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If they have to have a lot of channels then $120 isn’t the worst price (I have relatives who pay twice as much as that a month for cable) though you could perhaps try and check into whether they could switch to a streaming linear TV service like DirecTV Stream with one of their lower tier packages to save some money while retaining a cable-like experience (there’s also Sling, Hulu+Live TV, YoutubeTV, FUBO, etc, many of which have packages with many of the top channels for $60-$80/month).

Fact is to save money you need to be willing to give things up. If you’re moving from a premium cable package with a ton of channels to a few streaming services you’re going to lose things and potentially a lot of things. You’re going to lose access to live news channels, you’re going to lose access to specific programs on some networks that don’t have streaming service equivalents (I know for one older person I knew the fact they couldn’t get and watch Lifetime and Hallmark movies within any reasonable time-frame of their premier meant they were not interested in looking into streaming any further to replace their cable).

More than that though most old people hate change, they were used to a certain way of things and they’re afraid and perhaps get confused or frustrated with this new way of doing things. It’s simply more comfortable for them to use the old satellite system they’re used to and its interface and way of changing channels than doing something new where they have to think of how to do something or get frustrated or ask for help. Which is why I do think trying a streaming cable replacement like those I mentioned might be your best bet. It would still save some money.

Yes. It’s incredibly powerful but easy to use for a basic purpose like editing a line or converting formats.

Open the web subtitles in subtitleedit. Change format to ass (advanced substation alpha). Save and re-embed using mkvtoolnix.

Positioning of multiple lines works well with ass and VLC shouldn’t have an issue reading and displaying. Not sure if YouTube includes the positioning data in their subtitles though. You could recreate that in subtitle edit (free software btw, dk web domain I believe) but it would be a bit of an annoyance.

edit: Corrected domain name. Not German, but nikse is it as OP has suggested

“Killing Hope” was written by former intelligence officer Bill Blum (think that was the name) and details such operations (though not limited to socialist countries).

I’ll try to find some links on the subject and edit my reply to include them but it may be a day or two.

All the big pirate sites use them though. Even private ones like TL. If they don’t they get DDOSed. They all turned it on over the past year or so after being badly attacked.

Yes. Though I wouldn’t want to know the exact day if I could help that. Knowing the year or month would be enough to plan. To have a will. To say the things I want to say to those I care about. To make peace with the end. To do what I can of a bucket list and to feel a bit more secure up to that point not worrying about death.

Nothing. It’s an automated. Just stop doing it and it’ll decay with time.

DVD’s max out at about 580p (for PAL, NTSC is 480p), resolutions are measured by the number of horizontal lines of pixels (counted from top to bottom of video/screen), not vertical which at 4:3 square aspect ratio on dvds does tend to be 720 pixels (by contrast full resolution HD video’s number of vertical lines is 1920 while it’s horizontal lines are of course 1080, hence 1080p). You’re not the first person to be confused by this.

Professional encoders who fully understand the encoders and the schemes in use and care about not seeing artifacting or low quality would never intentionally go as low as 300mb for a feature length movie of even an hour. Yes there are people who do such things but they’re not well regarded and it won’t look even passable on anything larger than a phone screen.

Recognized quality groups that seek low sizes might get an animated feature (less bitrate needed due to lack of fine detail in animation vs real film) in SD quality down to around that. But for most live action content the sizes I see from the best of the best concerned with smaller release sizes are in the 900mb to 1.5GB range for 60-90 minute features.

300mb for a 90 minute live action feature even in SD is just not going to look good, some of the groups who get those sizes make them look even half-passable by running pre-filters in virtualdub that smooth, reduce grain and detail, etc before passing to the encoder. That kind of thing is way beyond anything you’re going to learn in a few youtube videos though, that’s advanced stuff with scripting.

Think about it this way, if you shoot for 1GB encodes with 265 or AV1 you can store over 900 movies on a 1tb drive which can be had for well under a hundred dollars.

I would like the best and fanciest algorithms to have least dataloss.

There is no magic that will get you where you want. If you want detail preserved you need more bitrate which translates to larger sizes. Modern codecs like HEVC and AV1 mean you need as much as 1/5th the bitrate you needed with old MPEG2/4 encoding schemes used on DVDs, that’s darn good savings but it has its limits.

Do as you will but anything live action (non-animated) significantly under 1000kbps average bitrate is going to look awful on a 1080p screen and much worse than what it would look like if you popped your dvd in the disc drive and played it from there.

Opus is fine if you’re not worried about compatibility and just playing on a computer.