I ended up picking up smoking in college in the early 2000s and I have to wonder if the constant exposure to second hand smoke in places I worked, in cars from family members, etc, was a factor
I was disgusted at the time but then I fell into it. I quit eventually, which was a nightmare, but I do think the exposure to second hand nicotine from the age of like 2 was maybe a factor
I remember working in restaurants in high school, coming home, showering, and the stench of cigarette smoke just releasing itself from my hair
Fun times
I don’t understand what you are arguing?
If you’re arguing that downloading remuxes and only flac is foolish then yeah, 99.8% of the time h264 and 320 mp3 are going to be indistinguishable on most setups with most content. H265 will be the same on like 99.5% of setups with slightly less content and will save tons of space. Sure. But this assumes the lossy encodes were done properly from a lossless master
if you encode lossy to lossy it will result in visible and audible distortion of the image and audio. Sometimes it’s minimal, sometimes it’s quite bad, sometimes it’s masked by your equipment, but it’s always there. Further, you’d spend more money on electricity running your cpu on full blast encoding terabytes of video files when you could simply just redownload your library in whatever format by someone who knows what they’re doing (if you’re so concerned about space and don’t care about quality go av1)
But you do you
Don’t encode lossy to lossy. The encoding will take forever and the image quality will suffer. If you want file size savings redownload your media in h265 or whatever. Or temporarily download a lossless copy, encode, and delete.
You’re correct that it will reduce file size but encoding lossy to lossy is foolish. You will introduce compression artifacts and have an objectively worse quality image, the encode will take much longer than if you used a proper lossless source, and if you don’t set your configs right you’ll strip out subtitles, tags, chapters, etc
Additionally if the h264 was already compressed by a lot h265 won’t save all that much space, giving you all the downsides with basically no upside
Only dummies encode lossy>lossy. The debate about lossy>h265 is one thing (h265 is not for archival) but h264>h265 will result in visible distortion
Anna’s archive, as mentioned
Libgen has academic papers, which is really important. I’m not aware of any torrents that back up scihub, this is the closest thing
Stuff like kiwix gives you offline backups of Wikipedia
What are you trying to find