It depends. If you’re using a laptop and say you take it to university or work then you’re not on your LAN. You’re on someone else’s LAN and they may have no interest in trying to stop these types of attacks via any kind of client isolation or it may be incomplete.

I can imagine it’s a very normal scenario for university students to have CUPS running and available on all networks as they may need to print at their university.

What are you average file sizes for movies and series?

Movies? 4-8GB for most 60-120 minute features. TV shows. For live action 800MB/episode, 500MB/ episode for animation. For hour long stuff probably 1.2-1.6GB/episode.

What would you do? what’s your target size for movies and series? What bitrate do you go for in which codec?

HEVC 10 bit. I target in the 7000-9000kbps bitrate range generally. For animation that can be as low as 3000-5000kbps. Sometimes a bit higher for very grainy old films, occasionally a little lower for grain less modern digital camera work that hasn’t had digital grain added.

If you want to maximize space savings without losing quality you have to understand what needs more bitrate and what can do with less. Across the board you could do something like CRF 20 but you’d have outliers where you don’t get enough bitrate and those where you still end up with rates of 14,000kbps.

The above is for 1080p content.

If you can stand HD video content at 2-3000kbps more power to you but on a large TV I can tell. I think even being reckless and not caring about future-proofing less than 6000kbps is a bad idea for anything but TV shows. Even those I think outside animation you want minimum 2000kbps for 1080p.

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.

Most useful unique website thing rarbg had by far was full mediainfo listing for every single upload on site. You could immediately tell what you were getting and even dead torrents became useful by virtue of retaining chapter data that could be applied to another release.

Also, call me skeptical but IMO without access to scene FTP’s or week-1 access to (and automation on a large scale of re-uploading from) cabal trackers like BTN to get the good content from your site frankly risks ending up just another mirror among many others like lime torrents for existing public net and low hanging private tracker fruit. (If you have mediainfo for all files that adds a lot of value though)

IMO the real need left by rarbg is not for more re-hosting of content many others have but for publishing web-dl’s others don’t have, not of just new series (which everyone does as ep’s drop) but older movies and older series without other good 1080p or 4k releases available. Even today I see many old TV series the only HD releases available are old rarbg packs and this includes across multiple of the biggest PT’s.

Of course I wish anyone willing to run a big general tracker luck (assuming they’re honest and intent isn’t to distribute malware ofc).

Looking up technical specs for the drive it’s often mentioned on data sheets (often as conventional magnetic recording drive or else shingled if SMR). Other than that third parties have compiled lists and many but not all Amazon pages in tech specs mention it if you look closely. Try searching drive-model and cmr and then smr and see what comes up. Beware some drive families different sizes of drive may be cmr vs smr. WD red pro and ultra star DC line are all CMR, WD blues many are SMR. WD black as far as I know are all CMR. WD red (non-pro) can be SMR I believe.

I’ll be honest, the real difference is getting a 7200 vs 5400 RPM drive, particularly one with a larger cache, I’d always go for 7200 except for purely offline backup stuff.

In terms of external drives and shucking, it’s largely a crapshoot. You can try searching what drives others found in a model, however they’re subject to change.

Bottom line: If money is tight and it’s just you, you can absolutely do SMR and 5400 RPM external drives and have a smooth experience as long as we’re talking re-encodes not raw Blu-ray remuxes (I have seen an external 5400RPM SMR drive choke and fail trying to smoothly play a file at 24MB/s bitrate but it worked fine with 10MB/s re-encodes, even those with burst rates of 17MB/s). If you can afford a bit more try to go 7200 and CMR.

https://diskprices.com/

Beware MDD at the top is alleged to sell drives they’ve refurbished which are essentially used but with wiped smart. Other cheap deals… check sellers. If it’s not sold and shipped by Amazon it could be slightly used drives (usually third party sellers do a mix so some people get brand new, others not so much). Also beware third party sellers and Amazon itself often sell OEM drives without warranty. I always check the serials online before opening the anti-static bag to make sure it’s in warranty.

Also: shucks.top

You need to wait and watch for the good deals but they come around multiple times a year.

Also, understand there are certain storage ranges to get these prices. Generally 8-18TB drives are best deals per TB. You pay a premium for 20-22 top size drives as well as for smaller drives like 2-4TB. 14TB seems to be the current sweet spot most of the time.

Lastly. Understand SMR drives are alright for backups but not ideal for streaming high bitrate content from or using to seed files. CMR is better.

OP said money was tight.

And why pay more for less? Over the purchase of 3 hard drives I save enough to get a fourth “free” off the difference in savings.

$4x14tb=$56 for example.

But please. Continue to pay whatever you want. More cheap drives for me.

$20/TB is a bad deal.

You can get WD Red Pro’s on sale twice a year for $16/TB.

Further you can order unused data center and enterprise drives for anything from $11-$16/TB and those things are built to take way more use and abuse than home users can throw at them.

I would not pay above $17/TB for traditional magnetic spinning disk storage.