As an extra step you can block DNS requests to external services from within your network to prevent devices trying to reach hardcoded for example Google DNS servers to bypass your filtering which isn’t uncommon with some IoT/streaming devices. Best to both block the known IPs as well as have DNS redirects for the urls that point back to your firewall at whatever IP it’s using to serve DNS from. There is a list called DoH servers by name or something like that which you can add to the blocklist to try and prevent usage of any DNS but your own.

What they told you is misleading.

Transcoding and burning in subtitles for Plex and similar only happens in some cases if your streaming device doesn’t support image based subtitles. Plex themselves could fix this on a lot more devices but don’t.

10 years ago it was the case that there were a LOT of issues with anything but text subtitles. These days it depends. If you’re running it directly off a smart tv (bad experience anyways, not recommended) it’s likely to be an issue. If you’re using an Android streaming device or Apple TV or gaming console there’s a good chance the subs just work.

Truth is lots of things can force transcoding with Plex including using certain audio formats in certain media containers. Most of these days picture subs work. If you can get text subs it’s not a bad thing but I wouldn’t go through the hassle of doing flawed OCR unless you can confirm it’s an issue you’re experiencing with your setup.

Console batch file for mkv merge should do that as long as subs are named same as video files (or something consistent like that name +subs).

You’d want to target the sub files not idx. If that fails I’d just do an intermediate step of merging the sub and idx files into an mks file then merging that into the mkv. The gui only needs the sub files added. I’ll try and come back to this though someone else already posted a script that should be able to be adapted to do this.

People got flack for saying Proton is the CIA, Proton is NSA, Proton is a joint five-eyes country intelligence operation despite the convenient timing of their formation and lots of other things.

Maybe they’re not, maybe their CEO is just acting this way.

But consider for a moment if they were. IF they were then all of this would make more sense. The CIA/NSA/etc have a vested interest in discrediting and attacking Chinese technology they have no ability to spy or gather data through. The CIA/NSA could also for example see a point to throwing in publicly with Trump as part of a larger agreed upon push with the tech companies towards reactionary politics, towards what many call fascism or fascism-ish.

My mind is not made up. It’s kind of unknowable. I think they’re suspicious enough to be wary of trusting them but there’s no smoking gun, yet there wasn’t a smoking gun that CryptoAG was a CIA cut-out until some unauthorized leaks nearly a half century after they gained control and use of it. We know they have an interest in subverting encryption, in going fishing among “interesting” targets who might seek to use privacy-conscious services and among dissidents outside the west they may wish to vet and recruit.

True privacy advocates should not be throwing in with the agenda of any regime or bloc, especially those who so trample human and privacy rights as that of the US and co. They should be roundly suspicious of all power.

An equivalent system was set up after World War II with a peace anchored by the Allied Powers, decolonization, and the US-Soviet rivalry. That system has lasted for about 80 years and is showing significant strain.

What? No it hasn’t. The cold war ended by 1992 at the latest. At that point the US achieved total, unipolar hegemony over the world and began exercising it. Clinton’s “interventions” in Kosovo, Africa, etc. The Bush era Neo-Cons, those were all results of a new era of unchallenged American power and hegemony. That marked a new era.

Right now the world, led by China and Russia as well as other members of BRICS are trying to buck that total dominance and hegemony of the US and set up a multi-polar world but the US is not letting go, it is not ceding power, it has replaced international law as set out in agreement with the victorious powers of WW2 with “rules based order” which means its way or the high-way, the rule of their might and their wants and nothing else matters. Trump is flexing that built up power, the fact they control SWIFT, the fact the dollar is world reserve currency, their incredible ability to do sanctions to anyone anywhere and put a big hurt on them for defying US interests and wants. He’s unleashing the full might, threatening sanctions, tariffs, straight up invasion to take Greenland or the Panama Canal, etc. All to do what? To maintain US primacy, to prevent the emergence of a multi-polar world where the US doesn’t dominate everyone else and set the terms and rules for the entire world.

So there are movements to try and strive towards a Westphalian (multi-polar) order led by China, Russia, and followed in those steps by other BRICS nations but they are cautious, they don’t want to anger the US and even China still backs down if the threats of sanctions gets too big. So right now we’re in a struggle to determine what kind of world we have either a continuation, a hardening of US empire and unipolar hegemony, unchallenged dominance of the world and its peoples to their dictates and benefits or else a multi-polar world structured around Westphalian principles of sovereignty of individual nations and cooperation and peace born out of multiple strong powers checking each other’s ambitions against other weaker nations.

The US ended an era of struggle and some independence for nations on its own after it won the cold war, it chose to build up its power, to break international law (Yugoslavia, Iraq, war on terror, sanctions regimes galore, etc), to replace it with “rules based order” which no one can solidly define the rules of because they’re ever shifted based on the wants and needs of the US.

Yeah they include a gigabit ethernet port which is really useful for full quality 4k, amazing how many cheaper streaming devices only have 10/100 ports which I suppose is adequate if all you do is stream Netflix.

But to me it’s just cheaping out to save a dollar or two on the manufacturer’s part that with ethernet & protocol overhead could result in problems potentially even for 1080p streams. Whereas gigabit even with overhead and lackluster conditions you’re going to get 700-800mbps sustained. People think for 1080p bluray dumps for instance that oh bitrates are only around 40-50mbps average but if you fast forward, if you’re seeking around the actual bitrate being consumed jumps to double or more at times and that 100mbps port will choke on that and buffer whereas the gigabit will not flinch. And though I don’t use the playback speed option myself much Infuse does allow playing back at 1.5 and 2x speeds which consume around 1.5x and 2x the bitrate respectively.

But it’s just nice to not have to deal with wireless hiccups too.

I’m assuming you mean the first generation of the Apple TV 4k or the Apple TV HD, that is that your box is black in color? (reference: https://support.apple.com/en-us/101605)

The actual first generation Apple TV is white, originally debuted in 2007, has a hard drive as opposed to flash memory and runs a modified version of MacOS rather than modern tvOS. If you were indeed using the very first generation I’d be impressed you can do anything streaming related with it.

All generations after that have HDMI CEC support and IR remotes. How the volume is controlled can be changed via a setting in the settings app on the Apple TV but as mentioned you should make sure your TV has that setting on.

Additionally iPhones have a built in remote app and you should be able to change the volume using the buttons on the side of your phone while you have the app open and connected to your Apple TV (connection to the same WiFi network is necessary). You can access this remote by adding it to the control center from settings, typing remote in search or pulling down the control center from the top right, in the top right the music/now playing tile when clicked on has a button at the bottom that says “control other speakers and TVs” and when clicked will show a list, once one is selected there’s a button you can press to open the remote.

Here’s an Apple support page on volume control: https://support.apple.com/en-us/108789

Putting this here as another comment so as to not get too lengthy in my original reply:

The only other things I can recommend in the streaming space would be Dune-HD’s products which are more expensive than Apple TV (though not more than Nvidia shield pro) and are not quite as simple and easy to use but do offer customization and a nice virtualized linux+androidtv system on some of their models AND maybe the Nvidia Shield Pro with caveats. But I have a bit of a bone to pick with the Shield for a number of reasons:

1. Price. They haven’t updated the hardware in 5 years and have changed it from a premium product without ads to standard AndroidTV with ads on the homescreen yet charge the same $200 price, meanwhile Apple dropped the price on their AppleTV and is eating their lunch with annual hardware updates and regular software updates that bring new functionality
2. Features. The shield still has bugs around things like framerate switching while AppleTV does not nor does Dune-HD’s products
3. The lack of updates, the move from a premium android experience without homescreen ads to one with ads. I feel it could be killed off any moment, they’re just lazily milking the product which is probably the only reason they haven’t. You /can/ with some effort alter the launcher to a 3rd party launcher to lose the ads but it’s not easy, it usually requires revisiting and you can do the same thing with the Dune-HD products and they care a lot more and offer a lot more IMO.

The only reason you might really prefer Dune-HD over an Apple TV is the ability to side-load a modded youtube app if you use that a ton but even that feels up in the air with how hard Google is going in their war on anyone using things like that and how successful they’ve been against it. You can’t block ads in ad-supported major streaming services (Netflix, Max, Hulu, Disney+, etc), neither with pihole nor any other way I’m aware of.

Beware I have heard that the latest revision of the Onn 4k box locks down the bootloader and prevents people from doing this as they found out and obviously wanted that data. Specifically I believe only models from before 2024 (should be model number that indicates this) still work with this.

Yes. An Apple TV will be about as private as you can get for something that supports mainstream streaming apps (running a mini-pc won’t allow better than 720p quality and you’ll struggle to get remotes to work, it’ll be a clunky experience via web browsers often). It will be a lot better than a smart TV, especially a Roku who are among the worst.

If you want a bit more privacy consider running a pihole and redirecting DNS traffic at your firewall to your pihole or blocking all DNS traffic not from your pihole. I run a firewall solution that includes DNS redirection and blocking and there are a lot of measurement endpoints for streaming apps that you can block without the app breaking so that’s another little ounce. This doesn’t require a ton more effort though it is more effort it can be a set and forget type of thing. Importantly this does not block in-app ads.

For me the fact they don’t have any ads is what sells me on it. I don’t want ads on my homescreen. I don’t even want them in the apps but getting that peace and lack of clutter on the homescreen is so nice.

Apple TVs are also just so smooth. Smart TV’s feel sluggish and pathetic compared to how well everything just works on a device that’s properly powered for the task and not constantly sucking up all your data.

Apple TVs also have a lot of Apple privacy settings though obviously some of them apps may not allow like many streaming apps require a location check at least intermittently for licensing reasons to prove you’re still in the country but you can limit it as much as possible.

If you have a decent wifi network and you know you’re not going to be streaming say homemade BluRay rips the wifi entry model is excellent (currently it supports wifi 6 and has a really good wifi chip). I personally run Plex and a media server so I choose the wifi+ethernet model to have the reliability of ethernet and don’t regret it but it’s understandable if your situation precludes being able to use a wired connection or you want to save the $20 extra they charge.

Not one bit. They’ve shown anyone who cares to look exactly who they are many, many, many times.

Being guilty of killing those two would be sprinkles on top of the mountain of their horrific crimes. It would be interesting only in that people would be more aware of the fact they killed a sitting president, that is that there were and almost certainly are elements in the US government who do not answer to the chain of command, who do not respect the purported institutions of US liberal “democracy”.

Most likely he won’t release anything meaningful. They’ve had decades to prepare a false narrative that looks better and didn’t hesitate to destroy most of the MKUltra documents rather than turn them over.

Why not HEVC 10bit? We’re quickly approaching the age of AV1 and HEVC has been on the scene for a decade now so might as well have a relatively recent codec and HEVC offers improvements of 20% bitrate reduction for same quality even for 480p content vs 264. Modern devices don’t have any issues decoding it either even in software and open source encoders are mature enough. AV1 might be an even better bet but encoding time takes a really noticeable hit compared to HEVC and client device support still isn’t entirely there, the encoders are also still a little more finicky than HEVC.

As to ripping DVDs to EAC3, I wouldn’t.

Almost all DVDs are natively AC3 regular dolby digital. You can’t add more quality by doing lossy conversions and the bitrates typically present for DVDs are low enough that doing a conversion to lower the bitrate doesn’t really make sense. We’re talking 512-640kbps for 5.1 audio (and 192 to 240 for stereo) which isn’t unreasonable and the damage incurred in conversion to save say half that IMO just doesn’t make sense with modern storage prices and the amount of storage being used for 480p content. You can easily save as much without damaging the audio by choosing HEVC10 as your video encoder. If you insist on doing a conversion for DVD audio I would suggest doing so to either AAC if you have a good encoder and know how to use it or Opus but I wouldn’t recommend it (all TVs pretty much natively play/decode AC3 audio so given you’re not saving that many bits you’re just inducing degradation of conversion from AC3 to AAC/Opus and again back to AC3 for playback).

Now for BluRays I fully agree converting from those massive 2000-4000kbps DTS-HD MA, TrueHD, PCM audio streams to EAC3 at 640kbps for multi-channel audio can save a fair amount of space at scale and doesn’t incur meaningful audio degradation (while offering equivalent quality to 1000kbps AC3).

Yeah as far as “just works” goes AppleTV with infuse is really high up there.

Support for all the lossless audio you want, dolby-vision, perfect framerate switching, etc. Either that or something like a Dune-HD box (no framerate switching bugs, lossless audio, DV, etc) or an NVIDIA Shield Pro (though the value of this last one is not great, hasn’t been refreshed in years hardware-wise, more expensive than AppleTV, still has issues with framerate switching not working as well as the looming fact that it feels like Nvidia could kill it and its support off any year now).

Biggest complaint with infuse would have to be lack of extras support after people have begged for it for a decade. Other than that and having not quite as many sort options as something like Kodi/Libelec it’s pretty great. It allows for directplay and pretty efficiently connects to Jellyfin, Plex, etc. You do have to pay for a pro subscription to infuse if your library has 4k/HDR/DV video or uses any audio codecs but AAC and FLAC as they even gate regular Dolby Digital behind payment (the patent on it has expired) and claim it’s because they use the official Dolby SDK and have to pay for that. Not a lot of money admittedly, $12 a year, it’s peanuts compared to what most spend on streaming services, less than the cost of one month ad-free anything.

As a leftist myself (communist)

Very, how do you do fellow kids energy from this comment.

I don’t think I’ve ever interacted with a communist who would be upset about a lack of reactionaries in their spaces, they’d be relieved to have a place free of them and their ignorance and hate.

And the fact you think that “centrists” and “right-wing” are somehow not extremists (but this made up special category of MAGA which by the way is most conservatives in the US and in a lot of the world somehow is) tells me you are politely not really politically literate.

Liberals are reactionary enough in their excuse for genocide, you think for some reason we need space for not only them but the people who want to take away rights from trans people, who want to kill trans kids, who want to make women second class citizens, who are incredibly racist, war-mongering, anti-science, etc?

As much as I align with many of the views expressed here, I wonder if we’re missing out on valuable dialogue and perspective by not having a more diverse range of political opinions represented.

You can get that literally anywhere else offline or online, especially your home instance. You’re not from a leftist instance but from the most reddit-brained, centrist neo-lib instance.

This is false equivalence, the idea that the left is too extreme and needs balancing with the right. Please just accurately identify your politics or don’t bother mentioning them as we can easily guess them from a post like this.

Break me? No. Really depress my mood? Probably no longer having Plex and my media collection. If my hard drives and back-ups all spontaneously combusted right after a trade war drove their prices through the roof x5 or something and I couldn’t afford to replace (and/or couldn’t find any to replace because of shortages) I would be quite sad. Additionally I’ve worked quite hard to curate my collection so losing it entirely in the first place would be depressing because of the amount of work required to rebuild it, encoding, scraping hard to scrape rarities, setting the posters just the way I like them, etc.

“Foreign bad actors” Sigh. This is propaganda framing.

The fact that reddit is astroturfed by the US government, US actors like Hillary’s campaign in 2016, etc is very well known. Reddit even did an oopsie many years ago admitting that the most active reddit city was a US air force base with influence operations located there, aka psyops, aka propaganda bots.

If it has foreign “bad actors” they don’t control the narrative, they don’t control the main big subs, they don’t have an in with the admin team, they don’t run even a large minority of bots.

If these mythical creatures people like you believe in (as a result of the US policy of always accuse your enemies of what you’re doing to hide it better) to pretend that the problems are all those evil foreigners do exist they exist as grains of sand caught in a mighty torrential river of US propaganda machines and influence operations. They exist hopeless. Helpless. With no friends on the admin team unlike the US propagandists, fighting a pointless fight where they are almost certainly subject to frequent, near immediate bans after mass downvotes by controlled moderators and/or mods who just are that happy to prevent any viewpoint but the US one from existing.

Even framing your question like this is a massive pushing of US propaganda. This isn’t so much a question as a weaponized trojan horse that starts from the point of view of the people who control the most bots and the narrative totally on reddit.

The only thing approaching foreign, non-US “bad actor” astroturfing and botting would have to be the zionist bot effort which is admin and main subs moderation team backed and also backed by the US government by the way who doesn’t care to get upset about it or raise it as an issue and demand it stop because they’re supplying weapons to that genocide.

I mean the way you state it is literally the line being pushed by US government censorship proponents who are angry any foreign voices, any voices but their own are getting through.

They’re US vassals. They don’t care about soft power just enriching themselves as much as possible while avoiding drawing US ire and being taken out back to be killed for competing too successfully. (See plaza accords when Japan did this)

In other words their power doesn’t come from a positive view by westerners but by loyalty to Washington’s geopolitical interests. They’re never going to change anything because they can’t overcome US-centric media and its power.

No amount of cultural popularity will help them if they’re turned into a villain for being a threat to the US’s interests. Similarly it’s not necessary for them to have good PR for soft power in the first place because of their subservient position. Their interests are tied to that of the US so displacing the culture power of the US with their own at no profit doesn’t benefit them and no individual corporation or capitalist is going to forgo profits for some vague hope of their country having more leverage as a vassal in 20 years.

Japan is viewed favorably because the US forced them to commit economic suicide in the 90s and the hate campaign let up. We are 35 years out from massive racism and fearmongering about Japan pushed by the media which relented and created this space only after they were brought to heel. Look how many Asian food places in the west still say “no MSG”. That was driven by western media reporting, racism, and fearmongering and clearly is still stronger than any anime fan feelings of positivity towards a normal ingredient.

Also wasn’t that guy their puppet dictator first leader who presided over numerous atrocities with a regime full of Japanese collaborators?

There is a certain smell of parallel construction. I hope his legal team is very thorough in examining every little detail, tearing apart time-lines of events, chains of custody, witnesses and find any holes at all in the public narrative if this is the case. One hopes that the parallel construction is in the way of they used illegal surveillance and intelligence capabilities to catch him and it could bring their whole case down, not in the way of they made up a claim that someone at McDonalds called the cops but really they were doing basic legal detective stuff tracking greyhound buses.

If you just don’t like ads AppleTV works great.

That said if you’re set on something less locked down you might look into Dune-HD boxes. They have some that have a dual OS. One is Android TV (not sure how mod-able) the other is Linux that can have other kinds of apps. They’re virtualized and accessible without a reboot. They have great codec support. Just realize only some of their models have the Android TV dual system thing.

Just be thoughtful. Accessibility is not seen as an excuse for breaking copyright. Take precautions.

Also if you’ve never done audio editing I’ll mention audacity the editor has a tool called “auto duck” that’s perfect for lowering the volume of other tracks in a mix when your select track with your voiceover makes noise To enhance clarity of it.