Acquired by whom?

Unfortunately yes, and I hate them with everything I’ve got.

Any x86 distro can run SteamCMD.

I’d be very careful with using tools like that. I can’t imagine Valve will simply let this slip if they detect it.

Why the switch?

I’ve thought about this myself during a phase of less that then perfect health. I think a somewhat practical solution is to have all passwords and documentation on how to use them/access the services that require them in a (online) password manager (so it stays current). Then have an USB stick with encrypted login credentials and OTP backup deposited at a notary and hand out the decryption key to a few trustworthy friends and family members.
This way nobody can access your stuff and the notary can make sure to hand out the USB stick only to the one person you specified in your will. The other friends and family members are there as backup in case your “special” friend has lost the decryption key in the meantime.

The alternative to an online pw manager would be a local one that you synchronize to your friends and only the notary has the key to unlock the database, which they only hand out according to your will.

I’d love to hear about other solutions though. Maybe there’s a better option.

P.S.: There are tools to have more redundancy on USB sticks and so on, so that bit flips/degradation can be accommodated. Multiple redundant data carriers are an option as well.

That’s pretty much dependent on your and your platform’s jurisdictions.

Here’s a small list of devices that might be interesting (sorry it’s in German): https://geizhals.de/?cat=hdxnas&asd=on&asuch=USB&pg=1&v=e&hloc=at&hloc=de&hloc=pl&hloc=uk&hloc=eu&sort=p&xf=19347_Erweiterungseinheit~2659_ohne

Keep in mind you could always go the NAS route instead and have it available in your whole network for pretty much around the same a bit higher price.

If you really end up with DAS, I can recommend this: https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/tl-d800c

I started with a rack case, hated it and ended up with a Fractal Design 7 XL. Plus, after years of running it I am looking to downsize with higher capacity harddrives or ideally even pure NVMe storage (expensive as hell for 80TB+). Not everybody wants to cosplay as a sysadmin all the time.

Why snapraid and LVM when you can have the functionality natively with Windows Storage Spaces?

In my experience racks are unpleasantly loud. You can put up to 16 drives or so comfortably in a regular big tower PC case with much better/quieter cooling options.

The keyword here is DAS - Direct Attached Storage

a) Release a Steam Deck successor (Steam Deck 2, 3, 4 or whatever)
b) Have the Steam “Box” have the same hardware as the Deck of the same generation, but with a higher TDP (and better cooling), maybe better storage options and a bundled controller
c) Break into a broader customer base by bringing the Deck and the “Box” to other retailers and stores (Amazon would be a huge one, but also big national brick and mortar franchises outside the US)
d) Maybe do some advertising??? Most gamers don’t even know about the existence of the Steam Deck yet
e) Bundle games or Steam gift cards with the console (at least for offline stores)

Any objections?

I wasn’t aware of the transcoding requirement, thank you. So I guess converting the subtitles is a best practice I should adopt.

I’m pretty sure MKV can handle VOBSUB. Why do you convert them to .srt before merging them?

Edit:

I’ve also just found this: https://github.com/elizagamedev/vobsubocr

The most comparable tool to vobsubocr is VobSub2SRT, but vobsubocr has significantly better output, especially for non-English languages, mainly because VobSub2SRT does not do much preprocessing of the image at all before sending it to Tesseract. For example, Tesseract 4.0 expects black text on a white background, which VobSub2SRT does not guarantee, but vobsubocr does. Additionally, vobsubocr splits each line into separate images to take advantage of page segmentation method 7, which greatly improves accuracy of non-English languages in particular.

Edit 2:

And a fork of it, of course: https://github.com/gwen-lg/subtile-ocr

As you seems to not update this project anymore, I have done a fork to continue the project. With subtile-ocr I have use subtile subtile is a fork no longer maintained vobsub crate. With this I was able to :

• modernise the code by :
  • update dependencies, especially nom who need a lot of code modification.
  • migrate to thiserror and anyhow for error management
• do some small optim (by reducing a lot the memory allocation count) And it could be a better start to add functionality (like managing .sup: blue-ray subtitle format).

MKVToolNix Batch Tool works on Windows 32-bit (x86) and Windows 64-bit (x64) operating systems,

Unfortunately I’m a Linux user.

Under Linux you can also start a throwaway profile by running firefox --Profile $(mktemp -d)

They will eventually stop to release physical media unfortunately.

Who would have thought people aren’t paying for stuff that’s not worth paying for?