It’s a shame the UK’s Competitive Markets Authority let this merger go through after all. I can’t wait for the future, when 90% of the most popular games are made by 3 companies
It’s not so simple, unfortunately. The sheer amount of data they have - 212 PB as of December 2021 - makes it practically impossible for most people to mirror. Unless they physically hand over all 745 server nodes to another operator, there’s no way of someone
There are some solutions to this - for example Archive-Team has proposed a method of mirroring the Internet Archive using distributed clients, although this method currently only has a fraction of the total dataset. Still, at this point in time, there’s no real solution to resharing IA’s data in the event they go under
That only helps for shadow libraries whose operators are unknown. The Internet Archive, on the other hand, is a registered non-profit organisation, so how would they be able to hide themselves?
Didn’t know that YouTube had 160kbps audio… I checked a auto-generated upload on yt-dlp, and while it had an Opus stream, all of the audio streams were encoded at 128kbps.
Both Opus and properly-encoded AAC audio should be virtually indistinguishable from the original source, but I do believe that Opus performs slightly worse in blind ABX testing. Again, you’d barely be able to tell the difference, so sound quality is basically the same.
(As for encoding, I believe that YouTube uses the source audio if it’s already encoded as AAC, which most video editors do by default, and music distributors send the same lossless source to YouTube as they do to Spotify, so I don’t think re-encoding will make a difference)
YouTube’s sound quality is comparable to Spotify’s - IIRC it’s 128kbps AAC versus 160kbps MP3. Also, a static video’s bitrate is around 300-400kbps, so you’re not wasting that much bandwidth
It’s pretty decent if you liked Bethesda’s other AAA games. I was actually surprised that there was even some amount of spaceship piloting at all - I just assumed it would be 100% fast travel.
However, the game runs like dogshit - even on my decently mid-range system, it takes 15-30 seconds of loading between menus, and I swear I spent half the time I played waiting for the game to load. I assume that this is meant to take advantage of the Xbox and PS5’s faster memory and DirectStorage, but on PC it’s borderline unplayable
Sure, the Steam Deck is cool, but a Series S can actually be bought in most of the world. Last I checked, Valve only sells it in less than 20 countries
The images are too compressed, so I can’t really make out what they say. I’m guessing that EA finally updated their outdated Denuvo implementation, making it much tougher to crack now
Personally, I think that the Denuvo protection on Switch games would probably be a simpler system than the full-fat PC DRM. It would probably be too intense for the Switch’s meagre processing power, and customers are definitely going to be annoyed when their game takes a minute or two to load up.
Could it pave the way for that crap on other consoles as well?
At this moment, the only current-gen console to be jailbroken is the Nintendo Switch. There’s no need for external DRM on the PS5 and Xbox because publishers can trust that users will only be able to play legit copies of games. Switch games, on the other hand, don’t have that guarantee, because dumping games on a jailbroken switch is very easy to do. Hence why Irdeto is planning to offer DRM for the Switch only.
Interestingly, this isn’t the first time that third-party DRM was used on a Nintendo console. Some DS and Wii games were protected by an anti-piracy system called MetaFortress, which aimed to protect against flashcarts and pirated copies. Here’s a video from the Dolphin emulator team about its use in the all-time classic, “The Smurfs: Dance Party”
It might be that more Mac users are moving away from Steam as their gaming client - from my experience, it’s very glitchy, and hasn’t been properly updated in years