dudemanbro
For real. I become a little bit of a snob when it comes to my audiobooks. I have a collection going of near 2000 and thats about 2TB of space. Now, I do try and get the “best” I can of what’s available, and, to be fair, 64kbps books are truly well and good. There are also ones that sound great and don’t pack a high bitrate, but once it hits the 32kbps that when its rare I’ll touch them unless the are the only copies I can find. Personally, I hate how much highly compressed books make the narrators sound. Just awful
Here is some basic info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirated_movie_release_types
As someone has said it pretty much goes [Title][Year][Resolution][Source][Codec(s)-Video/Audio][GroupName]
Title and Year: self explanatory
[Resolution]: 1080p, 2160p, HD, UHD, etc
[Source] Bluray, Webrip, Web-DL, Streaming-Provider, Cam, etc…
[Codec]: This can be a lot but kinda depends on what the uploader wants to mention/bring attention to
Video: x264 (AVC) or h264, x265(HEVC) or h265, AV1, x266 (VVC), etc...
May also include stuff like : 8bit (SDR), 10bit (HDR), DV (Dolby), Hybrid
Audio: # of channels (5.1, 7.1)
Codecs: Will tell you if the audio is lossless vs lossy
Examples DTS:X, TrueHD Atmos, DTS-HD MA, TrueHD, LPCM, FLAC [lossless] vs. DTS-HD HR, E-AC3, DTS-ES, DTS, AC3 [lossy]]
Group Name: Name of group or person that made the file.
Finally there is the container file which nowadays is MKV (Matroska Video file) but you can run into MP4. There are older formats but you don’t see them very often so I wont really mention them.
This is a quick run down but there is plenty of info out there that goes more into detail and you can just google questions like: what is lossless vs lossy?
Hope this helps
I mainly stick to x265 for the size. I’m not too snobby with quality and for the size its fine with me. I want to like AV1 but have issue with playback on some of my devices. Usually i just play locally off a HDD on xbox (Kodi) . This may not be an issue if/when I get a NAS. Not sure if there are issues with transcoding as I haven’t really looked into it
I use subscene and opensubtitles for when I need srt files. You can also look into addicted (spelled wrong).
As someone has brought up SubtitleEdit (program) is super useful is you need to OCR some PGS/SUP (bluray subtitle formats) files. You can also sync an existing SRT to your video file if push come to shove (this is usually my last resort though because its may be a lot of work if it isnt just a simple sync shift - doing line by line is awful).
Anna’s Archive & Z-Lib. You can search by language. I cant speak on how big/good its German catalogue is though.
I have been using it for the past few years. I haven’t had any issues so far.
My rule of thumb is to just wait till the blu-ray is released. Ill either get a remux or a very solid encode. Web-DLs can usually be found earlier than the blu-ray release too (usually like month, or a few weeks, before the BD release). I’m not saying rips or cams cant be “good quality”, but I would rather watch an actual scene release or closer to the quality of a physical counterpart. I’d rather be patient and just wait for better releases.