Telemetry, advertising, etc. are ultimately web page elements that I can download or block. The paid offering might have a TOS that requires acceptance of such, but those terms do not bind me as a free, public visitor. I think Youtube is doing its best to have people buy its nonsense argument, as part of a wider campaign to shift the public’s understanding of web site versus web service. For what it’s worth, I don’t see them ever putting their money where their mouth is by pay-walling the whole site.

Alternative frontends don’t fall under piracy by any definition. Youtube’s servers are publicly accessible.

Banding and blocking are associated with low bitrates. Bitrate is a key consideration in video encoding. Either it is constant, where you set a value of 2000 kbits, 5600, etc. and Handbrake sticks to it, or variable, where you set a quality rate factor, and Handbrake then adjusts bitrate on the fly to maintain quality X. Variable approaches will provide an average bitrate.

Occasionally DVD sources will compress really inefficiently: no matter how much bitrate you throw at it, the encoded result is substantially worse than source. But typically I’ve found RF 18-21 does a good job. I use mediainfo to ascertain bitrates and other information.

I pulled these settings from a DVD profile I made. They go in the ‘More Settings’ box

bframes=16:ref=16:fast-pskip=0:dct-decimate=0:aq-mode=2:aq-strength=1.0:qcomp=0.65:me=umh:me-range=32:psy-rd=0,0:deblock=-3,-3

Care to demonstrate ‘looks worse’? Are visual artifacts showing up? Are the sources DVD or BD? What encoding speed is in use? What special parameters are specified (More Settings box) in the video tab?

THEY KNOW

SHUT IT DOWN

The threats are what keep us alert, circumspect and fleet-footed in our use of web technology. Always have done.

Getting people to attach a(ny) value to it is the biggest hurdle by far. I think the complacent attitude is part genuine incapacity in dealing with abstraction (what is a data profile anyway? How is knowledge of my purchase history a risk to me?) and part exceptionalism/denial. People like this tend never to think in terms of power dynamics.

What I’ve long been curious about is whether the service provider can derive a subscriber identity using the number. I mean of course the mobile network operator knows I’m me, but does Bluesky? Or is it merely a valid mobile number to them?

Like that traffic light on a rural Russian intersection that is always red

I’m sure there’ll be a carve-out to the mask prohibition. I mean, what if there’s protest action a minister/police department dislikes? They need a way for their agents to don confiscated Nazi paraphernalia before joining the event to poison its media coverage, while remaining unidentifiable as state actors.

It’s all noise is what it is. Applications and code shouldn’t come prefaced with value judgements, ‘ally’ statements or inclusion/exclusion messaging of any sort. Our world is hard enough to navigate without software development falling to the culture wars.

Funny definition of ‘agreement’

The videast himself doesn’t think he’ll post his videos to the Fediverse as it lacks monetization.

That’s code for YT can spit in my sharecropping face as much as it wants.

Press releases like this are corporate signaling to US Congress that they would like some lawfare and are willing to pay for it.

Pirate streaming growth itself doesn’t ‘threaten legal services’ as TF suggests. Any threat that arises is created by industry’s market response. It comes back to margins. Netflix could decide overnight to invest in a long-term ‘hearts and minds’ approach that includes a quality platform user experience free of hostile design, non-discrimination amongst devices, relaxed household access rules, attentive customer service, commitment to finishing programming properly, improved stream quality, etc. Becoming the Valve of streaming represents an expenditure increase, though. You’re now a lower margin business with a very sticky and content customer base. That’s not a story industry wants to tell its investors, knowing they will respond with ‘you should be petitioning for bills that enable more market captivity’.

They do the right thing only as a last resort, because the right thing is expensive.

The messaging app front I consider to be a long-term stalemate, mainly due to crippling network effects. Another factor is that strange psychology at play when making app decisions, where a person will have page after page of junk apps on their phones, yet utterly balks at the notion of installing a second messenger.

Even if a large actor (say, the EU?) managed to bruteforce some interoperability into being, I wonder whether that would be to the detriment of small apps in terms of undermining (or even eliminating) their privacy protections. I can use the likes of Session or Simplex all day long, but if the other side of the conversation is on a corporate product like Whatsapp… It runs into the same problem as email.

Have you got Jasc Animation Shop?

In fact the easier option is anti-piracy technology. As shown by the continued investment in various DRM vendor offerings. Competing on service quality is very hard.

If OP takes the Soulpill, I offer some tips:

• Don’t despair if search results carry a [private] prefix. Some of these people just got frustrated once upon a time and decided to whitelist peers rather than blacklist. Often they just want a polite PM asking for access. It pays to be inquisitive, so check their User Info for information.
• Chat rooms don’t need to be occupied to obtain or download search results. In fact it’s usually better to ignore them.
• 99 per cent of users would rather you share 3 albums than 500 system files.