretty big performance loss. From what I’ve read, Soulframe works just fine with Proton. Either Lutris or the Linux Steam client should work for running it.

I just remember when the ADL went after David Icke and the guy talking about 12-foot-tall Lizardmen seemed to have the more rational point.

I keep Plex as a backup because some client devices are really tetchy about interacting with Jellyfin. Not every smart device supports the Jellyfin app (nor VLC), and if they do have a built-in media player it’s typically one that uses filesize-based progress tracking, i.e. you wind up being unable to fast-forward or rewind the video (or sometimes unable to even pause). Generally every major brand of smart device has a version of the Plex app, for better or worse.

It’s become harder to get clean(ish) audio captures for theater films, but it’s not impossible. There are still theaters with hearing impaired seating and headphone hookups, still a few drive-in theaters that broadcast via FM (one of those here in Reno, actually).

If anything, I think it’s because digital rips/DLs seem to come out more quickly. By the time a group has tracked down a clean audio stream and takes the time to sync it with footage, someone’s probably snagged a digital copy and released it.

Now Telecines, those are basically unseen these days. Almost no theaters still use actual film, and the few that do are way more careful about their inventory management. Gone are the days when a whole film can just get “misplaced” for a few days while someone with a Telecine setup copies it, to say nothing of how few people have the setup for Telecine anymore in the first place.

Ah damn, so that’s why a bunch of channels disappeared from my IPTV list. My fault for not diversifying I suppose.

Anyone got any suggestions for sites of a similar vein? Sites, not telegram/discord groups.

Seems like if they didn’t want content being viewed by anyone who can connect to a stream they might wanna put some authentication on the connection or something. Crazy idea, right?

EDIT: Yes, I know some of these streams are pirate streams being hosted elsewhere, but a bunch of them are straight from the companies themselves, available in the clear without any authorization checks.

I like to watch TV shows in the background where I’m not going to be watching the screen obsessively, so I have several shows in 480P or sub-480P. There are also some shows where the “official” HD versions are just awful (most 90s sitcoms) or the show was made for 4:3 and has a different feel converted to 16:9 (MASH, The Wire).

Going beyond that though, I spent years on a really limited connection (2.6m down/400k up) and my instinct for saving bandwidth and storage space is still there, along with my need to pay it forward since I ain’t no leech. I’ve become fond of making what I call “Bonsai Encodes”, where the files are small enough to be sent over damn near anything. With mono Opus and VP9 video you can cram 45 minutes of perfectly watchable content into a sub-25mb file that’ll play in Discord, with VTT subtitles even (though those won’t play in Discord itself). Looks a bit like watching it on an old tube TV, but it’s watchable.

Update: just logged in and this appears to be fixed now.

Almost, but needs a few tweaks:

• Content should be border-to-border in the 2000 panel.

• Needs to be 3 lines of content in 2010 and only two lines of content in 2018.

• 2018 needs a slide-over autoplay video on the bottom-left of the content space.

Update: It’s back as of now. Still curious what caused it to go down to begin with.

The original DVD release of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 riff of Godzilla vs Megalon. MST3K licensed the film from a company that did not actually own the rights to it, and only discovered when Toho sent out a cease and desist following the release of MST3K volume 10. Production was stopped, but a few hundred copies were still sold.

Funnily enough some of those copies were actually sold to Blockbuster, who somehow were allowed to keep renting them out even after the C&D went into effect. I made sure to rent a copy ASAP once I found out.

Having bittorrent traffic set to low priority while being online and doing other things can lead to that, especially someone seeding multiple things at once.

Also depending on where they are or how they’re connecting their ISP could be throttling them.

Weird Al still wholesome after all these years.

On windows it’s Settings > Themes, then click the “Mouse pointers” item. That should bring up the Pointers tab of the Mouse Properties window. Then it’s just a matter of getting .ani or .cur versions of the pointers you want.