black friday deals havent been that great in 20 years. it used to be a major deal.
This is bullshit.
Black Friday was insane for a handful of years following the Great Recession of 2008. Lasted till the very early 2010s. Retailers were desperate, desperate, to get you in the door or buying things on the website.
I've seen it, but I collect a lot of magazine cover discs, 90s PC games and stuff, it's def pretty darn rare. 'Did the previous owner(s) abuse the disc?' is a vastly higher concern for me in my eBay adventures.
This is a big part of it IMO. Even 'streaming exclusive' stuff that see's no physical release gets pirated enmass so many copies exist. Few people copy YouTube content however, since it's already online, free, and easily accessible. ...Until the day it's not accessible of course.
One could safeguard thousands of movies, song, art of any kind, that might disappear because some of it becomes lost media. Instead some prefer to backup content made for an ad platform.
Let's be clear here, movies, songs, and most art are also vehicles to serve you ads or generate admission/purchase revenue off the consumer. Like you criticize YouTube for being an 'Ad Platform' but elevate 'Songs' as if you've never heard of a radio station?
Funny enough, most films, music and other content are much better protected from being lost. They are mass produced, mass released, and have many many many pirated copies not to mention retail physical copies. YouTube on the other hand? People take for granted that it's there, online, easy to access from anything, and much of it doesn't easily have redundant copies on the internet so it vanishes in a flash when removed from YouTube.
I've been pretty selective, mostly YouTube channels that do 'Tech Documentary Stuff' cause I enjoy re-watching that. LGR would be a prime example.
However, I integrate all of these in my Kodi infrastructure, so only large channels have metadata online in the TVDB or the like.
For those without, I'd love some tips on something to generate Kodi compatible series metadata directly from YouTube.
No, it's totally a fact. Software encoding yields you better results in terms of 'quality per megabyte' over hardware encoding unless you are using some real bad sloppy software encoding results. If size efficiency matters more than anything, you use software encoding or you're basically leaving money on the table. Of course the downside is that hardware encoding is a whoooooooooooooole heck of a lot faster.