This is ridiculous. I like the way it’s set up now. They tried “simpler” before and I hated it and turned it off. Along with the news they’re supposedly getting rid of tags for bookmarks (I have so many bookmarks without tags they’d be useless) I’m just feeling so much despair for the web right now.

Also disabling showing HTTPS in the address bar as part of the URL is another negative change catering to what they believe is the lowest common denominator. Consider for a moment that browsers still support multiple protocols besides hypertext transfer.

My guess is they’re preparing for the Google search money to vanish and cutting costs wherever they can however small and hosting their own code repo was one thing to go.

Open invites sub. While there might be an opening or two this summer most places open at the end of the year or the first 4 weeks of the new year. Patience and planning.

Try checking that sub daily from the week of Thanksgiving through January 10th. Many openings around Christmas specifically. TL (torrent leech) will certainly open and they’re easy as long as you seed.

They’re not good, I admit that. But there is no better at present.

Your choices are Google, Safari (Apple devices and OSes only), or Firefox. It’s as simple as that. Pretending otherwise is living in a fantasy land. There’s no easy road out of here realistically. New browser engines take years (perhaps the better part of a decade at this point) to make and the inherent complications of web standards and their volume means I regard things like Ladybird as a silly meme sucking up nerd and venture capital dollars rather than a serious endeavor.

The effort to build a web browser from scratch today compared to 15 years ago has scaled massively and I think that’s intentional on the part of companies like Google and Microsoft to shut out the competition and to shut out small actors and to control the web for themselves and western governments.

The last decent bits of Firefox are the ones holding back a tidal wave of bad things from coming to destroy the sickly remains of the open web in very quick fashion. Right now I can block ads, I can shut up my browser from phoning home, my browser isn’t made by an ad company, and it’s not made by a company that has a vested interest in completely airtight DRM because they own a video platform and/or are friends with big Hollywood studios (yes they implement DRM, no it’s not done as tightly as Chrome, the fact major streaming platforms restrict it to 720p should show you that).

They’re not the hero we need, but they’re far from the worst villain and when they are gone much as I have criticized them we are going to be fucked because no one can replace them.

The 90s ideals of an open internet that persisted into the 2000s that led to Firefox have vanished, replaced by various grifts that call themselves web 3.0. The illusion the liberal capitalist west was weaving of human rights and freedom which resulted in space for many good things is being clawed back now that their hegemony is under threat.

Frankly I don’t see the EU or China or some large, benevolent, very wealthy organization stepping in to build a new browser that’s privacy respecting, not full of backdoors, not totally in the thrall of the worst corporate interests. And I don’t see Mozilla selling Firefox to some benevolent org. Not in the near term, in 8 years who can say but we’ll spend many horrible years wandering in the wilderness during that and the web will permanently enshittify in ways that Firefox could have at least slowed.

I see two options in the present and they are Firefox somehow managing to continue to exist without completely compromising things to the point that librewolf devs and others give up because the soil is too toxic or it not doing that, collapsing entirely, stuffing itself full of ads and spyware that’s very hard to remove to attempt to stay afloat.

It’s like shrugging at a law gutting union protections and saying “revolution, revolution, revolution” indifferently to the suffering coming down the pipe and the uncertainty when the conditions for what you want to happen aren’t near, when you’re staring down the barrel of worsened oppression and even the potential of salvation is years, a decade away. That’s how I regard people indifferent to Mozilla imploding.

Do I wish there was a way to snatch Firefox away from them? Yes. But there isn’t. In fact if anyone was able to they could right now, it’s opensource and they could just fork and get to work and start making something better. The idea that the void will be filled by good things is “hand of god, hand of the markets” liberal capitalist brained thinking.

Most people don’t give a shit about web privacy, about not seeing ads online, about controlling how websites display, about not having all their data sucked up or about companies pushing evil web standards that take away control and hand it to abusive governments and corporate actors so this isn’t going to lead to some revolutionary push-back, it’s going to lead to the collapse of the last militant hold-out for privacy advocates.

Frankly I see a nightmare scenario where Chrome is bought by a company that takes it closed source (even partially) or buries the spyware and bad things in so deeply they can’t be removed by open source fork maintainers due to the burden while simultaneously Firefox either simply ceases to be developed or enshittifies and deploys its own ads and spying. At that point we’ll have nothing. There aren’t enough nerds who care about privacy to fund a privacy respecting, standards compliant web browser that manages to not be blocked by most websites. As it is if Firefox came out 5 years ago and wasn’t grandfathered in from their good old days of being a big boy player they probably wouldn’t have the sway they have on the internet standards council and would probably be blocked a lot more aggressively.

Should Mozilla be restructured and stop acting in such a lousy fashion? Absolutely. Do I see any way for us random web users to force that? Not at all. It’s a lousy situation but one which can get much, much, much worse.

Literally the other way around.

Mozilla can continue to be an irrelevant little NGO with a tiny little office in SF pestering people and shouting into the void and setting up booths at tech conventions on very, very, very little money. A few million a year, much less than they stand to be able to earn from their investment fund returns annually.

Firefox on the other hand requires Mozilla’s hundreds of paid full time developers. Its codebase is nearly the size of Linux, as a browser it’s constantly patching security issues, adding in new features, fixing things that break for small amounts of the web, etc.

There is simply no organization waiting in the wings that has the money and the interest in making a privacy-preserving web-browser that can just pick up that slack.

And with it the open web.

If (and it’s still a big if) Google is forced to sell Chrome they’ll sell it to either Facebook, AltmanAI, Microsoft (lol), or else some shady tech company that has no reason to want to own it but is an even thinner rubber mask for the CIA/FBI/etc.

This is why I’m sure it’ll happen (dooming hard). The US government wants web control and censorship and one big thing standing in the way is the open web Firefox fosters. Kill that off and the rest falls in line for corporate/government surveillance, control, and the end of anonymity and anything resembling free speech to the disliking of the aforementioned parties.

Interesting project. Thanks for the link and I do appreciate it and could see some very good uses for that but it’s not quite what I meant.

Unfortunately as it notes it works as a companion for reverse proxies so it doesn’t solve the big hurdle there which is handling secure and working flow (specifically ingress) of Jellyfin traffic into a network as a turn-key solution. All this does is change the authorization mechanism but my users don’t have an issue with writing down passwords and emails. Still leaves the burden of:

• choosing and setting up the reverse proxy,
• certificates for that,
• paying for a domain so I can properly use certificates for encryption,
• making sure that works,
• chore of updating the reverse proxy, refreshing certs (and it breaking if we forget or the process fails), etc

Which is a hassle and a half for technically proficient users and the point that most other people would give up.

By contrast with Plex how many steps are there?

1. Install (going to skip media library setup as Jellyfin requires that too so it’s assumed)
2. Set up any port settings, open any relevant ports on firewall, enable remote access in setting with a tickbox
3. Set up users
4. Done, it now works and doesn’t need to be touched. It will handle connecting clients directly to the server. Users just need to install Plex client, login to their account and they have access.

By contrast this still requires the hoster set up a reverse proxy (major hassle if done securely with certificates as well as an expense for a domain which works out to probably $5 a year), to then have their users point their jellyfin at a domain-name (possibly a hard to remember one as majesticstuffbox[.]xyz is a lot cheaper than the dot com/org/net equivalents or a shorter domain that’s more to the point), auth and so on. It’s many, many, many more steps and software and configurations and chances for the hosting party to mess something up.

My point was I and many others would rather take the $5 we’d spend a year on a domain name and pay it for this kind of turn-key solution for ourselves and our users even if provided by a third party but that were Jellyfin to integrate this as an option it could provide some revenue for them and get the kinds of people who don’t want to mess with reverse proxies and certificates into their ecosystem and off Plex.

Here I’m still using the separate search box. Why wouldn’t I? Plenty of screen real estate horizontally. Nice to be able to do quick math there though I suppose.

Jellyfin needs to partner with someone people can pay a very low and reasonable and/or one-time fee to enable remote streaming without the fuss of setting up either dangerous port-forwarding or the complexity of reverse proxies (paying for a domain-name, the set-up itself including certificates, keeping it updated for security purposes).

And no a VPN is not a solution, the difficulty for non-technical users in setting up a VPN (if it’s even possible, on smart-tvs it’s almost always not, and I don’t think devices like AppleTV and other streaming boxes often support them) is too high and it’s an unwanted annoyance even for technical users.

I’m not talking about streaming video’s through someone else’s servers or using their bandwidth. I’m talking about the connection phase of clients and servers where Plex acts like an enhanced dynamic DNS service with authentication. They have an agent on the local media server which sends to the remote web service of the third party the IP address, the port configured for use, the account or server name, etc. When a client tries to connect they go to this remote web service with the servername/username info, the web service authenticates them then gives them the current IP address and any other information necessary. It then sends some data to the local Jellyfin server about the connecting client to enable that connection and then the local media Jellyfin server and the client talk directly and stream directly.

Importantly the cost of running this authentication and IP address tracking scheme would be minimal per Jellyfin server. You could charge $5/year for up to 20 unique remote clients and come out ahead with a slight profit which could be put back into Jellyfin development and things like their own hosting costs for code, etc. Even better if they offer lifetime for this at $60-$80 they’d get a decent chunk of cash up-front to use for development (with reasonable use restrictions per account so someone hosting stuff in Hetzner or whatever and serving 300 people with 400 devices will need to pay more because they’re clearly doing this for profit and can afford to throw some more money at Jellyfin).

Until Jellyfin offers something that JUST WORKS like that it’s not going to be a replacement for Plex, whatever other improvements they offer to users it’s still a burden for the server runner to set up remote streaming in a way that isn’t either incredibly dangerous (port forwarding) OR either involves paying money to third parties AND/OR the trouble of running your own reverse proxy and/or involves walking users through complicated set-up process for each device that you have to repeat if you change anything major like your domain name when using a VPN.

Of course. The YT-DLP team by refusing to support DRM videos gave Google a huge neon sign that said this is the one thing that will shut them down, the line they won’t cross. Google has targeted the big front end instances with rate limits and blocks and this is the next step.

Our only hope really is that the current YT-DLP team hands the reins over to people in countries that don’t give a shit about copyright and they put back in the ability to download and decrypt DRM protected video.

can they be added to the search function in qbittorrent?

Nearly all can. All the one’s you’d want anyways work with Jackett. They don’t work via direct plugins but just run Jackett, follow its instructions and connect it to qBittorrent and you’re good to go searching just the same as before. Some annoying ones occasionally require setting up another software like Flaresolver but for the most part the big easy to get into ones that open their doors annually work without that.

While there will likely be some openings throughout the year the fact is most trackers open in the period from Thanksgiving/late November through early January. TL opens then basically every year, a number of more exclusive trackers do open signups then, some for only 24 hours so get an RSS feed of that and remember to sign up IMMEDIATELY as soon as you see a post as the post on reddit may have been made 22 hours into a 24 hour open window, you just don’t know. TL though at least tends to stay open for several days. So if you have no luck before then, wait until that time of the year and then check daily or even twice daily if you can, once before bed, once earlier when you get up or lunch or after work, whatever.

Nah. Such permanent guarantees are not legally enforceable, if a company really cares about it they’ll structure themselves in such a way as to make it very hard to change by having veto voices in their ownership structure who are for such things and will not allow a change, by writing language that requires some high majority of agreement of these owners that’s hard to come by to change such conditions.

At best you get it in a contract when you use the software but guess what, that contract can and is overwritten as soon as you use a new version of the software with a new contract, feel free to use the old one full of one-click machine compromise vulnerabilities forever if you’d like but in reality you have no choice but to update and accept the new contract.

Um what the fuck.

Input information THROUGH the browser and they’re granted a right to that info worldwide license to use that? To use what I type into my url bar? To use what I search? To use what I type into forms on websites? This is a more all-encompassing spying license than I think even Google has. This is absurd. This is a spyware license not that of a browser. Not only that, any files I upload, their names, any files I download their names.

Maybe they’ll sell information on who looks like they’re doing filesharing, or porn habits, or those with politics a certain US administration present or future may not like.

This is unacceptable.

People saying “oh but it’s just to use the web” well part of the way they word it, all they have to do is insert spyware/adware or AI as they commonly call it these days and suddenly oh look at that, your normal use of the browser and how the data is used includes sending it all to us or our partners for the purposes of AI/ads, etc. One tiny little change, an addition no one will remark on or notice in future and suddenly this takes on very dire implications.

They disclaim any liability for use of FF, but if they do have any liability then it’s limited to $500? I doubt this will ever come up but it just feels odd.

Some jurisdictions don’t allow disclaiming liability, this is kind of a fall-back when that happens to attempt to limit damages. Pretty standard legal language.

What they told you is misleading.

Transcoding and burning in subtitles for Plex and similar only happens in some cases if your streaming device doesn’t support image based subtitles. Plex themselves could fix this on a lot more devices but don’t.

10 years ago it was the case that there were a LOT of issues with anything but text subtitles. These days it depends. If you’re running it directly off a smart tv (bad experience anyways, not recommended) it’s likely to be an issue. If you’re using an Android streaming device or Apple TV or gaming console there’s a good chance the subs just work.

Truth is lots of things can force transcoding with Plex including using certain audio formats in certain media containers. Most of these days picture subs work. If you can get text subs it’s not a bad thing but I wouldn’t go through the hassle of doing flawed OCR unless you can confirm it’s an issue you’re experiencing with your setup.

Console batch file for mkv merge should do that as long as subs are named same as video files (or something consistent like that name +subs).

You’d want to target the sub files not idx. If that fails I’d just do an intermediate step of merging the sub and idx files into an mks file then merging that into the mkv. The gui only needs the sub files added. I’ll try and come back to this though someone else already posted a script that should be able to be adapted to do this.

It’s alright. Not anywhere near as nice as say TL in retention and breadth/amount of content available but they have a fair amount of zero-day scene RARed stuff as well as some non-RARed stuff. Not as much free leech as many other trackers either, if you sign up I strongly recommend trying to grab stuff while you have sitewide to build a buffer.

Oh and they do have pretty regular problems keeping the site up. People regularly get API request failures and the website can be unreachable for hours or more. Not a bad tracker but I wouldn’t suggest using it as your only resource unless your needs are very specific such as only wanting day-one scene access.

They’re US vassals. They don’t care about soft power just enriching themselves as much as possible while avoiding drawing US ire and being taken out back to be killed for competing too successfully. (See plaza accords when Japan did this)

In other words their power doesn’t come from a positive view by westerners but by loyalty to Washington’s geopolitical interests. They’re never going to change anything because they can’t overcome US-centric media and its power.

No amount of cultural popularity will help them if they’re turned into a villain for being a threat to the US’s interests. Similarly it’s not necessary for them to have good PR for soft power in the first place because of their subservient position. Their interests are tied to that of the US so displacing the culture power of the US with their own at no profit doesn’t benefit them and no individual corporation or capitalist is going to forgo profits for some vague hope of their country having more leverage as a vassal in 20 years.

Japan is viewed favorably because the US forced them to commit economic suicide in the 90s and the hate campaign let up. We are 35 years out from massive racism and fearmongering about Japan pushed by the media which relented and created this space only after they were brought to heel. Look how many Asian food places in the west still say “no MSG”. That was driven by western media reporting, racism, and fearmongering and clearly is still stronger than any anime fan feelings of positivity towards a normal ingredient.

Also wasn’t that guy their puppet dictator first leader who presided over numerous atrocities with a regime full of Japanese collaborators?

Just be thoughtful. Accessibility is not seen as an excuse for breaking copyright. Take precautions.

Also if you’ve never done audio editing I’ll mention audacity the editor has a tool called “auto duck” that’s perfect for lowering the volume of other tracks in a mix when your select track with your voiceover makes noise To enhance clarity of it.

Full disc rips perhaps. Unfortunately many remux don’t bother to pass through such tracks (though some do). Some groups like qxr often but not always may include them when available. Thing is they only really exist for movies released in the past perhaps 15 years from what I’ve seen.