How do ya'll obtain/store your media?

[malformed_jill]

Anyway, my point is that I hate digital storage now. Or at least I'm starting to hate it the more I understand it and the longer I've been with it. Physical storage is magnificent. It doesn't rely on technology, even if that technology continues to work normally and never breaks. It's never going to use electricity and I've already had problems where the power has gone out more than once, no backup generator or battery, the power cuts out in and instantly my work is gone. [...] I suppose I've distanced myself from the future of technology in general. I've stopped liking computers for a long time now. If I moved out into the woods, I'm not bringing electronics with me. Or having electricity. I will however print out all the websites and plaintext files I have on my ssds and bring them with me to the woods.

i don't like saying the word 'based' but i find the dislike for computers totally understandable now, even if i still find things to like about them (and their needless complexity), and i always thought they had too much dependencies (the usual computers at least, anything battery powered like PDAs seems intriguing) for them to be ever-lasting like how some tech optimists think. forgetting even about the shitstorm that is software, hardware is definitely gonna degrade too, and open hardware isn't at a point where this is gonna be a non-issue. i also wouldn't want to do so much maintenance outside... if anything i'd probably move to mechanical tech.
kinda like how some people say to use money to be free of money, using (electric) technology to be free of tech is a pretty profound idea too, like with printing.
a problem with digital storage is the sort of hoarding mentality that i end up having with books and writings, since right now on my other laptop i have about 6000+ document files that have bloated up my space to around 71gb or so and i've only gone through about 1% at the least. the journey to making them physical also requires you to filter out a bunch of stuff, though i have a .txt files of random profound passages of text already for taking specific things that i like. for example, i like fiction and i believe it very much has a purpose and its own ways of expressing messages, but most of it is gonna be gutted (id end up writing my own anyways).
another reason to filter them out is for the weight you're gonna have to lug around with you, especially if there's some physical books you still want... i haven't thought too much about how i'm going to go from living outside like that, but a good bag will sort all, i hope. you could go pretty far with just having text and audio alone, images are a bonus.

[vulonkaaz]

here's a 37MiB Shrek i encoded a month ago btw

This is impressive AF. Like I said above I try to do the same with movies, aiming more for like < 30 MB, but some of my movies of comparable size to your Shrek seem a little lower quality, I wonder if it's because they're live action or if you have a better know how in encoding. Do you have any resources/tips on extreme video compression? All I do is experiment with ffmpeg flags: basically downscale, lower FPS, convert audio to mono, lower bitrate of audio and video and set encoding preset to slowest. I also tried more obscure stuff like changing pixel formats but think it didn't achieve much.

I think what you're missing is a good codec, I use SVT-AV1, preset 2 (very slow especially with the kind of hardware you might have, I think my Intel N100 can encode less than 10 frames per second in preset 2), constant quality I think the crf value can go up to 70 which is the most compressed/ugliest, I don't remember what crf this shrek was but it might be between 35 and 50 not too high cause high crf is actually unwatchable at lower resolutions

I think reducing the color depth with newer codecs like AV1 is not a good idea (and maybe not actually possible) and I've heard 10 bits colors (yuv420p10le) is actually always the better choice with this codec but i haven't experimented much to see if it was true

for audio I don't think there is anything better than Opus and the only thing you can really tweak with it is merge channels into mono and reducing the bitrate

[satoridepon]

here's a 37MiB Shrek i encoded a month ago btw

This is impressive AF. Like I said above I try to do the same with movies, aiming more for like < 30 MB, but some of my movies of comparable size to your Shrek seem a little lower quality, I wonder if it's because they're live action or if you have a better know how in encoding. Do you have any resources/tips on extreme video compression? All I do is experiment with ffmpeg flags: basically downscale, lower FPS, convert audio to mono, lower bitrate of audio and video and set encoding preset to slowest. I also tried more obscure stuff like changing pixel formats but think it didn't achieve much.

If I was compressing a movie as much as possible, I would just forget the movie and just save the script for it. You can also add a frame from every moment in the movie as an optional bonus. Imagination will fill in the rest.

[May]

When I was younger I tried to pirate things and got my family's internet cut off a few times (albeit temporarily), so I was rather hesitant to try torrenting again because of it. For many years I mostly relied on DDL sites such as fmhy, XDCC, Vimms/Myrient/Emuparadise, etc. But last year I finally got a VPN and tried torrenting again, and I became something of a data hoarder rather quickly.

Unfortunately my renewed interest only came in time for storage prices to be utterly absurd due to the AI craze, so my space is rather limited for now as I only have 7tb to work with. Were it not for my space limitations I'd probably take you up on that TL invite as I don't have a general tracker atm. As for finding things, one of my friends graciously invited me to a PT and I joined a few others from there.

I know this wasn't explicitly asked in the OP, but I like to download old 480p fansub rips and watch them on my CRT. A modded PS3 works well for this, as it's basically the strongest console that natively supports component output while also being softmoddable. Though this may soon change with the breakthroughs made on 360 modding. I also download all of my music (mainly from Soulseek) and listen to it via Winamp. You can see my top playcounts below.

playcountss.PNG (24.96 KiB) Viewed 106 times

[malformed_jill]

Unfortunately my renewed interest only came in time for storage prices to be utterly absurd due to the AI craze

what an unfortunate time to try and live under a rock. i initially only thought it would be ram prices until i remembered the llm bullshit generators need a place to store all of their data scrapes. even hdds have gone up, and i'm a bit in need of some storage for backups (switching os) and server hosting stuff.

[kshmr]

I use nyaa and soulseek primarily and sometimes I go to rutracker but that's a rare occasion.
I live in India and I'm broke so I don't really have a VPN but never got any issue either.
I don't recommend this practice to anyone else and I'll get one when I'll go to university
my torrent client is btpd

Lemme share a fun story(irrelevant):
In 2019, a film named URI: A surgical strike was released and as always ppl were torrenting it.
The film is about the Indian Military, Patriotism. It was set on a real strike by the Indian military.
A lot of pirates reported that the file they got from the torrent didn't had the file but there was a video of the film's cast saying "what do you think ? If Indian Army can penetrate the enemy bases, won't they be able to penetrate into your torrent and it was a really huge file in size that you won't suspect it being a parody

[drummyfish]

Lemme share a fun story(irrelevant):
In 2019, a film named URI: A surgical strike was released and as always ppl were torrenting it.
The film is about the Indian Military, Patriotism. It was set on a real strike by the Indian military.
A lot of pirates reported that the file they got from the torrent didn't had the file but there was a video of the film's cast saying "what do you think ? If Indian Army can penetrate the enemy bases, won't they be able to penetrate into your torrent and it was a really huge file in size that you won't suspect it being a parody

Someone told me that in the newest Dark Souls game (or smt like that) they named the horse Torrent so that when people look up "Dark Souls torrent" it just finds articles and discussions about the game lore Didn't bother fact checking btw maybe I'm spreading fake news.