Posts made by NF16

@peteinoz Yeah, the zero-length torrent file issue hit me, as well. I was finally able to finish uploading pictures and post the torrent last night, and was rejoicing that the problem seemed to be over. Then I went to download my newly-posted torrent..... A zero-length torrent file that was useless. I deleted the torrent immediately.

Judging from the dearth of torrents posted overnight, and from the results of a test case this morning, the problem is still there. It would be nice to get an acknowledgement from the site admins that they know about the problem.

Check the file size for the torrent files you downloaded. There has been a problem on the site over the past 12 hours with torrent uploading and, probably related, with some of the torrents previously uploaded yielding 0-size torrent files when you try to download them.

If that isn't the issue, forget I said anything and wait for someone more knowledgeable to reply.

@peteinoz It's definitely a server issue. I tried some images that I had successfully uploaded earlier today and it rejected them. The fact that almost nothing has been added in the past several hours indicates that it's site-wide and not restricted to just a subset of users.

We're just going to have to wait for an admin to give us an update. Or for the problem to go away on its own.

@john32123666 I just got halfway through another upload, with half a dozen pictures accepted, after which it started balking again and won't let me upload the rest of my pictures.

So, intermittent, but definitely more failure than success. After the long tracker error issue the other day, this is getting pretty frustrating.

@tnar Thanks. I'll try that.

@john32123666

Yup, although it appears to be intermittent. I was able to do one upload, then a short time later, I was blocked.

Judging from the lack of traffic on the site, it looks as though it's broken far more than it's working.

Hello? Is this thing on? This is still happening. Is anyone monitoring this forum, and can I get some help? Please?

Every time I log in to the forum site, I get an email that says, "You've requested that we change or confirm your email address," with a button to "Click here to confirm your email address."

I click the button and I get taken to a page that says, "Email Confirmed. Thank you for validating your email. Your account is now fully activated."

This is consistent and repeatable, happening every time I log in to the forum. This only affects the forum, not the torrent site. On the torrent site, I log in without incident. But here, I have to re-validate every single time.

It's true that I changed my email address here, but that was months ago. So how can I get the site to stop asking me to validate my email address?

@raphjd said in Fox News hosts know they're lying.:

Are we just supposed to accept voter fraud because it was a few years ago?

No, you're supposed to accept the reality that the "voter fraud" you're claiming simply does not exist. The few isolated incidents that have been identified were nowhere near enough to sway the election. Every single one of the theories and claims put forward by the election denialists has been thoroughly and completely debunked.

This has been examined by local officials, state officials, federal officials, news organizations (like Fox News, which we now know didn't believe the shit they were spewing on air), over 70 courts, including judges placed on the bench by Trump, and including multiple Appeals Courts and all the way to the Supreme Court, multiple recounts in multiple counties and states, including recounts overseen by election denialists, and the result has always been the same: there is nothing there.

The fact that you still cling to this big lie is not our problem. And since you clearly have closed your mind to reality, this will be my last post on this. I know when I'm wasting my time.

I think the real answer is that "it depends." If the bulk of your high ratio is coming from your own uploads, that isn't a problem, in my opinion. You're supplying the content; you're entitled to the ratio boost that comes with it.

If your ratio is coming from seeding torrents where you're the only one, that, too, isn't a problem. I'm currently seeding a large collection that has been around for months, and that everyone else has abandoned. It's still getting an occasional leecher, and it's given me a nearly 1 TB boost to my upload stats. If I weren't seeding it, the content wouldn't be available.

That said, this has been a thought-provoking discussion, and I'm going to be a bit more cautious about how often, and how long, I seed going forward. I think I got a little over-cautious because of early ratio problems caused by downloading a large collection in my first few weeks on the site. I like knowing that I can download such a collection now and still maintain a good ratio, but I might, just might, have carried that a bit too far.

@lololulu19 : It's a Saturday Night Live skit, starring Dan Aykroyd, as "Fred Garvin: Male Prostitute."

Youtube Video

@john32123666 said in Site duplicate rules as applied to AI enhancement:

Unless the source enhancement/upscaling coming from the studio itself ...

Even then.... I bought the Falcon Vault Collection of their 10 classic vintage films, all of them supposedly carefully remastered. The remastered versions weren't much better, if at all, than the originals. And in one case, Spokes, I could argue that Falcon made it worse. And these weren't even upscaled, just "remastered."

There's a website that is studio-authorized to play and allow downloads of classic videos. I've forgotten the name, but it's similar in nature to the gay-world-dot-org site. They started making 1080p versions of some of their older videos, and I downloaded a couple. They were almost as bad as most of the upscaled versions posted here. Honestly, it looked like they had just stretched the videos out and called it good, without bothering to do any cleanup.

Drekkin can speak more to this than I can, but my understanding is that this kind of remastering/upscaling will only work well if you have a really excellent master video to start from and you hire professionals who know what they are doing (and be prepared to pay for that expertise). Otherwise, you get the kind of junk we see here.

I just wish more of the uploaders here would stop thinking about whether they could do the upscaling and start thinking about whether they should do the upscaling. For me, anyway, for now, the answer is that I shouldn't do it myself, and that it's not worth my time or my bandwidth/ratio to download the work of others.

@jrewingwanna said in Site duplicate rules as applied to AI enhancement:

IMHO I do not see them as duplicates in general

I was thinking more about people posting competing upscaled versions of the same video. They would both be 1080p versions and might be similar in size, but could be radically different in video quality. Are they duplicates?

I understand that this isn't a problem yet, and might never be.

@drekkin : I saw two of them today, if I recall correctly, one of which was 480p and one of which was 360p (!), both of which were claimed to have been upscaled to 4K. I didn't bother to download either. (I can't find the 360p one in a search just now, so either I imagined it or someone got smart and removed it.)

Seriously, what are these people thinking? A 480p video has roughly 300K pixels. A 4K video has around 8.3 million pixels, which means that the enhancement process has to add 8 million pixels to the original 300K. How can any tool, no matter how sophisticated, do that well, particularly if the original was a fuzzy 1970s video?

Oh, well... I've done enough ranting about this. Either this will become a problem, in which case the site admins will take care of it, or it will remain a fringe activity and I'll just ignore those videos.

I do admit to being amused by the ones that say "AI Enhanced by Me" or "AI Enhanced by Myself." Because that matters?

Lovely ... someone posted a 1971 SD video upscaled to 4K. Good grief.

@blablarg18 said:

The Danish researchers' study IS LITERALLY "experts chiming in".

It was one meta-study, a study that omitted quite a few contemporary studies that reached the opposite conclusion. So yes, I am going to wait for other experts to chime in rather than immediately jumping on the bandwagon, particularly since the study's conclusions are being wildly over-stated, didn't include N95, and didn't include numerous Covid mask studies.

Was your comment meant as a parody of the Mask Zombies?

Not at all. It's call "critical thinking," something I strongly suggest you consider adopting.

Another site that I look in on occasionally has a policy that upscaled videos are prohibited. I suspect the reason is pretty simple: that most such videos suck and they don't want the hassle of wading through the 99% that suck to find the 1% that are okay.

Personally, I'll wait a few days for experts to chime in rather than jumping on the latest bandwagon without confirmation. While I'm waiting, I'll just note, from the study itself: "The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions." They were also unable to to ascertain with any certainty the effect of wearing N95 masks.

I should also note that the "78 studies" number includes historical studies of "non-epidemic influenza periods," during which, of course, masks were neither mandated nor widely used. This meta study includes just six studies that were conducted during the current pandemic: two from Mexico, one each from Denmark, Bangladesh, England, and Norway.

Personally, I'm curious as to why they limited themselves to just six actual Covid studies. Cherry-picking, perhaps? Like I said, I'll wait and see.

I would assume that the site administrators don't place a DMCA-removed video in the dead section because a) it would still be on the site, b) it would be trivially easy to revive it, and c) there currently is no way to tell the difference between "DMCA removed; don't revive this" and "Nobody is currently seeding this but you are free to do so."

There actually is a highly cynical fourth reason, but I'll refrain from pointing that one out.

So 90% of the AI "enhanced" videos posted here are, to put it charitably, not very good (but see Sturgeon's Law), that still leaves open the question of posting multiple upscaled versions of the same video and whether the site's rules will (or should) allow it.

Personally, I have uploaded a few videos that I used AI tools on. I like to think that I did a reasonable job and I'm pretty happy with them even now. But something like 90% of the videos I've played around with, I wasn't able to come up with an enhanced version that I liked. And the ones I posted here each took quite a few tries to get right.

For now, anyway, I think I'm going to stick to doing minor cleanup on some older videos, without trying to upscale them, and will mostly keep them to myself. Given my lack of expertise, the current state of the tools, and the amount of time it takes to do even a basic cleanup, it's too much work for too little reward to do more than that.

Alas, my dreams of pristine 1080p versions of the old classics have vanished, destroyed by the harsh light of reality. Those vendors sure know how to make enticing demo videos, don't they?