In most cases, most release groups already fine tune encoding settings towards various balances of file size and quality, so the best option is to decide on a set of release group whose standards meet your needs and just use the files as they come without further modification.

Applying lossy compression to a video that’s already had lossy compression applied to it degrades it unnecessarily, so if you’re going to compress it yourself, it’s best to start with the remux, aka the original media file.

I’d personally recommend releases from members of the qxr group and Vyndros.

Not the corporate one, with 680 employees in Washington, D.C.

To keep Radio Free Europe from degrading to the level of Russian propaganda, any and all fascist influence must be removed and kept out of its administration.

If Radio Free Europe gets EU funding, it should be reincorporated in Europe and the remainder of its US operations relocated to Prague to avoid any American influence on its reporting and continued defense of democracy.

Definitely a good idea for mobile, though if on desktop, I’d suggest bypassing the website altogether and using a torrent aggregator such as Jackett, which can be integrated into qBittorrent via an extension.

In the case of 1337x.to, the megathread lists 1377x.to as the fake replica of it. In terms of quality, 1337x.to is one of the best public torrent indexers.

While I personally prefer not to use YTS releases due to their low quality, and can’t seem to find a legitimate YTS link that yts.mx would be the replica of, as long as you’re downloading via Prowlarr rather than going to the website itself, the only risk is the trustworthiness of the releases, rather than the possibility of ads or otherwise unwanted links on the website itself.

I’m guessing that they mean extending access to Japanese citizenship to descendants of Japanese expats abroad. Brazil in particular had a substantial wave of Japanese settlers in the early 1900s.

Zelenskyy giving interviews to propaganda outlets like Newsmax, especially in giving in to Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in peace talk negotiation, is just dealing into Russia’s hand. Trump’s odd pandering to Putin means that Zelenskyy should be spending his time wheeling and dealing with as many European politicians as possible, since Trump will take Russian bribes in a minute over recognizing the illegality, authoritarianism, and ethnic cleansing associated with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the countless war crimes that it has perpetuated in the process.

MKVToolNix Batch Tool should be able to do it automatically, assuming the subtitle format is supported.

US Private Security Company Is Hiring Nearly 100 Armed US Veterans Mercenaries to Run Gaza Checkpoint, Report Says

FTFY

Switched to Apple Maps a few months ago, just one more reason to never switch back.

Terrorism is wrong, whether conducted by Palestinians or Israelis. I therefore think the ideal ceasefire would have war criminals from both sides shipped to The Hague.

Recognizing that that isn’t going to happen though, 30–50 Palestinians per Israeli is also around what the war casualties have been thus far…

Stremio comes with a few addons for content navigation by default, but to actually watch most things within Stremio itself, the unofficial Torrentio addon is needed. There’s other content addons too, but Torrentio seems to work the best.

Torrentio itself needs a debrid service API key to function, with Real-Debrid being the cheapest at about $3 a month.

While I too find Linux, Arch Linux in my case due to the Steam Deck, to often be overly complicated, with operating system settings not nearly as streamlined via GUIs as on Windows, the forced switch to the enshittified Windows 11 has motivated me to set up the Steam Deck as similarly to my Windows 10 laptop as possible.

While most Windows 10 programs should work on Windows 11, I’d rather go through the hassle of switching to an OS I can trust and configure to my liking, rather than one where configuration via the Windows registry can have unintended side effects.

If program compatibility is a worry in your switch to Linux, proton, and wine as a whole, can usually let you use Windows programs on Linux; it’s how most games are able to run on the Steam Deck in the first place.

In terms of Firefox, while there’s a couple things I miss from my switch away from Chrome, such as network media playback support and built-in web-app functionality, better adblocking support via Manifest V2 add-ons and less to worry about in terms of data privacy make putting up with the hassle of configuring it to my liking more than worthwhile. Via the browser’s chrome.css GUI configuration capabilities, I disabled several menu options and context menu items to make it more like what I had been used to in using Chrome.

While it doesn’t do live TV and doesn’t work directly on an Apple TV, Real-Debrid is only $35 a year and is a relatively seamless Netflix replacement when used with Torrentio and Stremio.