HandBrake is the best if you want to ruin all of your DVD encodes.

e: downvote if you want but I'm right and you're wrong lmfao

For anyone in the peanut gallery who wants a good deinterlacer, try QTGMC. It's originally an Avisynth script, but I use a VapourSynth port: http://avisynth.nl/index.php/QTGMC

Can you explain why it ruins the DVD encodes? I like this community to learn stuff

It all comes down to the fact that DVD is more of an analog format than a digital one. I feel like people get “CD ripping brain” which causes them to think that the most desirable thing is making the most-accurate copy of what's on the disc. For CD that's true because PCM is PCM, but for DVD the thing we really want is the program material, which is three layers deep on a DVD: inside an NTSC video signal, which is digitized following the Rec.601 standard, which is then shoved into an MPEG2 transport.

Four major things that can be done to DVD to make them look great on modern displays:

- Deinterlacing is the hardest to get right. Progressive-scan 24-frames-per-second DVDs exist but are mostly confined to movies where there will be a better BD release anyway. Interlaced DVDs where the program material is intended to be seen in 24FPS get “inverse telecine” (IVTC) instead of straight deinterlaced, but again I don't do a lot of those for the same reason. Almost any NTSC DVD that I care to encode is thus going to be 60000/1001 fields per second, which needs to be turned into 60000/1001 frames per second to avoid throwing away half of the available motion detail. If you do nothing at encode-time and produce an interlaced output, then the display or player software will end up doing it and will do a bad job. HandBrake's deinterlacing options just don't look good in my experience. I like QTGMC for this because it predicts the motion of the infill fields instead of just copying the previous field verbatim. It's very noticeable any time there's a lot of horizontal movement in the program material.

- Resolution and ratio. Most people hear “anamorphic” DVD and think of 16:9 crammed into a 4:3 image, but the truth is that all NTSC DVDs are anamorphic. They're 720x480 which if you calculate it is actually a 3:2 aspect ratio. Very clever because it ends up being about the same amount of scaling for 4:3 or for 16:9 material. They rely on PAR/DAR flags to tell the player or display how to scale it, but modern displays have terrible terrible scalers because it's purely a box-checking thing for them and not a feature they spend money or effort on. When I encode a DVD I stretch it myself at encode-time to 720x540 or 960x540. There's obviously some artifacting inherent in that vertical stretch, but it avoids throwing horizontal resolution detail away by scaling 4:3 programs down to 640x480 like most encoders do. Then the 540 pixel-doubles cleanly into 1080, 2160, etc.

- SD colorspace (Rec.601 again) is a similar issue where modern displays are just fucking terrible at it because there's no economic reason for them not to be. The chroma is already subsampled, so greens especially end up looking washed out and terrible. When I encode a DVD I convert them into HD colorspace which doesn't restore subsampled chroma but at least avoids letting the display make it worse.

- Cropping. The program-area resolution is actually 702 or 704x480 for anything transferred from tape (look up SONY D-1). If you have any "DVDrips" sitting around of an '80s or '90s TV show, does it have 8 pixels of black pillarbars on the left and right? If so then the person who encoded it didn't know what they were doing. It subtly throws off the aspect ratio for the entire program, especially noticeable in animation where they tended to use exact-circle tools. Look at the characters' eyes in The Simpsons for a great example. I crop those off before my one-time scaling so the program ratio comes out perfect.

This all applies similarly to PAL DVDs except I'm usually shrinking them down to 540px because the loss of some vertical resolution is still better than trying to get a modern display to scale 576px to panel-native res, and deinterlacing PAL is a straight 50-fields-to-50-frames without the wacky 1001 division notation that is a legacy of the backwards-compatible way that color was introduced to NTSC.

That's fascinating, thx!

I just remembered that I have a non-infringing example encode I can share: PBS's “Code Rush — A Year in the Life of a Silicon Valley Supernova: Netscape” (2000)

Original PBS web page: https://web.archive.org/web/20000815055556/http://www.pbs.or...

A copy of this was released as an MPEG-4 Part 2 (not AAC/H.264!) MOV back in 2008 to commemorate the Firefox 3.0 release: https://waxy.org/2008/06/code_rush/

Then re-released and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0: https://waxy.org/2009/07/code_rush_in_the_creative_commons/

  mega dot nz/file/QhtHzBZD#Z8eUnBgmk3lsjRgKQsiSaGD_gAnRgNY6FCk2rzrSisM

Thank you! I don’t have many DVDs (and only PAL), but it’s good to hear that I would need to be careful when ripping them

As with any lossy encoding process, I also always keep my originals so I can do it over in the future if need be :)

Not necessarily the physical disc but at least an ISO. I tend to rip DVD ISOs with the encryption intact in the name of making an untouched copy, since CSS is so thoroughly broken and since I have seen some very bad “backup” tooling that corrupts the VOBs when decrypting. I use DVDfab Passkey which is free for DVD usage; “Rip to Image” → “Keep Protection”.

This seems like a bit of a microoptimization if you're just interested in getting a streaming-service-quality level of DVD rip (which is fine by me).

I have no problem with someone wanting the highest quality possible, but for me, I mostly stream videos to a TV or to an iPhone, and unless it's a 4K UHD video (which I still compress to H.265 currently), I'm not too worried about pixel peeping at the quality.

I still watch VHS dubs too, and those have all kinds of crazy artifacts/color issues :)

There's no reason this can't by automated! I have a StaxRip workflow that takes care of everything I mentioned below except for the cropping which tends to be more fiddly — some times larger on the left or the right, or some times including the top and bottom too for e.g. Academy-ratio material that's hard-matted to the DVD res.

> I have a StaxRip workflow

I hope if you have time that you could document that workflow for us, as detailed as possible. I'm not trying to make work for you, so no worries.

I'm on vacation right now (shouldn't be on HN or my phone at all but what're ya gonna do) but can upload it somewhere when I get home next week and can access that machine.

Divvy handles this very well. It's been my go-to for like fifteen years: https://mizage.com/divvy/

Same. Divvy is simple and effective and "just works".

Monkey's paw curls: listening to customers, except literally and 24/7.

> and now we have 3 different versions of the audio control panel in Windows

And yet somehow none of them are as nice as https://eartrumpet.app/ lol

Even this cannot adjust volume levels independently for multiple tabs in the same browser, which I have always been able to do on linux with pulseaudio/pipewire. People on windows use browser extensions for this, with full access to all tabs/sites...

Every time I try to build a castle in my swamp, it gets to a certain height and then it just sinks?

STOP telling me about civil engineering, we fucking invented that shit. And NO, we have to build it in the swamp, it feeds us and keeps us safe, and I'm darned proud to say we invented that too.

Thanks, I actually didn't realize that my basically stock Linux install already did this

What makes that nicer than the built in volume mixer?

Per-app mixing on the first-level menu. I like SoundSource on macOS for the same reason: https://rogueamoeba.com/soundsource/

I right click the volume icon in Windows, select "Volume Mixer", and it gives me per-app mixing. Which I guess is an extra click, as with eartrumpet you can access the mixer with a single left click on the icon.

had to stop using eartrumpet cos it kept randomly pulling the cpu to near 100%. updating didnt help

I like a lot of things about Windows and would consider myself technically literate. I also like Linux and especially FreeBSD, but Windows has Good Bones. Shame about all the spyware and the shitty modern UI though.

How can you say “outside of Play Protect” when it comes enabled by default and hassles me to turn it back on every time I install an APK?

Really? I turned Play Protect off and have never been prompted to turn it back on, what phone do you have that does that?

It's this screen: https://support.google.com/googleplay/thread/230937718/annoy... (not several times per hour like this post says, but same UI)

Pretty sure this is a Play Services thing, so I don't know that the phone model really matters. But regardless this is on a few different devices: my primary REDMAGIC 9S Pro (Android 15), Surface Duo 2 (Android 12), and my YONGNUO YN455 (Android 10).

Now do Surveillance Impact: https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2024/10/27/waymos-5-6...

“Waymo is using around four NVIDIA H100 GPUSs at a unit price of 10,000 dollars per vehicle to cover the necessary computing requirements. The number of sensors – five lidars, 29 cameras, 4 radars”

My understandig is that in private settings, third-party consent has a very difficult legal bar to meet.

Agreed. Effectively-nobody would be interested in buying it if it weren't for OpenTTD and all the improvements they've made over the years.

It's absurd that some company can buy up and profit from thirty-year-old formerly-abandonware, and that society have been collectively browbeaten into believing in the notion of “““intellectual property””” at all.

> a compromise would be needed to balance Atari’s commercial interests (which of course they are entitled to pursue as the rights holder)

No, fuck 'em. They had nothing to do with developing the game, and in a sane copyright structure a thirty-year-old work would be public domain by now.

Agreed. Publishers need to be knocked off this absurd moral high ground. If merely being rich is enough for me to profit off of Miles Davis songs for decades after his death, copyright is just another wealth redistribution to the rich. Steal all the games and music, and any ghoul that claims I’m stifling creativity can compare their compositions to mine.

> in a sane copyright structure

You are not wrong. But alas we don't have that. ANd in the reality we live in this collaboration is way better than the alternative.

We know what the law is… the law is bullshit.

Is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism?

No. Or maybe yes (with the current US government the end of the world is quite easy to imagine... )

But what I can imagine has very little to do with what actually happens.

What you can imagine has very little to bear on what they can get away with without being legally shut down.

I mean, yeah. There's enough nukes locked and loaded around the globe to end human civilization as we know it in minutes. Nobody's made a bomb that can fix socioeconomics.

> They had nothing to do with developing the game

OpenTTD started as an effort to translate the original game’s assembly into higher level code.

It was not a clean room implementation. The original code was used as a base.

Who gives a shit? It's from 1995 and nu-Atari had nothing to do with it.

Copyright from 1995 has not expired.

And now we have looped back around to my original comment. I'll give you a moment to scroll up and read it again.

Well, they shouldn't be entitled but they are entitled.

But it's not and we don't live in fantasy land. Your approach would have it shut down tomorrow.

Most people carry an accelerometer-equipped smartphone around in their pocket or bag, and there is already precedent for that data being collected and transmitted without consent: https://research.google/blog/android-earthquake-alerts-a-glo...