Catar

that would be very illegal and completely negate everything we've done <.< The download sections have been removed entirely.

just to back up Koby, here's a citation for you: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/private-i/ Besides, that reasoning is absurd. Private property doesn't magically grant you the ability to commit crimes within. If law enforcement has reasonable cause to suspect criminal activity inside a private space, they've got justification to move in, physical or virtual. Just placing a sign outside saying "pls don't come in everything is perfectly fine and it's my own home" isn't gonna do squat. edit: also the internet isn't a private place. everything on the internet is public, and you can assume it's been recorded somewhere. do not use the internet with any expectation of privacy.

This is because the BIOS is actual proprietary code. Old emulators would use this as a shortcut to make a lot of the emulation work easier to write and execute. Supplying a BIOS is illegal for the same reason supplying any paid application is. Newer emulators stopped relying on any proprietary code though (e.g. Dolphin, Cemu, etc), so it's not really a problem anymore thankfully. You can run any games straight out of the box these days with modern emulators. back on topic: I'd be on board with a general piracy discussion area. No links, of course, but the A/V encoding section was definitely useful. We could also add a comparisons section for encode comparisons, since that's something you only get on forums like this or BTN's comparisons board.

The forum already has several dark themes enabled. Titan is a bit colorful, but Brave and Carbon are both fairly dark. There is no pure black theme, if you're hoping for an OLED-compatible option. That's really not a standard on the web yet, unfortunately, so you probably won't see it often. You can force it on using extensions like Dark Reader or custom styling though, if you use Firefox as your mobile browser (this will be more unstable / slower though)

Very close. H264/x264 can encode 4K+ just fine. It's HDR that it can't do. Important distinction. But yes. H265/x265 is better for mini-encodes because it's more efficient. For everything else, H264/x264 is still the best, because we produce better quality results with it.

They aren't the same quality at lower filesizes, but at lower bitrates, H265/x265 is more efficient. So if you aren't going for actual quality (like we are), H265/x265 is a better choice since you'll get better quality at low bitrates.

Just to be clear, H265 doesn't have to be worse. The problem is mostly in the encoder we have available (x265). It took nearly a decade to develop and understand x264 to the level we do now, and produce consistent quality results that the encoders regularly achieve. x264 was first released waaaaaaaay back in 2004, while x265 has only been available since 2013. x264 has gotten quite a bit more work put in, especially since it was the king of encoders during the height of P2P sharing where full files were regularly passed around (these days, streaming is the lion's share of media piracy). From comparisons done by people much better at this than me, H265 can actually produce fantastic results and at the lower quality, but we've only seen that with commercially developed encoders used by companies like Netflix and Hulu (I haven't heard anything about Amazon H265 offerings). Since all we have to work with is x265, and since the major encoding groups already have an established pipeline with x264 where they achieve transparent encodes at a reasonable enough filesize, no one's working on it anymore. To understand why, it really comes down to differing needs. When H264/x264 came out, it was a mindblowing step forward. Quality improved dramatically over the most popular standard at the time (XviD, the open source implementation of DivX). Couple this with the sharp rise in P2P thanks to torrents and there was a lot more motivation to get great compression, since hard drive space was still at a relative premium. HD content really took off around the same time too. Shows like Lost were broadcast in HD and made available at 1080p, and those Hawaii landscapes were gorgeous in HD (still are), so unless everyone wanted to buy a ton more hard drive space, we needed better compression. The scene really pushed the transition too, when scenerules were released requiring all new encodes to be on x264. (This created a hilarious effect on public indexes that don't understand the scene, with tons of comments wondering how "every single group changed codecs overnight?" "why can't i play anything anymore?") Compare that to today, where hard drive space is relatively cheap, huge cloud solutions are available, streaming is plentiful, internet speeds are more than fast enough to handle even the highest bitrate videos. H265 simply isn't a big enough jump, and honestly I'm not sure AV1 will be either. The motivation isn't there to the same degree it was for H264/x264. The real transition will only occur once HDR content is plentiful and HDR-enabled screens start holding a significant share. Since x264 doesn't support HDR, there must be a change in codec. in short: H265 is better than H264 but no one knows how to get those results and no one wants to spend the time to figure out how because it's probably not worth it.

dangerous assumption.

Pretty soon I'm gonna sticky a thread answering this question... It mostly depends on the person actually encoding it, but as a rule: H264 will probably be the better quality one, while H264 will have better compression and be smaller. 265 will take more hardware to decode properly and won't be as compatible with all devices, but is also required for HDR in 4k videos. Short: 264 encodes are better to download unless 4K HDR is needed. There's a lot more nuance but I'm on my phone.

Nah. Pros for mpv: Video output looks great right out of the box. No messing with filters, no grabbing codec packs or audio/subtitle filters. Main package and done. You can still configure it a bit if you like, especially if you want fancier upscaling/HDR stuff/etc, but 99% of videos will look good. Cross platform. MPV runs on all major platforms and uses the same config files to do so. You can move your config anywhere and each platform will understand it and be (fairly) consistent about it. Heavily customizable. You can mess with the MPV GUI to a pretty ludicrous degree if you want, even make it look almost identical to other players if you put the effort in. it's lightweight =P It's modern and still getting updates, while the other favorite (MPC-HC) has an uncertain future (officially announced stopping updates, other people announced updates, very unclear now). It handles livestreams really well. I currently use MPV as my primary viewer for Twitch, for example. Cons: configuring the thing is a learning curve. the default setup has a terrible UI (read: none). Lots of other unintuitive things. MPC-HC is still solid as long as you've got the right filters, but if you have no clue what you're doing, I recommend picking up the stickied "MPV Easy Mode" from @Moodkiller. It's a nice starter package. (addendum: i probably forgot some things here that someone's gonna come correct me on. my primary video player is not MPC or MPV, it's actually Kodi =P)

on top of this, there's a very clear distinction between releases in the Anime boards vs releases in the Cartoons board, both in what people post and what people are generally looking for. In Cartoons & Animation, the important things are the resolution, source media, and encoder, generally in that order. In the Anime boards, the priorities are the subtitle source (fansub/retail/etc), the encoder, and the source media, again in that general order. This is pretty consistent, and shows a clear delineation of what each board gets used for. There's the rare exception, but even with foreign dubs of Cartoons, they simply don't have the extensive fansubbing work you see for Anime. The distro boards separate just as cleanly based on that alone. our current rules on where stuff goes are very easy to follow anyway. If it's on AniDB or MAL, it goes in Anime. otherwise it doesn't. nice and simple.

@mcmxcixmm Rules have now been officially updated with those changes. Also, for future rules updates, you may want to subscribe to the Distro rules thread here. Whenever new updates are made, I'll make sure I comment there for anyone who wants to be pinged about it. (hopefully that's never, but we all know how catar projects go.)

sorry, you caught me right before I edited it. We're separating rules a little between anime and cartoons, since the release tag is far more important in one than the other. In anime, group tags will always be required, since it denotes the fansubber who made it. There's not really such a thing as anonymous here, and picking fansubbers for shows is pretty important. In cartoons, group tags will not be required anymore. If you're just posting straight WEB-DLs all from the same group, it'd be appreciated if you include it in the thread title (protip: if you're just posting scene/p2p releases, you can literally paste the release name into the thread title and you auto-fill all requirements. easy mode.), but given how much a show can vary between seasons, it's become a bit silly and doesn't actually help anymore. Now that I'm actually subscribed to the cartoons board and watching how that community interacts, I'm learning a lot about how to write rules for that section. Bear with me here, please. As for your final point: I don't think this is a valid concern, to be honest. If you're filesharing, you've already lost your anonymity full stop. However, tags are still very important. The number of random old files I have floating around without tags is frankly quite irritating. It makes it nearly impossible to source them properly. All files should be tagged. If you really wish to (try to) stay anonymous, you could just make up a random tag for each new file release. Anything to differentiate your files from others.

there is an upcoming rules change soon, and removing the requirement for filehost is a part of it. This is an old rule that was carried over from previous rules, and we've since determined it is definitely unnecessary. I'd disagree on it being detrimental, but I don't think it's useful anymore either, so it will be removed as a requirement (and hasn't really been enforced for a while anyway). At the moment, three release tags will still be required in thread titles: Resolution (marked either by full dimensions, i.e. 1920x1080p, or simply by the vertical resolution, i.e. 1080p). Media source (WEB, WEBRip, WEB-DL, DVD, BluRay/BD, TV/HDTV, etc). Release group tag. The release group tag will be optional in the Cartoons section, but required in all Anime sections. These are the three most commonly searched terms in any of the distro boards, and greatly aid users in finding content, so all will be required in thread titles. feedback is always welcomed! let me know if you have any other suggestions.