Join the LiNUX movie release group

[RobertX]

You know Fant0men, I think I'm in a midlife crisis: I want to start over with learning about programming/scripting, but I don't know where/when to start.

I turn 40 in September and now that I waited too long in getting a job, or even a volunteer position, I am falling more behind with each passing day.

Also, there are other things I want to do, like learning Chinese and revising early Calculus, but I always had to fight an uphill battle against an ugly foe: time.

What should I do here?

EDIT: By the way, I'm not trying to hijack your thread.

It was that the moment you mentioned scripts that I was reminded about my failure to act.

The truth is, I want to enjoy life again and, in the process, have the strength to work hard and make something out of myself, while circling the distance of IT.

[Fant0men]

You know Fant0men, I think I'm in a midlife crisis: I want to start over with learning about programming/scripting, but I don't know where/when to start.

I turn 40 in September and now that I waited too long in getting a job, or even a volunteer position, I am falling more behind with each passing day.

Also, there are other things I want to do, like learning Chinese and revising early Calculus, but I always had to fight an uphill battle against an ugly foe: time.

What should I do here?

I hear you.

It's a long journey. Had I been more focused I would be much more adept at scripting / programming than I am now. I started out all the way back on Windows, making (very simple) install scripts (.BAT files) for my favorite games. Those scripts were only a couple of lines. So start simple. You should begin with something fun and easy, and create something you actually need yourself. Otherwise, there will be no motivation. Do it for yourself, if you're gonna do it.

If you're gonna start scripting, I recommend Bash as a language, since it's the language of the terminal itself, which you're gonna be using anyway if you're on *nix. Bash is the default shell in most Linux distros, and is historically the most used. Even macOS used to be on Bash, but I think it uses ZSH now cause of the license change from GPLv2 to GPLv3 in Bash.

[RobertX]

Thanks for hearing me out.

By the way, what is the difference between "programming" and "scripting?'

I see these words used interchangeably, but I don't know why.

EDIT: By the way, what is your favourite open source (otherwise known as "free") licence?

[Fant0men]

Thanks for hearing me out.

By the way, what is the difference between "programming" and "scripting?'

I see these words used interchangeably, but I don't know why.

EDIT: By the way, what is your favourite open source (otherwise known as "free") licence?

To be honest, there's no real difference. Both scripting and programming means writing code. But with programming, it tends to refer to compiled languages like C. While, when you say scripting you typically mean a language like Bash, Perl, PHP or Python. Scripting tends to be easier, since it's a higher level of abstraction, while with a language like C, you're touching the hardware directly. You have much more control with C, but that also means more responsibility.

If you plan to learn C in the future, I still think it's a good idea to start with Bash, since it can be an entry-point and the learning hurdle is pretty low.

If you get stuck with scripting, Google is your friend. Don't hesitate to Google. You will learn to make better search queries as you go, to find the help you need. There's so many people out there who have run into the same problems.

Some good sites are:

https://stackexchange.com/
https://stackoverflow.com/

---

I chose the MIT license for my scripts, since it's very short, easy to read and understand for the average joe. It's not long and complicated legalese like the GPL. I think that makes it more powerful. Also, it doesn't require people to make their forks / changes open source. They can lock it down and turn it into a proprietary product, without offering the source code, if they want. I just want to give people the freedom to do whatever they want.

And, like I said, I do admire simplicity. Otherwise, I think the GNU General Public License is very good. That's the license of the Linux kernel after all.

[RobertX]

Do you make money off your scripts?

[Fant0men]

Do you make money off your scripts?

I don't. I could use more money but it was never a priority in this context. It's not feasible to make money on them now anyway. They're open source. And I like it that way, to be honest. The goal is to share, and help other people.

By the way, I was up all fucking night trying to fix a function in my Bluray ripping script. It's the IMDb function. It's been so long since I ripped a movie, imdb.com has changed the code on the site so my old regular expressions were useless. I had to create new ones. I did clean the function up a lot, and it's looking a lot better now. I think it will be much easier to maintain should they change things on the site again. I think the code runs faster now too.

It took me quite a few hours to figure out the optimal way to parse the page. Every new regular expression I created seemed to work, but then it ran into edge cases where it would not work anymore. But then I discovered IMDb has JSON data in the page code, and that's very easy to parse.

I put the function as its own script too, so you can check it out. It just enables you to search movies on IMDb from the terminal, and it gives some basic info.

Those scripts now have fewer lines of code than before too, which is always a good sign.

[Fant0men]

I cleaned the script up some more, and made it capable of handling additional arguments, like choosing language for the audio track. That argument is optional, and the default is English, if no other language is specified.



Sure would be nice if other people besides me would realize the value in being able to batch rip movies in a completely automated way. If we were a couple of people doing that, we could completely flood TPB with really good rips.

A few years ago, almost no one was interested. Cause most pirates seem to be on really old and outdated hardware. So their hardware did not have hardware acceleration for H265. But it's been a couple of years now, so I would assume most people are on newer devices.

If we were a group of people using that script, we could actually compete with groups like RARBG. Cause their rips are lower quality. Their video bitrate is half of what I specified in the script, and they use AAC for audio, not DTS.

As I see it, there's an untapped part of the piracy ecosystem when it comes to movie rips. There exists many good high-end (large) rips for A/V enthusiasts. There exists good low-end rips for people who don't care much about quality, but just want the movie. But there's almost no good mid-range rips.

Using the settings in the script, you get the same quality as x264 rips that are around 10-12GB in size, but since we're using a better codec, the size is only 4-7GB depending on movie length.

[am a giant]

I cleaned the script up some more, and made it capable of handling additional arguments, like choosing language for the audio track. That argument is optional, and the default is English, if no other language is specified.



Sure would be nice if other people besides me would realize the value in being able to batch rip movies in a completely automated way. If we were a couple of people doing that, we could completely flood TPB with really good rips.

A few years ago, almost no one was interested. Cause most pirates seem to be on really old and outdated hardware. So their hardware did not have hardware acceleration for H265. But it's been a couple of years now, so I would assume most people are on newer devices.

If we were a group of people using that script, we could actually compete with groups like RARBG. Cause their rips are lower quality. Their video bitrate is half of what I specified in the script, and they use AAC for audio, not DTS.

As I see it, there's an untapped part of the piracy ecosystem when it comes to movie rips. There exists many good high-end (large) rips for A/V enthusiasts. There exists good low-end rips for people who don't care much about quality, but just want the movie. But there's almost no good mid-range rips.

Using the settings in the script, you get the same quality as x264 rips that are around 10-12GB in size, but since we're using a better codec, the size is only 4-7GB depending on movie length.

it's important for pirates to have a self-destruct command in case police is raiding their house.

you should consider adding a '--sf' command which deletes everything from hard drive

[Fant0men]

it's important for pirates to have a self-destruct command in case police is raiding their house.

you should consider adding a '--sf' command which deletes everything from hard drive

I got you covered.

[AncientRome]

I really appreciate the approach of automating the ripping and encoding process, it's something I have been passively trying to do over the past couple of years as well.
Personally, I have only automated the encoding process because it's something I let run when I'm sleeping, and I don't mind doing the ripping part manually.

Have you considered using ffmpeg as a main encoding program?

From personal experience I have used 2048 kbps video bitrate for HEVC 1080p movies, it seems to turn out well. I just haven't tested it on that many devices.

I wish you the best of luck in your scripting endeavors and also in starting a group.