The first couple of weeks on a private tracker are always pretty rough, until you can build up your ul/dl ratio high enough to get some breathing room.

Some sites make things easier on newbs than others.

If possible, look for recent freeleech torrents, especially popular ones, download them even if you aren’t really interested in the content, and seed them 24/7 to build your ul stats…

You have at least 10 years from when your tapes were written.

Hope the device you have to read them still works …

I just signed up for Matrix because you mentioned it.

I installed the Element front end, because that seems to be the most popular.

It looks like IRC, which is fine if that’s all you need.

It also appears that anything beyond text has to be hotlinked, which is understandable, given that the amount of data transmitted for redundancy between home servers is exponential with the number of home servers.

Really very similar to Lemmy, where the identity of each group is tied to a particular server, e.g. lemmy has !anime@ani.social but Matrix has #anime:matrix.org

So what happens if matrix.org goes away or decides the server admin wants to be hostile to #anime?

What kind of system that depends on centralized servers can ever be secure from government snooping?

That kind of architecture is completely hopeless in that regard.

Is a encrypted, distributed, P2P architecture realistic though?

How to cut off PS online verification: https://www.reddit.com/r/GenP/comments/1624ybw/how_to_fix_photoshop_we_cant_verify_your/

But the tool they recommend using, GenP, does trigger Windows Defender warnings because it modifies binaries, so read the installation instructions carefully.

Or migrate to FOSS software, or pay Adobe to use their product.

There are some specialty content, such as British TV and Asian TV and movies, or complete archives of porn sites, that don’t appear regularly on public torrent sites, or streaming sites for that matter.

If you never watch that kind of thing, then you don’t need to sign up for a private tracker.

The same caution is advisable when searching for any free software.

There’s all kinds of malware, adware, and just plain malicious crap that shows up in search engine results.

The corollary is that a book has to be in-print, or commercially distributed in e-book form, to have any sales.

If neither new printed copies, or commercially sold e-books are available, then taking down pirate sites, or even an archive like archive.org, only diminishes the collection and availability of human knowledge and literature.

Azure is MS’s cloud computing. As long as you weren’t using MS OneDrive, or 365 Office, or something else that relied on MS cloud, you’re good.

Don’t blame the writers, some of whom are long dead, and some titles are long out of print.

https://vipleague.im/motorsports-schedule-streaming-links

https://freestreams-live.my/motorsports-streams5/

The full disc images worked well, and hard drive space is so cheap these days, that I’d worry about getting the virtual drive emulator working first.

WinCDEmu is FOSS, so you might look into that first.

Back in the day, I bought Alcohol 120, and it worked great.

The mini-CD image trick (optional): https://forum.daemon-tools.cc/forum/copy-methods-questions-daemon-tools/general-copy-discussion/4900-

Those no-disc patches can be sketchy and infected, so watch out!

My preferred way to play games without CDs was virtual disc emulators, so you can store a copy of your game disc on your hard drive, and virtually pop that game’s CD image into the virtual drive in when you want to play that specific game.

One good trick with these, is that you don’t even need a full copy of the disc: There was some trick to creating a very small disc image that just has enough information to get past the game’s copy protection, but it’s been well over 2 decades since I did any of that, so you’ll have to do your own research.

I have also noticed some dips in brightness in some shows.

Sounds like an encoding problem, or some sort of form of copy protection in the streamed video that screws up the encoding algorithms, like the old Macrovision copy protection on VHS tapes.

What does VLC have to do with piracy?

It’s just a media player, right?

I always wondered where the name came from. I always assumed it was a real person, like craigslist.

That it’s short for Anarchist’s archive makes a lot more sense.

Usually x264 rips are available faster than x265, due to slower encoding time for x265, so depends on how long you want to wait vs download time and HD space.

The sites that I see get x264 first, then x265 of the same shows some hours later.

Limewire is gone, but ED2K is very much alive, and pretty darned good for finding older files.