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Cake day: August 6th, 2023

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  • You need to make sure when you rip the film that you grab all English subtitle tracks. Use mediainfo to find the smallest one with least elements and that tends to be the forced/translation track. Some people when initially ripping choose to burn those particular subs and those alone into the video. Others just put them in an MKV container with the full subs and mark them as forced with the flag editor. And others don’t rip them at all.

    That said, if for some reason your copy didn’t have such a track, it’s possible that the particular forced/translation subtitles had some special marker or something that the BD disc or DVD read and tended to force on and use only those subs. In fact looking at options for exporting PGS visual image subtitles in subtitle edit there is an option to mark individual lines of subtitles as forced so that’s a thing but I’m not sure any players or software currently supports it as all software I’m aware of tends to just look for whether a track is marked as forced or default and then use it or not depending on user preferences.

    If you can’t find good subtitles by themselves you could always acquire ('arr) another copy of the full movie and just grab the subs from that and mux them into your file. Again looking for forced flagged/named subs or else ones with less than half the elements of the other sub files.




  • As others mentioned having a good encoder is an issue for AAC. And some skills in using it, tuning, etc.

    Nearly all quality releasers now use AC3/EAC3 or FLAC. Tigole is the last one who uses AAC to my knowledge and the rest of the QXR group rolls their eyes at it.

    You’re not going to get a meaningful reduction in bitrate and file size with AAC over EAC3/AC3 without loss of quality. We’re talking maybe you can shave 2-300kbps off an AAC version versus an AC3 5.1 track. And it’s tricky. So much so no one other than that one person I mentioned bothers. At least no one accepted in the higher echelons as competent in creating acceptably transparent encodes.

    If a source has EAC3 (itself capable of up to halving the bitrate required vs AC3) or AC3 I’d recommend keeping it as they tend to already be efficient. They’re also universally compatible as codecs. Re-encode those big 1500kbps DTS tracks and those even bigger monster lossless Dolby and DTS tracks but I’d leave efficient codecs like AC3 alone.

    That said it’s up to you what sounds good. If you’re using lower end stuff and can’t tell the difference after trying a few different test videos with different types of sounds then go for it.




  • Don’t bother with M-discs. They only provided a meaningful advantage in the DVD era. I’ve researched this a bit myself and consensus at least in the data hoarding community is use 2 Blu-ray Discs from two different batches (bought 6 months apart). Which still comes out cheaper or the same as branded M-Discs. (Though that may be overkill and truth be told as long as you test the disc and it’s data done months after writing you’ll tend to catch any rare bad ones)

    Truth is, quality Blu-ray Discs have all the features that would engender M-disc type longevity in the design spec. Just make sure they’re not low to high (LTH) discs which are inferior but always marked as such at least.

    Don’t get no-name cheap ones either, get Verbatim, Sony, some other good Japanese brand. For Verbatim specifically their discs marked MABL on the package are better.

    Always burn data at lower speeds too, less errors.



  • Felt the same way. The soul was gone, the delivery felt off and stilted. The show just felt different. I kept on thinking to myself “they would have never done that or done it like that in the old show”.

    Charm just isn’t there and I really wanted to like it. I even watched every episode twice and while there are some enjoyable moments the tone just is off-key enough it becomes frustrating because it’s close but not the same.

    In particular as one example the universe simulation episode and particularly Bender’s actions (in the face of what he and the characters thought they meant would happen to him) just seemed out of character and random, like forced for the sake of delivering the point. As a speculative what-if machine episode it would have worked.


  • Most remuxes have commentary tracks passed through. Heck, good encoder groups like QxR, TAoE and many Internal’s retain them.

    I’ll agree remuxes generally drop extra video files though you don’t strictly need an iso for those, just a full BD disc dump in folder form which are far more common than ISO’s though far less common than single file remuxes.

    I don’t think LoTR 4K’s changed the extras and behind the scenes from 1080p either so finding disc folder dumps of the old HD releases should suffice for OP if that’s all they want.


  • Most useful unique website thing rarbg had by far was full mediainfo listing for every single upload on site. You could immediately tell what you were getting and even dead torrents became useful by virtue of retaining chapter data that could be applied to another release.

    Also, call me skeptical but IMO without access to scene FTP’s or week-1 access to (and automation on a large scale of re-uploading from) cabal trackers like BTN to get the good content from your site frankly risks ending up just another mirror among many others like lime torrents for existing public net and low hanging private tracker fruit. (If you have mediainfo for all files that adds a lot of value though)

    IMO the real need left by rarbg is not for more re-hosting of content many others have but for publishing web-dl’s others don’t have, not of just new series (which everyone does as ep’s drop) but older movies and older series without other good 1080p or 4k releases available. Even today I see many old TV series the only HD releases available are old rarbg packs and this includes across multiple of the biggest PT’s.

    Of course I wish anyone willing to run a big general tracker luck (assuming they’re honest and intent isn’t to distribute malware ofc).


  • Looking up technical specs for the drive it’s often mentioned on data sheets (often as conventional magnetic recording drive or else shingled if SMR). Other than that third parties have compiled lists and many but not all Amazon pages in tech specs mention it if you look closely. Try searching drive-model and cmr and then smr and see what comes up. Beware some drive families different sizes of drive may be cmr vs smr. WD red pro and ultra star DC line are all CMR, WD blues many are SMR. WD black as far as I know are all CMR. WD red (non-pro) can be SMR I believe.

    I’ll be honest, the real difference is getting a 7200 vs 5400 RPM drive, particularly one with a larger cache, I’d always go for 7200 except for purely offline backup stuff.

    In terms of external drives and shucking, it’s largely a crapshoot. You can try searching what drives others found in a model, however they’re subject to change.

    Bottom line: If money is tight and it’s just you, you can absolutely do SMR and 5400 RPM external drives and have a smooth experience as long as we’re talking re-encodes not raw Blu-ray remuxes (I have seen an external 5400RPM SMR drive choke and fail trying to smoothly play a file at 24MB/s bitrate but it worked fine with 10MB/s re-encodes, even those with burst rates of 17MB/s). If you can afford a bit more try to go 7200 and CMR.


  • https://diskprices.com/

    Beware MDD at the top is alleged to sell drives they’ve refurbished which are essentially used but with wiped smart. Other cheap deals… check sellers. If it’s not sold and shipped by Amazon it could be slightly used drives (usually third party sellers do a mix so some people get brand new, others not so much). Also beware third party sellers and Amazon itself often sell OEM drives without warranty. I always check the serials online before opening the anti-static bag to make sure it’s in warranty.

    Also: shucks.top

    You need to wait and watch for the good deals but they come around multiple times a year.

    Also, understand there are certain storage ranges to get these prices. Generally 8-18TB drives are best deals per TB. You pay a premium for 20-22 top size drives as well as for smaller drives like 2-4TB. 14TB seems to be the current sweet spot most of the time.

    Lastly. Understand SMR drives are alright for backups but not ideal for streaming high bitrate content from or using to seed files. CMR is better.