M-Discs had merit in the DVD era. It’s a common refrain of those who don’t know the intricacies and read a wired article years ago to claim they mean anything in the Blu-ray era. They don’t.

Standard Blu-ray Discs have all the technologies that supposedly make m-discs so long lasting and as far as media that isn’t continuously updated and hashed from live storage medium to live storage medium (cold, archival storage unpowered) they are about as good as you’ll get.

They are much tougher than DVDs. Of course a variety of things go into how long a disc remains readable and without damage to data including luck with regards to no impurities in the batch. Even m-disc themselves based their longest claims off storage in ideal situations like an inactive salt mine (commonly used for archives by governments). Kept out of sun, away from extreme heat (including baking in uninsulated 120 degree F heat all summer year after year), away from high humidity and away from UV exposure to the data side of the disc as well as scratches and such and they should last a quarter to half a century, some more.

In the Blu-ray era m-discs are just an overly expensive brand.

Hamas is a legitimate resistance group exercising their legitimate, legal right under international law to violently resist unlawful colonization, occupation, land-theft, and genocide. They have every right to exist, they have every right to use violence against settlers who should leave and give back the stolen land.

If you want more moderate types, know that the zionists intentionally crushed them and propped up Hamas to create just this kind of argument and by spouting it you’re carrying water for them. Only the end of the occupation and the formation of a full Palestinian state will result in the breathing room for the creation of moderate groups and opinions.

So first it’s client-side scanning for CSAM. Not without some nobility. But the problem is once you wedge open that door it’s technically possible to do it for other things and so you become compelled to.

It’ll move from just CSAM to stopping and tracking “propaganda” as deemed by them which will be narrow-ish at first (anything pro-Russia, RT links, etc) but gradually expand over time to anything outside the mainstream branded as extremist (and guess what, privacy advocates will definitely fall within that label). And once that’s in place the private stake-holders, copyright holders will come knocking, they’ll say rightly so “hey you have the capability right now, we demand you implement client-side scanning to detect copyright violations” and then that will be ordered by a court, further enshrined by a law and oh look now you can no longer send political thought that the ruling regime disagrees with, can no longer surf the high seas, and so on and so forth. Congratulations and please enjoy living in the “garden” of Europe.

Yes. Though I wouldn’t want to know the exact day if I could help that. Knowing the year or month would be enough to plan. To have a will. To say the things I want to say to those I care about. To make peace with the end. To do what I can of a bucket list and to feel a bit more secure up to that point not worrying about death.

China: has like 300 nuclear weapons, none of them stationed outside their country. Has no forward military bases from which to stage or launch attacks, has limited forward radar visibility of incoming attacks. Has a couple SSBM subs which likely operate entirely in the south China sea from which it can launch. Wants to expand to 1000 by 2030.

Russia: Has over 4000 warheads, most aging. Has no meaningful forward military bases outside their country for staging attacks on the west. Has no meaningful forward radar visibility of incoming attacks from beyond its borders. Has a few SSBM subs from which it can launch.

US: Has over 4000 warheads, many aging. Has many hidden, classified, constantly operating SSBM submarines which regularly intentionally cruise to the north Atlantic (near Russia), the south Pacific (near China), and a variety of other locations. Has ground-launched missiles, an air delivery system. Has world class sonar (included super-sensitive listening stations bolted to the bedrock of the east and west coasts) and aggressive drone campaigns to hunt and constantly track Chinese and Russian missile subs to allow them a first kill. Has forward warning radar systems positioned thousands of miles from its borders in northern Canada, in Europe, in the Pacific on island chains. In addition has a massive, the most massive spy satellite network in operation constantly watching other powers in incredible detail. Has a space force dedicated to among other things sabotaging Chinese and Russian space assets with kill switches or remote disable explosives which could be used in aggression to blind their enemy first. Of all major world powers will have the most warning and most time to react decisively in case of a full scale launch and attempted sneak first strike on them by either Russia or China. Stations nuclear weapons with allies in “sharing” agreements where the US has final say on their use and launch in countries from the UK to mainland Europe near Russia to Turkey, is considering such an agreement with South Korea right on China’s border.

But tell me again how the US is backed into a corner in this situation and has no choice but to build more warheads and pour hundreds of billions that could feed, cloth, shelter, and provide healthcare to its people into new delivery systems which will fatten and enrich defense contractors to the tune of hundreds of billions of overage costs if not trillions for systems that may or may not even work thanks to contractor greed and sloppiness.

Nothing. It’s an automated. Just stop doing it and it’ll decay with time.

DVD’s max out at about 580p (for PAL, NTSC is 480p), resolutions are measured by the number of horizontal lines of pixels (counted from top to bottom of video/screen), not vertical which at 4:3 square aspect ratio on dvds does tend to be 720 pixels (by contrast full resolution HD video’s number of vertical lines is 1920 while it’s horizontal lines are of course 1080, hence 1080p). You’re not the first person to be confused by this.

Professional encoders who fully understand the encoders and the schemes in use and care about not seeing artifacting or low quality would never intentionally go as low as 300mb for a feature length movie of even an hour. Yes there are people who do such things but they’re not well regarded and it won’t look even passable on anything larger than a phone screen.

Recognized quality groups that seek low sizes might get an animated feature (less bitrate needed due to lack of fine detail in animation vs real film) in SD quality down to around that. But for most live action content the sizes I see from the best of the best concerned with smaller release sizes are in the 900mb to 1.5GB range for 60-90 minute features.

300mb for a 90 minute live action feature even in SD is just not going to look good, some of the groups who get those sizes make them look even half-passable by running pre-filters in virtualdub that smooth, reduce grain and detail, etc before passing to the encoder. That kind of thing is way beyond anything you’re going to learn in a few youtube videos though, that’s advanced stuff with scripting.

Think about it this way, if you shoot for 1GB encodes with 265 or AV1 you can store over 900 movies on a 1tb drive which can be had for well under a hundred dollars.

I would like the best and fanciest algorithms to have least dataloss.

There is no magic that will get you where you want. If you want detail preserved you need more bitrate which translates to larger sizes. Modern codecs like HEVC and AV1 mean you need as much as 1/5th the bitrate you needed with old MPEG2/4 encoding schemes used on DVDs, that’s darn good savings but it has its limits.

Do as you will but anything live action (non-animated) significantly under 1000kbps average bitrate is going to look awful on a 1080p screen and much worse than what it would look like if you popped your dvd in the disc drive and played it from there.

Opus is fine if you’re not worried about compatibility and just playing on a computer.

As others mentioned having a good encoder is an issue for AAC. And some skills in using it, tuning, etc.

Nearly all quality releasers now use AC3/EAC3 or FLAC. Tigole is the last one who uses AAC to my knowledge and the rest of the QXR group rolls their eyes at it.

You’re not going to get a meaningful reduction in bitrate and file size with AAC over EAC3/AC3 without loss of quality. We’re talking maybe you can shave 2-300kbps off an AAC version versus an AC3 5.1 track. And it’s tricky. So much so no one other than that one person I mentioned bothers. At least no one accepted in the higher echelons as competent in creating acceptably transparent encodes.

If a source has EAC3 (itself capable of up to halving the bitrate required vs AC3) or AC3 I’d recommend keeping it as they tend to already be efficient. They’re also universally compatible as codecs. Re-encode those big 1500kbps DTS tracks and those even bigger monster lossless Dolby and DTS tracks but I’d leave efficient codecs like AC3 alone.

That said it’s up to you what sounds good. If you’re using lower end stuff and can’t tell the difference after trying a few different test videos with different types of sounds then go for it.