If you want to copy: MakeMKV for BluRays are perfect.
For MiniDV you can use any MiniDV camcorder, they have a digital video out (probably FireWire) then import with a video editor on PC. An old Macbook/Pro is the best with the built-in port and iMove.
What do you mean? All three of those are already digital, no conversion needed. Or do you mean you just want to copy them to some other storage medium?
"Digital" has become this weird overloaded term with a second meaning that means "no physical media". You see it mostly in videogames, "bought digitally" means buying it from Steam or another online store as a download, as opposed to a physical disk.
Obviously you're right and and literally every commercial* videogame ever released is digital in the sense that it's binary information, and the movies that person was talking about were already digital on Blu Ray.
You can kind of justify it as literally correct if you infer the context of "digital" referring to the method of transferral, rather than the method of information storage - I.e when I bought a game disk from a shop, the game was transferred to me physically on a disk, but when I bought one from Steam it was transferred digitally. Doesn't really apply as much for this situation tho.
(*I almost said every videogame ever made, but I suppose Tennis For Two and some other experimental games ran on analogue computers)
I'm currently in the same position regarding 8mm digital8. After researching, I believe the best way to digitize these is to obtain a compatible used camcorder with a DV/Firewire port, then install a DV/Firewire PCI card to stream and record the video to your PC.
You’re right.
But even better than trying to get a compatible PCI card, find an older MacBook Pro that has built in FireWire ports and use something like iMovie to direct rip the DV content.
Unfortunately, it has to be done in real-time even though it’s digital data. I haven’t heard anyone use a high speed tape drive for them but it would be theoretically possible.
Also, that setup is a pretty good way to digitize Hi8 analog tapes. And I think you can use some of the camcorders as analog to digital converters of an analog video stream (eg, an attached vcr).
Sounds daunting compared to my limited experience:
Friend brings over MiniDV camera and a tape, and asks if I can transfer it to a PC.
"I don't know, but we can try!"
It took longer to rummage through the cabling collection for the right FireWire cable than to get it working, plugged straight into the front of a Q6600 box running Windows Vista or 7, with whatever software Microsoft included by default.
Even the tape transport controls worked perfectly from the GUI on the PC.
There is a way to go from mini dv to thunderbolt. Apple made adapters for Firewire to Thunderbolt 2, and Thunderbolt 2 to 3. These can be chained to do what you want. See this video/channel for more details. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT0oDYbqwwk
If someone comes to you and offers you a fictional job to illegally move a lot of drugs for cash and you agree - that's not entrapment, you agreed of your own accord. That the whole thing was a fake setup is not materially relevant.
If you first refuse, and then the undercover officer says "if you don't do this we'll come after you and kill your family" and then you agree under duress - that's entrapment.
It has to be something that's compelling you to do something you would not have done otherwise. Presenting you with the option to make a bad choice is not itself enough because had the situation been real you would have done it.
On one hand I'm sympathetic to Ross in that I can empathize with his youthful ideals and ego that drove the marketplace, but I also think he genuinely would have authorized that person be killed had it been real and people are in prison for a lot less. His market was also a lot more than drugs iirc.
I find his supporters downplaying the assassination bit irritating - I suspect they do it because they know it's the least defensible bit and they can argue it on technicality. I think it'd be better if they just accepted it.
I also think he's very unlikely to commit another crime now that he's out, but still - a lot of people are in prison for a lot less.
It's still pretty hard to find fiber in the bay for decent prices. I have 1gb symmetric in SF, but that's pretty uncommon. The 10gb sonic is only in some neighborhoods. I lived in Palo Alto for a long time and the options there were awful. 1gb down 35mbps up Comcast was the best option and it was well over $100/mo - there may have been a 2gb option for $300/mo and a 2yr commitment.
Sonic covers large parts of Oakland too. Been really happy with their 10Gbps service, I have an Intel X520 SFP+ NIC in my PC and I get 7-8Gbps symmetrical if upstream isn't bandwidth-limited.
Yep, my in-laws in Menlo Park had insanely slow SBC DSL with high packet loss. SBC actually just discontinued the service rather than do anything useful.
I once paid that ridiculous $149/mo for the 1gig Comcast service until I got tired of the bill that I was really only paying for bragging rights, and went back to 250Mbps.
A couple of years ago I had my 6Mbps ATT DSL reduced down to less than 1Mbps, to the point of being absolutely useless. I had no forewarning or notice that my service had been compromised. Every attempt to obtain support from ATT was met with attempts to get me to switch to cellular internet.
Fortunately I was able to get accepted into the StarLink early access around that time and managed to cancel the DSL. Even though ATT clearly did not want my business anymore, they still made sure I had to jump through countless hoops to finally disconnect and terminate billing. I had to sit on the phone for a couple of hours, being transferred between phone reps and managers until I finally got one person with the authority to shut my account down.
Wow. In the EU, canceling subscriptions must be as easy as signing up for them by law.
My personal longest issue with ISP's was when the software config once went wrong in their side, took me a month and allmost daily phone calls until I got to 4th line support that was an actual techie who fixed it in 10 minutes.
I honestly don't understand what the big deal is with the higher speed tiers. I forget what my house theoretically gets but, in practice, it's less than 100 down from Comcast and that's perfectly fine for what I use it for. I'm a bit under $100/mo and wouldn't pay to upgrade.
I semi-frequently run into situations that are bottlenecked on my internet speed, that I could of course just walk away from if it took too long but is nice to really have complete in seconds instead. I think the biggest one for me is downloading updates and software tools.
Sure, and that’s worth spending how much per month?
I mean if I was forced to sit and stare at a download screen then sure it’d be worth it to me. However even at 2+Gigabit I’m not going to sit and stare about the download screen so it’s kind of meaningless how long it takes. I’ve got plenty of other stuff to do for a while.
Download/upload speed seems like a fairly weak argument for more bandwidth past a certain, fairly low, point. These days, it seems like it's more around a large household doing simultaneous 4K streaming where they're running into limits.
What common streaming services even offer 4K streams that are more than say 30Mbit a stream? Most Blu-Rays are what, ~40Mbit?
A 1Gb internet package would let you have a dozen 40Mbit streams (480Mb) and still have another several hundred megabits for gaming, http traffic, etc.
Yeah- I just spent so much time complaining about not being able to get fiber in the heart of the bay area that when the 1gig cable service came, I felt like it was time to put my money where my mouth was. Then the novelty wore off, and I downgraded. IIRC, the 250meg service still had "sufficient" upload.
That is how Comcast slices their meager upload capacity, but it looks better for them to advertise their bigger bullshit burst bandwidth numbers than advertise a pathetic upgrade of 5Mbps upload, which probably just means they downgrade someone else’s upload.
Comcast is now starting to support higher upload speeds. They upgraded their equipment in our area (Fremont, CA) and now I'm able to get 200 mbps uploads. But you do have use a newer cable modem which support higher upload speeds. I'm using Arris S34 because I can also eventually upgrade to 2gbps downloads.
it's mostly an artifact of shitty ISPs like Xfinity that haven't figured out that in 2025 non-symmetric download and upload is really dumb. I have 300mbps currently because if I dropped to 100, my upload would go from 30 to 5, and it's nice to be able to upload a file at higher than dial up speeds
> non-symmetric download and upload is really dumb.
IIRC all their asymmetric internet packages are based on their coax deployments. It's not a dumb tradeoff in the coax space even though I don't like their choices of how much in each direction they usually do. There are only so many useful channels they can deploy in a given physical network. They could offer more upload bandwidth at the expense of download bandwidth but generally speaking most customers don't upload much and value download bandwidth over upload.
I know that's the theory, I just don't think it's true. Video calls anc gaming are some of the higher bandwidth consumers and are symmetrical bandwidth.
Gaming often uses extremely little amounts of bandwidth for a match, often less than a megabit or two.
Video calls, sure, but still most platforms are still averaging a handful of megabits. Most people don't have high quality webcams at home, so really moving to 10Mbit+ uploads isn't really going to do much for them.
Meanwhile people will likely stream HD video for hours and hours on their TVs, averaging 15+Mbit. They'll stream music which is like a basic online game but only a single direction. They'll download 100GB game downloads, scroll social media, etc. Do you think the average user uploads more media or downloads more media to social media?
I'd agree something like 20Mbit is probably too low for even an average US household, but in the end I'd say most consumers are still going to care more about download speed than upload speed. Just look around here in the comments and notice lots of people talk about how a fast connection is great because of large game downloads and what not; few people are justifying fast connections to home users because of sending data.
I use a lot of my upload data, but I'm definitely not a normal household. I hop on my VPN and stream data from my SDRs remotely, which will use hundreds of megabits. I host media streaming servers. I do remote gaming from my gaming PC to my handheld sometimes. I have some other applications I connect to while out. But I'm definitely not normal. And yet I still on average have 5-10x down than up usage.
I'm in Fremont and I recently noticed they now have 2gbps for $105 in my area. Also they boosted the upload speed to 200-350mbps. I did have to upgrade my cable modem to get my faster upload speed but still I need a faster Wi-Fi router before I consider going to 2gbps.
Palo Alto has had AT&T fiber since 2019 depending on your location (but still not 100% coverage). I was lucky enough to be in an early coverage area but the price for 1GB symmetric has risen from $75/month to $115.
There's something off about the post that I'm not sure I can pin point, but it's there.
What are these oft referenced insecurities? It's hard to get a read on this without details, but dumping your girlfriend to do random selfish shit (climb mountain, go to Hawaii, etc.) - it's not a surprise he's unfulfilled (though working on doge would be exciting).
This trap of 'working on yourself' that leads to endless mindfulness and narcissism leads you to become aloof. People tend to derive purpose from community, friends, and family. This is what religion used to give people independent of the pseudoscience.
Being financially independent is great, but it doesn't bring fulfillment.
A long way to say spend time with friends, work on a relationship, get married, have kids. People can do what they want, but most people will likely be the most content doing this. If you can find something to work on you're also excited about great, can do that too.
You can only dick around traveling and 'finding yourself' for so long, it gets old and repetitive.
Not the OP, but after a certain
age (mid 30s in my case) traveling just becomes cumbersome, i.e. when you realize that there are no big insights about oneself that can be gained via traveling that can’t also be gotten back at home, surrounded by friends/family and a couple of good books.
This sounds an awful lot like you're generalising from your experiences to other people's.
I'm also in my mid 30s and I still find travelling eye opening in a way that books are not (and I do read a lot, including when I travel). And on my last trip I met a retired couple who spent three weeks traveling in their car and they told me they used to have a boat with which they'd sail around the world.
Well, i beg to differ. And i'm older than that. In my view, we have a very limited time to live, and experiencing the amazing planet we're on in all its variety is one of the best things one can do.
You're just scratching the surface of said amazing planet, you're not experiencing anything of value that you couldn't have experienced back home. There's a real good essay on the emptiness of tourism written by Siegfried Kracauer back in the 1930s, just as mass tourism was beginning to take off, Travel and Dance [1] is called, it is still highly relevant almost 100 years later.
Amen! Travelling is just virtue signalling and social posturing. I've travelled the world, way too much for both business and "pleasure" and there's nothing new, no hidden insights, that I couldn't have gotten at home.
I advice all people I meet to stop travelling, and to spend more time with themselves and explore their inside, instead of being captivated by the outside, like a child by a new shiny toy.
The world would truly be a better place if that ever happened.
I think the jargon makes it seem scarier/less approachable than it is. There's tons of jargon in every new branch of anything interesting that you first notice, but it's not as impenetrable as it appears (at least for a high level understanding imo).
It's also odd that there seems to be a large overlap of autistic, disabled, queer or trans, anime fans with far left politics (add in the requisite bluesky/mastodon account). It doesn't necessarily mean anything - but that kind of union of disparate things always sets of some skepticism alarms for me around social contagion or general mental illness that makes me distrust the argument as presented, like there's some detail being left out in pursuit of some partisan goal.
I also just have an allergic reaction to people calling others *ist at this point too, espeically when trying to leverage some policy against them.
Mental illness is complicated and it can create real physiological symptoms. Someone with extreme anxiety will feel heart palpitations, fatigue, and a bunch of other symptoms despite the cause not being an actual underlying disease.
Is it always the case that there's no underlying disease? No, but is it often the case? Maybe?
Those that make it part of their identity and reinforce it make it worse.
I don't know what's going on here, but if I had to place a bet it's on the side of skepticism wrt 'long covid' in most cases.
I have two friends with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (aka chronic fatigue) at life-ruining levels, likely from the 2009 swine flu. To very mentally healthy women both before and after, and physically very healthy before.
As someone who has a chronic illness myself, I think it's absolutely important to consider anxiety as a potential source. I'd much prefer if meditation or therapy would fix my health issues rather than something more expensive/annoying/side-effecting.
My complaint is that "this is caused by anxiety" is treated as an assumption, rather than as a potential cause to be investigated. Moreover, I've seen doctors use anxiety as a way to write-off and dismiss a patient ("it's all in your head" shouldn't be dismissive; it's still something that needs to be treated).
Sometimes a doctor might say, "why don't you try exercising three times a week for three weeks and tell me if that makes a difference," to test if that makes a difference. But I've never heard a doctor say "try meditating every day and then we'll see if that will stop your fainting episodes."
All that is to say, I wish doctors viewed anxiety as a cause to be investigated, rather than a dead end that they can use to ignore a patient.
Yeah I generally agree with that. The anxiety example comes from personal experience for me where I thought I was having some medical problem which ended up ultimately being fairly extreme anxiety. Learning how to cope with that was a form of treatment the medical system is ill-equipped to handle, but in my case had I gone down the path of "this is definitely a non-anxiety related illness" I would have been much worse off.
It's still genuinely hard for me to personally tell the difference and sometimes I think something is anxiety when it ends up being an actual virus (or the opposite).
Yeah it's tricky; I imagine it's a mix of things going on. Suppose 80% of cases are fake. If we see that, and dismiss the whole thing as a result, that leaves the 20% of real cases ignored/dismissed. That could still be a lot of people who we are now wrongly telling it's all in their mind.
It says something that sony has the ability to fail like that and continue. Just like FB failed at the metaverse after doubling and tripling down about how it was the future of the company before it just kinda stopped talking about it.
Companies with this much cash can take risks and fail with little to no concequences, smaller companies cannot and thus often choose not compete or just HOPE that they get bought by one of these near monopolies.
Using caps doesn’t make this affirmation any more true.
While you’re correct that it does massively help, money is only a resource, which you can use to trade for a lot of things, but there are people, things and abstract concepts that money can’t buy.
Money buys recovery from failure, which is a double-edged sword. It doesn't buy the ability to learn the right lessons, and eventually the money teaches that failure doesn't really matter, because there's always another chance to get it right.
Which is why it is probably better to be just constrained enough financially that your first attempt really matters to your bottom line, but have enough to be able to pull it off.
Sure, but it's a factor and it's not like Snap is doing great otherwise.
Startups have less money, but invent new fields because of the differentiated advantage that comes from being smaller and faster (among other things). This is Snap competing in the same arena against Zuckerberg who is a lot better capitalized and better at it.
It'd be one thing to do if Snap was otherwise firing on all cylinders and trying to expand into the platform of the future, but it seems like they never recovered from Apple's ATT and are blowing money on passion projects that are not competitive.
What do I know? I'm just an outsider, but I'd buy Meta and sell Snap. If you disagree, the other direction is probably a lot more profitable if you're right.
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