Just tar and zstd. They’re probably installed by default for most distros anyway.

I think this is what I used when I first tried out zstd https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-and-use-zstd-compression-tool-on-linux

Tar supports input from zstd so I put everything on one line.

tar -I 'zstd -v --ultra -22' -cvf YourFile.tar.zst -C /path/to/your/file YourFile

-I takes the input from zstd which is in quotes.

–ultra it should be redundant but for some reason its needed for higher levels of compression.

-22 the highest level of compression offered by zstd.

-c for compress.

-v for verbose.

-f for the file name.

-C excludes the absolute path to the file/directory and just takes YourFile as the file/directory to compress. Its not needed if you’re in the same directory as YourFile.

I would recommend leaving out

--ultra -22

and just test how much compression you get with the default level first because 22 is super slow and if it just can’t compress the file you won’t see any difference in file size compared to the default compression level.

For 3DS games I use NDSTokyoTrim to remove useless data from the game files to make them smaller.

DreamCast, PS1 & PS2 games get compressed to chd with chdman.

GameCube and Wii are compressed to rvz with Dolphin.

PS3 I remove the PS3_UPDATE folder, 256MiB for each game adds up. I also use Gnarly Repacks for PS3 games since they have better compression than anything I’ve tried so far.

Switch games, I use nsz.

Then I use tar with zst on all of them, Nsz and rvz already use zst so theres no change but I just like to keep everything the same accross all of my roms and pc games.

Everything else, GB, NDS, SNES etc all get archived and compressed with tar and zst. For these I’ll also use the --ultra -22 option since they’re small enough files anyway so they don’t take long to compress/decompress. If anyone knows any specific compression/trimming methods that are better than zst, I’d love to hear about them!

Copies of all the tar archives are kept on 2 separate drives and a copy of the games are on my PC in whatever the smallest format is that is compatible with their emulator.

Around 16 TiB and I keep 3 copies of everything so 48 TiB used of around 65TiB. I encoded all my TV shows and most of my movies with AV1 and keep most of my files compressed, which saves a bunch of space so hopefully I won’t need more drives any time soon

Theres at least 4 websites in the megathread under the ROMs section that have a bunch of Switch games. 3 begin with N and 1 begins with Z. In the FAQ section of the Z website is where I got keys and firmware

Pretty sure its because of the piracy shield thingy. Secure Core might be an option as long as no Italian servers are used and you’re using the VPNs DNS

https://torrentfreak.com/airvpn-stops-serving-italians-due-to-piracy-shield-blocking-requirements-240206/

“[A]ll parties in any capacity involved in the accessibility of illegally disseminated content – and therefore also, by way of example and not limitation – VPN and open DNS service providers, will have to execute the blocks requested by the Authority [AGCOM],” the notice read.

Use one of the websites in the megathread, unless you want to use the dev tools on a pc to find the video source link and try to download it from there but thats a whole lot of unnecessary effort

??? Theres a download button beside the play button that gives a bunch of sources and each source has a torrent file or magnet link to add to your torrent client

I’ve used https://github.com/Softcatala/whisper-ctranslate2 before for transcribing English and translating non English audio into srt files and its been pretty good for TV shows for me. Its not perfect but it usually gets me about 95% of the way there

Tl;dr Step by step how I setup lutris to run pirated games

I use Lutris, its pretty easy to setup and is pretty much the same setup for most games.

Install lutris wine and winetricks with your package manager. Wine is a windows compatibility layer for linux and winetricks is a helper for downloading and dependencies that a game might need and lutris integrates both of these.

In the file manager, I like to create a folder with the name of the game and then inside of that folder I make 2 folders “game” and “prefix” I put all of the game files in the game folder and leave the prefix folder empty for now.

When you open lutris, on the left, hover over wine and click on the little box icon to manage the wine versions. I recommend, wine-ge. Its a custom build/fork of Steams Proton that adds some extra stuff

Once you have installed that, back on the main page at the top left is a + to add a new game. Select the bottom option, “Add locally installed game”. Give the game name and select “wine” as the runner from the dropdown.

Then on the next tab, Game Options, select the games executable location, inside the “game” folder. Set the Working directory as the “game” folder. You can just copy the path that you put in the executable section and backspace until the folder called “game”.

For wine prefix, copy the working directory path and replace “game” with “prefix” this is where all the wine/windows stuff will install.

Set the Prefix architecture to 64-bit

On the next tab, Runner Options, you can select the wine version you want to use. It should default to the wine-ge version you installed. At the top right press save and your game should be good to go. There are a whole bunch of other options you can play around with but for pretty much every game I’ve played I just leave them as default.

This should be fine for most games but sometimes wine updates can break older games and so you may have to try older versions of wine-ge or different versions of wine like lutris-fshack or wine-staging. Or the game may need a special dependency that you need to install. This is why I set a separate prefix directory for each game.

You can look at the logs for a game by selecting it and pressing the arrow beside the play button, this may or may not be helpful for trouble shooting.

If you do need to install an additional dependency, select the game and press the arrow at the bottom right and select winetricks. “Select the default prefix” should be selected by default, press ok and at the top of the next screen you should see the path to the games prefix, then select the “Install a Windows DLL or component” Then you should have a list of packages you can install.

If you’re using a repack that needs to be extracted, put the path to setup.exe as the executable on the Game Options tab and run through the installer, selecting the “game” folder that you created as the install location, it is probably under the Z drive. Then when you’re done installing, right click the game in lutris and press configure and then back to game options and replace the setup.exe path with the path to the games exe and save.

There’s a whole bunch of other ways to do this, like bottles or just using system wine or adding the game as a non-steam game to Steam, I have a separate throwaway Steam account for this.

I like the way lutris is laid out and I like having separate prefixes for each game because I archive the games I like and its nice to have a known working prefix in that archive for games I had issues running.

Ha, we’ve been doing the same thing for the past few months! I just made a generic Immich account that we all log into and upload to that. I auto backup the library to other places as we go, just in case. Once we’re done, we’ll all get copies of the directory to do with as we please.

I have Immich set up to keep the name of the files instead of giving them a random name. As we scan we name the files with the peoples names and generic tags like Tom.Mary.Birthday.1992 and putting Mary before birthday indicates that it was Mary’s birthday. So that if I decide to try and add meta data to the files it will be easier.

I haven’t figured out a plan for adding meta info to the files so they at least have the year/month they were taken and I don’t know if I even want to since we’re 1000’s of photos in now

My dads friend used to burn random movies to DVD and give them to us. Eventually, he showed my dad where to get them and my dad showed me. I think it was the uploader axxo on isohunt that my dad would always download from. I nearly completely forgot about that, thanks for making me think about it! We really had no idea what we were doing, we used to use utorrent and everything. That family computer was riddled with viruses. It took us about an hour to remove some random extensions that changed our default search engine one time

The size of the file and speed shouldn’t be an issue, unless its crazy high speeds, I’m seeding a bunch of 80+ GB files, I think for me it was the number of connections being made that was causing the disconnects for me.

I assume its not something basic like the ProtonVPN subscription lapsed or one of the issues mentioned in the link in the logs https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun-wiki/blob/main/faq/healthcheck.md

I’d try a few different countries and see if its that specific one, I like to have 3 different countries listed in my compose files so if there are issues with one countries servers it just connects to the next country instead

You could also try switching between wireguard and openvpn configs to see if that helps https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun-wiki/blob/main/setup/providers/custom.md#wireguard

Are you seeding a lot of torrents?

Something similar kept happening to me last year, constantly disconnecting no matter what I tried. I thought it was a gluetun issue so I stopped using docker and tried the official ProtonVPN app, openvpn, wireguard and community version of protonvpn, I tried switching from arch to ubuntu on my NAS and the same thing kept happening.

I was convinced it was a hardware issue so I tried different hardware, same issues.

The only thing that fixed it was reducing the number of torrents I had seeding. At the time I had ~500 and once I lowered it, I stopped disconnecting.

Now I run 3 gluetun containers with 1 qbittorrent container connected to each and they each have ~400 torrents seeding and I haven’t had any issues since.

Settings -> Apps -> Eternity -> Mobile Data and WiFi

Depending on your ROM, you should see one or all of these toggles

• Allow network access
• WiFi data
• Mobile data
• Background data
• VPN data
• Unrestricted data usage

The first 2 at least should be enabled by default

Tbh I don’t think this is the issue, there hasn’t been an update to eternity in 6 months and I wouldn’t be surprised if its buggy from a Lemmy update

Fennec is a Firefox fork on F-droid, use this as your browser and install ublock origin as your adblocker. Top right menu in fennc then press add-ons and find ublock origin and install it. Customise by pressing the top right menu of fennec -> add-ons -> ublock origin -> settings

Then just use the direct download sites in the megathread to download your files from. You can follow something like this video to harden ublock and make sure you block the ads that pretend to be download links.

OR

If you want to seed (upload the files you download from the torrent) back to other people like you, then use fennec, the same as above, but use the torrent sites linked in the mega thread instead of direct download sites and use a torrent client like libretorent on the F-droid repo to add the magnet links or torrent files you get from these sites. It will start downloading the files and also uploading the parts you have downloaded to other people that want them.

I always recommend a VPN and on android you can turn on always on VPN and and block connections without VPN in android settings but that’s up to you and what your country is like when it comes to piracy

OR

Others might be able to suggest a streaming setup? But I don’t stream anything so can’t help you there

I use tags and categories in qbittorrent to know if I have made copies of the files to other disks, you could do something similar by naming with a sticky note/ label and making a corresponding category in qb

I also use tree to list all of my TV episodes individually so I can mark off the ones that I’ve reencoded and added subtitles to. You could keep similar text files with trees of each drive in your home directory to quickly search them to see which drive has the file you’re looking for

The link you posted sends me to Mayerthorpe on imdb so typed that in on btdig(.)com and the first result is “Mayerthorpe.2008.SatRip.avi” this might be it? Does the movie have different names in different regions?

I have my qbittorrent containters capped to seed about 20 - 30 GiB per day, 300KiB/s on each container. I’m seeding about 1400 torrents but since we have “unlimited” data allowances that aren’t actually unlimited I have to cap it. It sucks seeing some torrents seeding at 20KiB/s but at least they’ll eventually get it fully downloaded I suppose.

I also set anything over a 5 ratio to superseed mode so more popular torrents don’t hog too much bandwidth

The valid CRF value range is 0-63, with the default being 30. Lower values correspond to higher quality and greater file size.

https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AV1

I compared a bunch of crf values, taking video quality, encode time and file size into account on a few episodes from some of my favorite shows and ended up settling on this.

For the most part, I don’t notice a quality difference compared to my source, but it might just be because of my bad eyes or my monitor lol. But I did notice quality differences around 35 + so they were out.

At crf 0 I’m encoding a 40 min epsisode in about 5 mins which I’m happy with, I probably could have saved time going for a higher value but most of the time I run the script when I’m sleeping so time wasn’t a big issue as long as it wasn’t taking 20+ mins to encode 1 file

Going for 0 meant I’d have as close to the same quality as my source, using the default preset, and I didn’t notice huge file size differences between 0 and 30.

I’ve encoded pretty much all of my TV shows now and I’ve dropped the size of my TV directory to about 1/4 of the original size so going for a higher crf value didn’t seem worth it to me, if I had noticed that my file size at crf 5 was half what it is at crf 0 then I would probably have went with crf 5

I think its pretty subjective some people are happy with 720p and others won’t settle for less than 4k so I don’t think this would be a great solution for everyone to do but I think people should play around with different parameters to see what works best for them.

I’ve been using a for loop with ffmpeg to convert to AV1

I start in the series root folder and it iterates through each seasons subfolder

for f in ./**/*.mkv; do
      ffmpeg -i "$f" -c:v libsvtav1 -crf 0 "{f%.*}.av1.mkv"; done

Since I’m happy with the quality of everything so far, I’ve added this to the start to make it easier to delete the old files

for f in ./**/*.mkv; do
      mv "$f" "${f%.*}.xyz.mkv"; done

And at the end I’ve added this to delete the old files

for f in ./**/*.xyz.mkv; do
      rm " $f"; done