CoyoteFacts

It looks like it might be; I just know someone that has a site using it and they use a different mascot, so I thought it would have been trivial. I kind of wonder why it wouldn’t be possible to just docker bind mount a couple images into the right path, but I’m guessing maybe they obfuscate/archive the file they’re reading from or something?

You can customize the images if you want: https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper#customizing-images

Yeah that sounds about right. It also depends on which indexers you’re using, as I imagine the more public indexers will have a higher chance of getting takedowns from trolls. It’s worth noting that I believe the running theory is that a lot of 2021-2023 articles were voluntarily deleted to save space, resulting in issues even for .nzbs that weren’t takedown’d. It’s also theorized (and outright stated sometimes) that providers do silently delete data that is rarely or never accessed as well to save space, so that can be a random issue too.

Personally, I lean more into torrent technology because usenet can be fickle for these reasons even if you’re in the secret indexers, whereas if you’re in at least some semi-good private torrent trackers you’ll never have completion issues (just potentially slower downloads). I also feel like usenet’s scalability, future, and pricing is sort of uncertain.

It’s generally better to instead have more indexers, or indexers that repost stuff. Articles on the various providers often get taken down at the same time, so while it’s not a bad idea to get a lot of blocks just in case, you’ll get a better chance of completion by just trying a different .nzb

I’m implying that most normal people would not give their consent to it, or would be coerced by the app into giving consent when they don’t understand what it means (e.g. Windows Delivery Optimization).

I think that the idea of an app “stealing” bandwidth from its users because they want to save money on their own servers is a pretty bad look. Our current world is still not that great w/r/t internet quality, price, and availability, and it was surely worse in the past. It could definitely be more of a thing in the future, but maybe only for stuff used by techy people who could understand it and give proper consent.

I’m not like a sponge connoisseur, but I’ve been using “O-Cedar Scrunge” sponges for about a year and they’re pretty rugged. I have two sponges in rotation, and every time I do a dishwasher load I alternate them through it. They’ve never really fallen apart on me, but I think the green scratchy side gets a little less scratchy over time, and I just replace both of them every 2-3 months for good measure. I’m assuming that there’s a scientific paper somewhere that says using sponges for that long will kill me or something, but I’m still alive so far so fingers crossed.

I don’t entirely mean to throw rocks, but there’s something funny about them dragging their feet so long on supporting a linux version (8+ years) that by the time their personal breaking point with windows came, they discovered themselves on the other side of the issue with no one to blame but themselves. Maybe a parable.

Absolutely not trusting this. Uninstalling until we know more, and ideally just getting a different solution entirely. A new account tried to impersonate Catfriend1 directly at first, and then they switched to researchxxl when someone called it out (both are new accounts). Meanwhile the original Catfriend1 has provided no information about this, and we only have the new person’s word as to what’s going on. There’s way too many red flags here.

I just want to note that Jellyfin MPV Shim exists and can do most of this MPV stuff while still getting the benefits of Jellyfin. You’re putting a lot of emphasis on Plex-specific limitations (which Jellyfin doesn’t have obviously) and transcoding (which is a FEATURE to stopgap an improper media player setup, not a limitation of Jellyfin).

Pretty much every single “Pro” is not exclusive to pure MPV vs. Jellyfin MPV Shim, which mainly leaves you with the cons. Also as another commenter said, I set my Jellyfin up so that my friends and family can use it, and that’s its primary value to me. I feel like a lot of this post should be re-oriented towards MPV as a great media player, not against Jellyfin as a media platform.

I can launch it fine:
GE-Proton10-21
WINEDLLOVERRIDES="wsock32=n,b" %command% -skip_intro -steamMM -NewCPU

Worth noting that when What died, ~4 new sites popped up immediately and invited all the old members, and everyone raced to re-upload everything from What onto them, which was actually pretty effective. At this point, RED and OPS have greatly surpassed What in many ways, aside from some releases that never made it back (you can actually find out which releases used to exist because What’s database was made available after its death). Users and staff are a lot more prepared if it happens again, e.g. keeping track of all metadata via “gazelle-origin”.

If by “in” you mean how to get into them, generally you’re supposed to have a friend invite you. If you don’t have anyone you know on private trackers, you’ve gotta get in from scratch. Luckily, RED and OPS both do interviews to test your knowledge on the technicals of music formats, though I’ve heard RED’s interview queues are long and OPS’s interviews are often just not happening: https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html https://interview.orpheus.network/

Alternatively, you can interview for MAM, which is IMO the best ebook/audiobook tracker. They’re super chill and have a very simple interview e.g. “what is a tracker”: https://www.myanonamouse.net/inviteapp.php. After that, you can just hang around there for a while until you can get into their recruitment forums to get invites to other entry-level trackers, and then on those entry-level trackers you can get recruited into slightly higher-level trackers, and so on, and eventually RED/OPS should be recruiting from somewhere.

This can feel a little silly and convoluted, but I guess I’d just appreciate that these sites put the effort into conducting interviews for new people at all, since the alternative is that you will just never get into anything without a friend. Reddit’s /r/trackers wiki is unfortunately one of the better places for information about private trackers if you want to do further reading.

If you have any drive to get back into it, TMK the interview for RED is roughly the same as the interview for WCD, and although OPS isn’t interviewing right now it’s fairly easy to get to power user on RED and get an invite to OPS that way. I think RED is a little bit more hard-ratio than WCD was because RED doesn’t do freeleech staff picks or site-wides, but they do give out handfuls of freeleech tokens from time to time, so even if you can’t keep up with ratio requirements you can still nab free stuff with those just by having an account. As before, having an OPS account will help tremendously for keeping up with RED ratio, and eventually it’ll become a non-issue.

Yes, it’s allowed and encouraged between RED<->OPS. There are a few tools on the RED and OPS forums to automate most of the process (e.g. Transplant, REDCurry, Takeout, Orpheus-Populator, etc.). Cross-posting torrents on many sites is allowed and fine, you just have to be aware of the rules of the source site, e.g. some places don’t want their internals to be shared, or some have a literal timer countdown before cross-posting is allowed. On the other hand, most sites are not going to enforce other sites’ exclusivity demands (PTP explicitly has a note about this). If an exclusive file is cross-posted onto PTP, PTP isn’t going to take it down on anyone’s behalf.

I’ll note that private tracker culture has warmed up quite a bit in the past decade and a half that I’ve been on them. Trackers (and their users) don’t usually see other trackers as rivals/competitors anymore, release groups are respectful of each other, there are a ton of tutorials and help forums around to help low-skill members learn how to do the advanced stuff, and so on. There are recognizable usernames everywhere, and the general vibe is to cross-upload as much as possible and help build everyone’s trackers together. Cross-seed (the program) has helped a lot with this, and seedbases have become very strong even on smaller trackers as a result.

Mainly, HDDs are bigger and FLAC is future-proof for future audio formats, as well I think the death of What.CD has really impressed upon the next generation that preservation is of utmost importance. A lot of albums were fully lost during the transition to RED/OPS, and a good chunk of albums that used to have a lossless copy now only have lossy versions from those who kept MP3 libraries. IMO, piracy is ownership, and owning the master lossless copy so you can generate any other formats is that concept taken to its logical conclusion.

Seconding the notion to get into OPS somehow if at all possible. RED’s economy is one of the few economies that is actually non-trivial, whereas OPS’s economy is totally trivial. A large amount of RED stuff is automatically mirrored to OPS, so you can just grab it at OPS and cross-seed back to RED (there are a few tools to do this automatically, e.g. nemorosa). RED is still definitely the more active and qualitative place to be, but cross-seeding shenanigans with OPS will keep RED’s economy in-check.

A lot of people just rip Qobuz, Deezer, and Tidal FLAC for free using shared keys that you can find on the megathread (“Knowledge & Tokens”). Autosnatchers will give you at least one snatch per upload. No one is actually buying most of that WEB FLAC. There also might be a big batch of freeleech tokens during December for kickstarting a library. Also, I’d recommend just going full FLAC from the start; MP3 is easier/smaller to snatch, but it’s 2025 and no one wants MP3, so long-term you’ll get the best results by perma-seeding a large FLAC library.

I don’t think it will be a big deal to transcode MP3 to Opus as long as you’re okay with for-sure having theoretically-scuffed-up audio files. Every time an encoder has a go at the files (especially different encoders) they’ll leave little artifacting marks all over the waveforms, typically seen as little “blocks”. Are they audible? Doubtful. If you want to keep a neat and high-quality library I’d recommend collecting FLAC next time around.

Also, this won’t work on Win11, and I don’t think you can make it transcode MP3, but if anyone happens to have slightly different requirements I’ll plug https://gitlab.com/beep_street/mkopuslibrary, which I use to keep my FLAC library in sync with a parallel Opus library for mobile use.

Doing your own encodes is also really cool. I’m not too sure what the AV1 compatibility of your friends’ players would be, but yes AV1 encodes are a very efficient way to microsize. If you happen to be on PTP, there’s a giant AV1 research thread with people testing stuff out. It looks like they prefer SVT-AV1-PSYEX as of the latest posts, though I don’t know enough to understand which encoding settings are the most impactful.

If you’re only at 10mbps upload you’ll have to be very careful about selecting microsized 1080p (~4-9mbps) or quality 720p (~6-9mbps) encodes, and even then I really wouldn’t bother. If you’re not able to get any more upload speed from your plan then you’ll either have to cancel the idea or host everything from a VPS.

You can go with a VPS and maybe make people chip in for the storage space, but in that case I’d still lean towards either microsized 1080p encodes or 1080p WEB-DL (which are inherently efficient for the size) if you want to have a big content base without breaking the bank. E.g, these prices look pretty doable if you’ve got people that can chip in: https://hostingby.design/app-hosting/. I’m not very familiar with what VPS options are available or reputable so you’ll have to shop around. Anything with a big harddrive should pretty much work, though I’d probably recommend at least a few gigs of RAM just for Jellyfin (my long-running local instance is taking 1.3GB at the moment; no idea what the usual range might be). Also, you likely won’t be able to transcode video, so you’ll have to be a little careful about what everyone’s playback devices support.

Edit: Also, if you’re not familiar with microsized encodes, look for groups like BHDStudio, NAN0, hallowed, TAoE, QxR, HONE, PxHD, and such. I know at least BHDStudio, NAN0, and hallowed are well-regarded, but intentionally microsizing for streaming is a relatively new concept, and it’s hard to sleuth out who’s doing a good job and who’s just crushing the hell out of the source and making a mess - especially because a lot of these groups don’t even post source<->encode comparisons (I can guess why). You can find a lot of them on TL, ATH, and HUNO, if those acronyms mean anything to you. Otherwise, a lot of these groups post completely publicly as well, since most private trackers do not allow microsizing.