Are you trolling? No enterprise would ever compete with free. They will scream for an onerous legislative solution, which will make all our lives more difficult.

I wish pirate streaming operations a speedy death.

Pixel Pirate II Hollywood Trailer https://yewtu.be/watch?v=cdK0RoO5hpY

I question whether a lot of people even need sync.

Passwords in general don’t change for long periods of time. Really the only rationale for doing so is confirmed or suspected compromise (two-factor processes make this rarer still). It doesn’t strike me that an almost permanently static input merits regular synchronization.

The alternative is doing a one-off manual sync (copy and paste) between two local DBs, then locally moving one of them to the target device. Zero online connectivity has to dramatically reduce attack surface. Is five minutes’ maintenance per year an unacceptable convenience penalty to pay?

Advertisers can pay more to stay in the room than you will realistically pay to have them expelled.

I suspect a lot of users with silly warnings in their profile like OP described haven’t bothered configuring their Upload/Download preferences. The tools for managing slot numbers and queue scheme (round robin v. FIFO) are all there.

Has it occurred to you that commerce might see advantage in weaponizing the Streisand effect?

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.

I want to view multiple tabs at once, in a split-page view where I can scroll on one tab, then mouse-over to another and start independently scrolling on that one. It’s probably the key feature I miss from Vivaldi. Is there some insurmountable obstacle in the engine that prevents implementation, or is it stubborn devs?

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.

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’

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.