Technical Support

[Tim2460]

Isn't that 5000 like here @icm?

[PeacefulAnarchy]

No, it's 10,000 on imdb.

[joachimt]

Thanks. Just put 10,000 urls in the list helper. Wonder how long it'll take. Roughly three hours at least.

[mightysparks]

When I put the 8000 TSZDT films into the list, it takes all day. I usually have to leave it overnight and it's still going by morning...

[joachimt]

It just did 350 movies in 15 minutes, so that will be 7 hours. We'll see.

[PeacefulAnarchy]

That seems rather slow. That's nearly 3 seconds per film and I'm pretty sure the default delay in the script is under 1 second (mine is 1 second but I'm pretty sure I raised it to avoid the "films getting swapped" bug).

That said, because of how messed up imdb's list page pagination is and how it loads stuff, you probably shouldn't put all the urls in at once. Do 1000, then reload the page and do the next batch, the more movies on the page the slower it goes because of the bloat.

[mightysparks]

Yeah I usually have to stop and redo it every now and then, and I find it can sometimes slow down or stop if I don't leave that tab open as well.

[joachimt]

When I look at the page going it seems to do one every 1.5 seconds, but then I do other stuff, also stream a movie, get back to the page later and it's just a few dozen titles further. It seems to slow down when there's more traffic. Ah well, I'll just leave it running. Almost three hours now and just over 3000/10000 done. I'll go away from my laptop now, so it might speed up now.

[Tim2460]

As i often create list on both IMDb and iCM, i create them en 4990 films packs.

The faster for the imdb list entry script is IMDB Urls or anything with the ttnumber on it ...

even a list of files if quite fast

14115.Pieniä.eroja.2002.tt0341522.mkv
etc etc

Took me an full day to recreate the 22k films lists on imdb/icm last time ;(

[joachimt]

I can start over. 9984 titles of 10000 ended up on the list. I'm going to do it in batched of 1000 now.

[xianjiro]

Just an FYI if anyone uses Handbrake for anything, the latest Win10 update bricked my Handbrake. So avoid it for a while.

Should still work on Linux. So if you desperately need it, you can install a Virtual Machine (I use Virtualbox from Oracle) and then run a Virtualbox installation of a Linux distribution and put Handbrake on that and do your work there.

Does VirtualBox have a hefty learning curve? I've been thinking about installing in on a Win10 box and then installing XP so I can play some of the games I miss. (Don't have a working XP machine any longer and not sure I can piece one together at this point, but then again, I only have a three monitors and use them for other things). The other reason for putting it on the Win10 box is it's my most powerful machine and could be helpful for the games though I'm not sure how that will all play out - the machine is x64 and clearly neither XP nor the games were written to take advantage of that but there's lots more memory and processing power. I'm just not eager to drop any more money on gaming and don't like the idea of having to connect to external servers to play (even in sandbox mode)

[PeacefulAnarchy]

Last time I ran a virtual box in win 10 it was super slow. But maybe I messed something up. I just wanted to do one small thing and wasn't worried about trying to fix anything.

[xianjiro]

Yeah, slowness (even on a more than reasonably powered box) is in the back of my mind and why I decided to ask about it. If it feels really laggy, then I'm better off coming up with another solution. I'm still reading about it - not really sure if I want to put forth the effort.

[Knaldskalle]

Just an FYI if anyone uses Handbrake for anything, the latest Win10 update bricked my Handbrake. So avoid it for a while.

Should still work on Linux. So if you desperately need it, you can install a Virtual Machine (I use Virtualbox from Oracle) and then run a Virtualbox installation of a Linux distribution and put Handbrake on that and do your work there.

Does VirtualBox have a hefty learning curve? I've been thinking about installing in on a Win10 box and then installing XP so I can play some of the games I miss. (Don't have a working XP machine any longer and not sure I can piece one together at this point, but then again, I only have a three monitors and use them for other things). The other reason for putting it on the Win10 box is it's my most powerful machine and could be helpful for the games though I'm not sure how that will all play out - the machine is x64 and clearly neither XP nor the games were written to take advantage of that but there's lots more memory and processing power. I'm just not eager to drop any more money on gaming and don't like the idea of having to connect to external servers to play (even in sandbox mode)

Slowness will probably be an issue, depending on just how many resources you decide to allocate to the VM and how many you have, but in terms of learning curve, it's relatively simple. You can install an OS 'instance' in fairly short order (there's a guided installation routine with mostly sensible presets) and then fire it up. Sometimes you need to fiddle with the available "inputs" to decide whether it goes to your host OS or the virtual machine (say you plug in a USB stick, does the VM get access or is it intended for your host OS?). You decide on how much CPU power and RAM you want to hand over to the VM, and that of course determines how 'snappy' it will be, the more the better. I'm not much of a gamer, but I know that most games top out at using 4 cores (since Intel decided that 4 cores were plenty for a decade) and about 8 gigs of RAM, so if you can allocate that to the VM you should be just fine.

You can also find guides on how to set up Virtualbox on youtube and elsewhere on the 'Net if you still want more info before diving in.

[xianjiro]

Thanks. In some ways, since I won't be doing anything other than playing the game, VirtualBox might not be the best solution. I need to look at a partition/dual-boot scenario as well. Hmmmmmmmmmmm. Well, this is too much to think about this week and I'm not going to be very good at making any decisions for a while.

[PeacefulAnarchy]

What game? Most games have at least one weirdo who has spent the requisite hours figuring out the best way to make it work and posted about it somewhere.

[xianjiro]

The two I'd like to be able play again are SimCity 4 (Rush Hour) and The Sims (original, since I already own it and all expansion packs). And yes, I've been down the hack road. Actually was able to get Civ IV to work even though there were plenty of posts to say it wouldn't, but I didn't have any luck with SC4 and since Sims is also their product and likely relies on the same DRM, didn't think it was worth the effort.

Might be easier to learn the tech behind the DRM than VirtualBox or dual-boot.

[PeacefulAnarchy]

I don't know about The Sims, but both CivIV and Sim City 4 should absolutely work in Win10.

Edit: Maybe not the disc versions, to be fair.

[xianjiro]

well, and that's the issue - if I wanted to repurchase STEAM or whatever enabled versions I would have zero issue with CivIV and SC4. I really thought I should be able to get SC4 to work and did exactly the same things I did with CivIV. Don't ever quote me, but my vague recollection is they both use the same DRM: if that's the case, then why shouldn't SC4 work? Anyway, point is, I've tried. (Just not with Sims since a full install is a lot more discs than SC4.)

I've thought about buying SC5, but the reviews are not good and this new Kindle-like DRM bugs the fuck out of me. I've looked around for open source versions, but no luck. (I play Minetest instead of Minecraft, for exactly this reason.)

[PeacefulAnarchy]

SC5 is a trashfire. The modern city sim that people like is Cities Skylines, it came out not too long after SC5 and stole all its thunder and users.

[xianjiro]

"trashfire" lol - probably the best single word I've seen to summarize the universal panning of SC5. I've looked at Cities Skylines and Cities in Motion as well.

[Knaldskalle]

GOG sells Sim City 4 Deluxe Edition (including Rush Hour) DRM-free and it should work on Win10:

https://www.gog.com/game/simcity_4_deluxe_edition

I'd wait for a sale, sign up for their newsletter and strike when the price is right.

[xianjiro]

that sounds like good advice - do you subscribe? Are they spammy or only occasional?

[PeacefulAnarchy]

They can be pretty spammy especially if you have a lot of stuff on your wishlist. If you only put one or two games on the wishlist and tell them to only email you about those then maybe not as spammy? Sim City was just on sale last week for $5. Before that was in May, and March before that.

[Knaldskalle]

Yeah, just add a couple of titles to your wishlist and you'll be fine. I get email from them every few weeks, mostly when they have a sale going on.

[xianjiro]

sounds cool - thanks for the tips!

[joachimt]

I got a few MTS-file, which I want to combine into one MKV. Unfortunately MKV Toolnix gives a broken file. I can start playing it, but I can't jump to another time. It simply breaks then. Any tips on other ways to combine them?

[weirdboy]

Thanks. In some ways, since I won't be doing anything other than playing the game, VirtualBox might not be the best solution. I need to look at a partition/dual-boot scenario as well. Hmmmmmmmmmmm. Well, this is too much to think about this week and I'm not going to be very good at making any decisions for a while.

I seem to recall there is a specific fork/project to make a virtual machine specifically for playing classic games that handles most of that stuff very well. I used to have it bookmarked but that was 3 laptops ago and I cannot find it now.

[PeacefulAnarchy]

Considering the issue was the DRM and not the actual game code I'm not sure if a virtual machine would have worked.

[xianjiro]

and for now, GOG should keep me busy enough, but I really appreciate the help!

[brokenface]

Twitter definitely in need of some tech support. Major hack going on, of numerous highly followed accounts, Obama, Bill Gates, Kanye West etc

[xianjiro]

Twitter definitely in need of some tech support. Major hack going on, of numerous highly followed accounts, Obama, Bill Gates, Kanye West etc

how so? BLM posts? edit: think I'm finding it - "Kanye west, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Elon Musk Twitter accounts got hacked and this guys have made over 10M dollars This will go down as the biggest heist on Twitter"

that whatcha mean? - never mind Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Apple, and others hacked in unprecedented Twitter attack = The scams appear to be part of a widespread hacking operation affecting multiple accounts

[weirdboy]

I cannot believe there are actually people in the world dumb enough to send BTC to someone based on that stupid message.

[brokenface]

I cannot believe there are actually people in the world dumb enough to send BTC to someone based on that stupid message.

Donald Trump is US President. I can believe.

[xianjiro]

Isn't there a line in some movie where someone says ecstatically, "I believe!" IDK, might have had ghosts or something in it.

[mightysparks]

Is VirtualBox the go-to for playing Windows 98 games or is there another option? I downloaded Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego but it won't even let me install it I'm pretty sure it worked on Win 8 or XP. I tried changing compatibility but it still just gave me 'This app can't run on your PC'.

[mjf314]

Is VirtualBox the go-to for playing Windows 98 games or is there another option? I downloaded Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego but it won't even let me install it I'm pretty sure it worked on Win 8 or XP. I tried changing compatibility but it still just gave me 'This app can't run on your PC'.

I remember playing that game a long time ago. I think it was the mid-90s when I played it.

[mightysparks]

Yeah I played the 1999 version when I was at school in 2000/2001. My computer teacher burnt me a copy because I loved it so much but doesn’t seem to work anymore. I didn’t like any other versions of the game.

[mjf314]

I played the 1985 version. I liked it, but it was a long time ago, so I don't know if the current me would like it. I don't think I ever tried any other versions.

Edit: I made a mistake, actually I played the 1991 version. Here's a video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dL-13NZAXuE

[Tim2460]

https://archive.org/search.php?query=Wh ... s%20carmen