You wouldn't want the Sponsorblock to be part of the download process, but rather the player. Being crowdsourced, it's not immediate and often gets improved/corrected over time, so a video's least likely to have good Sponsorblock timestamps right after being uploaded (when an automated program would likely be downloading it).
We need a Plex/Jellyfin/etc. metadata provider with the Sponsorblock info included. Could keep the data up to date, even after the videos are downloaded.
I don't know how common they are anymore, as Plex has moved toward hosting their own metadata and I've never bothered using any myself, but there historically have been some number of YT metadata agents (e.g., this one) folks could add onto their Plex server and pull the metadata from YT directly. Expanding something like this to also query the Sponsorblock API seems like it wouldn't be terribly difficult.
The harder part would be getting the player to incorporate Sponsorblock to actually use that data to skip the segments. Plex, in particular, seems unlikely to ever try something like this, as their business model is moving more and more toward ad-supported streaming content rather than improving the self-hosted media server that got them popular.
It does seem unlikely Plex would include this ever. Hate their generic pivot to ad supported bs. But as a lifetime sub to Plex I’m riding it down.
I hear jellyfin supports plugins which is one step easier.
At home I watch on an Apple TV with a nas running isponsorblock. Works well but is a single device/location solution. And I am still paying for YouTube premium.
For things I don't care enough to archive to my own collection, I use a Shield TV with SmartTube, an alternative client that blocks ads, incorporates SponsorBlock, and a few other nice tweaks. Definitely my favorite YT experience of all the ones I've tried.
Adding proper metadata to releases. Why are we still trying to decipher release titles, why not add a little metadata JSON file to every release and make the info available to the search API?
Also keeping multiple different versions of a release in Arr apps, like ebook and audiobook in different languages. Right now I’d need 4 Readarr instances to get the English and German audiobook and ebook versions of a book, and don’t even think about letting them manage the same root folder!
and following proper naming conventions too. why can’t releasers decided to choose one single naming convention together so it makes our job better to automate things?
I actually like the release titles. It’s encoded in the name that way, there’s a somewhat good standard for it, and it’s one file. I rarely need more info than what’s in the release title. And I would dislike having to carry a separate json with me.
That dubbed audio tracks of movies could be downloaded separatey and easily merged in the audio, in a way similar to subtitles. This way, the audio track in non English languages would be downloaded very quickly, even with just one seeder, and the whole movie in original language has way more seeders than dubbed ones.
I’ve always only torrented movies “manually” until a few weeks ago, when I set up my first media server with jellyfin and sonarr/radarr, and set the language to italian only. often however I see that the requested movies not downloading automatically because no italian torrent is found with the required resolution (1080p), and/or the ones actually available have 0 seeds, while there’s plenty of English torrents with loads of seeders
As someone being bilingual en/de and my family being primarily pl/de:
I will either manually remux my own from torrent/usenet releases or (usually for shows) usually just download the german version.
Usually the uploaders include the english track anyway.
I guess I have to keep my eyes open for movies series in my own language and hope they come with the original (English) sound included.
But if not: how does the whole remuxxing work? I have literally zero ideas how to get started with that. Where do you find the right (non-english) audio track(s) for the movies? Which software do you use? Etc…
Thanks for the link for Radarr dual-language setup! I came across it before :)
How to remux:
My program of choice: MakeMKV
How to:
Import two sources
Choose which tracks you want -> Example:
Video: The best video track of the two
Audio: 7.1 dolby EN (source 1) and Stereo DE (source 2)
Subtitle: 2-4 subtitle tracks (if needed). 2 from source 1 in EN, 2 from source 2 in DE
Remux it into a MKV (basically a zip version of a movie folder with each track included)
Rename your own release to fit the naming scheme
Import into *arr/media library.
For an actual guide better search on YT/Google as only text might be difficult.
Ditto for audio in general. I notice wild differences between encodings in dialogue clarity and volume. If this were standard we could all mix and match whatever audio is best for our equipment.
I’ve seen some anime releases where they had separate mka files for different languages and a little script to attach whatever dub you want into it. It is technically possible already, but super rare
One click install that provides regional VPN, multi-index torrent searching, scheduling, auto downloading based on simple criteria, and then file and metadata management.
I do all this now with various apps, but a single package that does everything that I could install on a new machine and start downloading immediately.
A different, better protocol for sharing. Torrent is cool but files on it tend to die off, and also can’t be updated. I’m thinking something like syncthing might be the future.
Yeah, ensuring availability over time requires dedicated infra. That’s basically what it comes down to. Torrents for the most part lack dedicated providers ensuring file availability. Web seeds exist, but the uploader or the tracker needs to have the resources to back their torrents with bandwidth and storage. Other decentralized solutions, like say IPFS, don’t solve the resources problem, because it’s not technical, so although you can pay to have content “pinned” in place on IPFS, or you can pin it yourself, that “pinning” requires a server, running off electricity, using someone else’s uplink to serve the content, all of which costs. If you don’t have your own server, and don’t pay someone else to pin it for you, it could easily fall off IPFS.
Syncthing could honestly help, I’ve thought about this a fair amount, although you’d still have the resources issues. Availability of content over syncthing or something like it would likely still be tied to popularity (how long are uploaders going to keep their syncthing folders full of specific content? how long will downloaders? In order for it to really work people would have to get in the habit of building out NAS’s and putting their libraries on syncthing forever, basically). It still has some of the same basic issues with torrent, but the dynamicness is cool for sure.
Yes the availability will remain an issue but at least I imagine that solving other issues could make it less serious.
More specifically, the issue (a feature too but still) with torrents is how spread they are. It’s difficult to know what is available and in what condition. There are dozens if not hundreds private trackers etc. This all makes it more likely for new torrents for the same content to be created multiple times, and overall seeding resources to be spread out across multiple versions of the same things. Some centralized public index might have helped everyone find things faster and prolong those things’ availability as the result. What such an index might need to stay damage-proof and useful is unrelated to this discussion, but I imagine it might work as some blockchain and thus may not require much in terms of resources.
I didn’t mean syncthing itself but some theoretical derivative that would have relevant features.
It would help to involve a kind of software infrastructure where users would choose how much resources (mostly disk space) they are willing to give in order to contribute to the overall availability of stuff.
I really want IPFS to go mainstream. It solves a lot of problems with piracy and the internet in general. But people started thinking it was a blockchain thing, and I haven’t heard much about it since then. Libgen uses it but that’s the only place I’ve seen it be embraced.
File discoverability is poor, most people will not know how to act as a node and mirror files, and there’s no builtin privacy protection in place and it’s quite easy to figure out which IP addresses are hosting something.
Would love to find old Canadian sketch comedy. CBC doesn’t release much in the way of physical media. Thankfully, most if not all of Red Green is on youtube, but the vast majority of Royal Canadian Air Farce, Wayne & Shuster, 22 Minutes, etc is rotting away in the CBC archives. Maybe there’s a couple episodes here and there on archive.org but there are zero torrents.
You just reminded me of something I saw once, that I’d love to find. It was some sketch comedy show, and the sketch was “Every episode of Star Trek”. It was hysterical.
Doesn’t quite vibe with the post, but with the title: More industrial software and operators manuals and stuff. I’m honestly having a hell of a time finding them.
You might know this already, but try emailing the primary authors directly and asking for a copy, it’s often the easiest way to get them if you haven’t got any other way to access.
This actually works way better than people expect. Many authors are tied to a publisher but are still allowed to personally give away copies to students.
Or, a self-hosted universal watch list for both Jellyfin and any platforms I may use from time-to-time. In the past I’ve resorted to compiling a massive table, but now I just have an account on JustWatch. Obviously doesn’t show me anything from Jellyfin, though.
Other than that, I feel like we need to teach others how to pirate themselves. I’m often the one that friends and family come to to get books, streaming links, software, etc. Its surprising how little people understand how torrenting actually works at a fundamental level.
Interesting, looking into it, it can automatically send a request to Sonarr and Radarr to download certain content, if I don’t have it on a streaming service? How does this compare to Jellyseerr?
If I really enjoy a movie, series or music, I often actually want to send the actual creator some money to reward their creativity. May be just a dollar, may be ten. But I can’t.
I wish anime/manga/etc studios were transparent about their costs and profit. I want to see if my favorite show has so far made enough money to afford the next season or for the team to afford their next project.
Kickstarter/Patreon should have shown creators that people will support what they like and even if they have made enough money people will continue to buy/donate to creators they love.
I don’t pay for movies or series of (I just don’t). But when I like some music (bands, producers, or even a record label) I end up buying some physical records or merchandising. If you don’t care about that, the most direct way is to go to Bandcamp and buy something on friday. People often want to put a price on their work, and not just “a dollar” like it’s your spare change, but there are several options and websites to do it.
I can’t remember the name now (and struggling to find it) but there was some packaging of VLC with I think a customised libtorrent, where someone would effectively broadcast with an infohash (sha hash like in a torrent) and people could stream and share with not much latency. Hashes were shared on sites/telegram/discord etc and it seemed to work ok.
Surprised it didn’t become more popular/standardised
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