2015 'Bitch' List

[Beck38]

Obviously, this being 'the internet', one can (take/leave/forget/take issue/put me on a death list) on these comments.

1. Yes, put in a decent number of pars, but then CHECK/VERIFY both the rar AND
the PAR creation. I'm still running into quite a number of par2 sets that aren't
associated with the rar's they are packed with, and therefore don't 'fix' a thing.

Both these check routines only take a few seconds, yet are skipped by too many posters.

2. What's up with all the 'REMUX' posts? It might be one thing if it's to strip out
audio tracks or extras that bring the posts down to a BD25 sizing or such, but way too
many are stripping out (perhaps) a couple of Gigabytes, where posting the full BD50
and letting folks do what they want with it makes real sense. The savings in size
in a lot of these makes no sense. tsMuxr is easy to use, and takes seconds to do
what one wants; let the downloader decide!

And, there are LOTS of posts that don't even list that they are REMUX but have been
'stripped' of anything other than the 'main movie'. I guess thanks for nothing.

3. Whatever happened to posting the NZB of what you just posted? Yes, the old
'Power Post' kinda did this automatically, but with lots of folks now using JBinUp or
other programs, they skip this 'step'. One can't rely on what Binsearch or NZBIndex
collect to 'post generate' the nzb, as they get 'skips' and such just like the
news-servers!

POST the NZB! This kinda also goes for a NFO, but I guess that many don't have the
time (or effort) to do that.

4. Watch your block size and part size! Changing the block size to something really large
(or small as in number of blocks) and setting your rar part size to something larger than,
say, 250MB, is a recipe for disaster. It does no good to ramp things toward the outsize,
it makes the downloading harder (not easier) and, again, may make things prone to more
failures.

I'm sure there are lots of other issues out there, but if one is taking the time, effort, and
cost of posting, then I would think that a bit of expended brain power would be appreciated.

[jsmith2k1]

I have a lot of problem with rar files after unzip. I have a lot of errors. Is it just me or files are corrupted?

[Beck38]

No transmission/storage system (like the Internet and USENET) is devoid of errors. That's why parity correction, with Par (or Par2 these days) exist.

Quickpar used to be the standard tool, but these days with 64bit and multi-core systems, Multipar has taken hold.

[madjock]

I think the REMUX posts are due to a lot of Hardware players, and some software players not having BD menu settings, or insome cases BD lite menus only.

So when I used a WD Live Hub, even if I downloaded the full Bluray it would just play the main .m2ts file anyway, so I was sat with about 10-25Gb of wasted space on Hard drives for no point.

I prefer them myself, if I do get a full Bluray, you usually can lose 10-25Gb in audio and crap straight away. As long as it has DTS audio in English in an Nfo, thats usually good enough for me.

I did have a little phase of 3D Blurays, but to be honest it limited me to WIndows for PowerDVD and once you get used to a menu, it was a pain coming out of XBMC etc, so Remux Blurays and Good SBS 3D stuff does me fine.

[Beck38]

If your h/w box fails to play anything other than the 'main movie', you made a bad choice in choosing it. Almost every 'stand alone' BR player from the major manufacturers (Sony, Samsung, etc.) all play MKV's and m2ts files, at cost points well under $100. Yes, at the time things like 'WD Live' and other networked streamers came out, there were still cheap players that ran circles around it (and predated it and others), most notably the 'Popcorn Hour' (Syabas/Cloud Media) linux boxes (I have several).

I pointed out that yes, if stripping extras/languages etc got that much out of it, that's one thing; but I see tons of 'REMUX' posts that are 30-40GB that were processed with tsMuxr to strip out, at best, 3-5GB, and to me, that makes no sense (the resulting post is still way larger than a 25GB BD25, and no longer has things like commentary tracks or a language I might like to have).

That's what I was talking about.

It saved the poster a couple hours perhaps, depending on their connection. And made it useless except for anyone else that had the exact same thinking on what to 'strip out' (and to top it off, they almost universally don't post an NFO so one gets to spend time and effort on something that may or may not be semi-useless).

And of course, that's if the poster actually puts 'remux' in the title, many don't (and again, no nfo). To those who label 'full Blu' or some such, kudos.

[madjock]

Yes I suppose.

But that could also you be assuming these posters are only showing that info on a index site, there could well be more on an actual site someone posts for, ok, I get that seems a bit silly nowadays, if you are not advertising a site, or a usenet provider you aint worth shit nowadays. :)

I trawled through a lot of Remuxes today, a lot have info, its more like Spanish posters who seem to keep it to the minimum.

I still think the biggest Remuxes I have are about 30 Odd Gb, before this they usually have at least 2 DTS tracks and 2 or 3 AC3 tracks, once you strip them out thats a few Gbs, the extras are usually a total waste of time, so think we will agree to disagree on this, I would rather save maybe as little as 5-6Gb and use that space to get another Remux.

I dont like it when I find a Mkv in a Remux, but thats just me. It does not really matter.

I got rid of the standalone box and I meant WDs and Popcorn hours, due to glitches here and there, interfaces being crap, crashes , firmware updates that broke more than they fixed.

Best thing I found to use is a high spec, mini-itx setup with Arch Linux and Kodi, awesome.

[Beck38]

It is all up to what one 'wants', and if you find more to your liking than not, then 'life is good'.

In some of the early days (7+ years ago) PCH (popcorn hour) did fall into the 'programmer is dumb' hole quite often, but after a couple of their cheap boxes I fell into the C200's simply because of the ability to slide in a BR disc player and go from there, and when the C300 (and 400 series) came out, the firmware updates got much slower (to maybe once per year) and they took much more care.

I like MKV's simply because it allows anyone to simply and easily add or subtract things like audio and subtitle tracks virtually 'at will'. That and if one is going to recode (x264) the video, it's the way to go. There were some variables in the early days (again, 10 years ago) even if one did a 1:1 transform of a m2ts (h264 or VC-1) movie stream to MKV, that one would get some video glitches (depending on the playback chip or firmware of the player used) but that has gone by the wayside quite a while ago.

My newest 'stand alone' player, a Sony, does for physical MKV BD25's almost everything the PCH boxes do, except although their specs 'say' that they play MKV LPCM, it doesn't. Everything else, fine. They know they have that one small problem (my complaint is still active) and maybe at some point they'll get a firmware update that corrects it. But a <$100, it works just fine for MKV's and consumer BD's (including 3D).

I went down the HTPC route several years back, before I found the PCH's, and although they worked (I still have the PC's) compared to the PCH boxes they were a bit hard to operate. I'm sure that these small footprint HT boxes now have really improved, but the PCH's still run just fine and until they drop dead (I have 6 C200's and a pile of spare things like power supplies and optical drives) I won't be looking to swap out any of that.

The next big hurdle will probably be x265. There are a couple of h/w boxes just coming out right now, but I haven't kept up on the s/w for recoding, that will probably take a bit of time to 'get right'.

[iLOVENZB]

I have a lot of problem with rar files after unzip. I have a lot of errors. Is it just me or files are corrupted?

I assume you're talking about 0day. Are you using a mac? CORE is usuing the new unix exectuable 5.x.. You need to update unrar or find a utility that is updated to use unrar5. You should be fine with Keka.

It could well be that the files didn't propagate properly. Personally I haven't had an issue lately

[m3hkh2002]

I have a lot of problem with winrar files after unzip. I have a lot of errors. Is it just me or files are corrupted?

[Beck38]

Could be one or two (out of a bazillion) or a bazillion out of a bazillion things.

Have you checked the newsgroup for other complaints on the nzb you have troubles with? Since you have a 'lot of problems' where are you getting your nzb's from; if a newsnab type site, if lots of folks are grabbing that nzb then that's a clue that they don't have problems.

I'll 'assume' you are using a decent par recovery system, either Quickpar or the newer Multipar to correct any transmission/storage errors. Your machine may also be sick (bad ram), have you run a good ram checker?

Then again, there are a lot of 'bad' postings out there, perhaps you need to start a new thread on something that you think should be good (no complaints on the newsgroup, others seem to be getting it fine) and folks here will chime in; if you got the nzb from here (filesharingtalk) and had problems, that will be the fastest way to resolving any human or machine errors.

In short, bazillion reasons why. You need to narrow the focus down to one nzb/retrieval and go from there.