Hacker News: neckro23

New comment by neckro23 in "JPEG Compression"

neckro23 — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:53:20 +0000

Pretty much all dramatic American TV shows were shot on film (at 24 fps) before the digital camera era. It's why so many old shows (ex. Star Trek TNG) are now available as HD remasters, they simply go back and rescan the film.

It's more complicated in other countries (the BBC liked to shoot on video a lot) but it was standard practice in the States.

New comment by neckro23 in "The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform"

neckro23 — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 16:39:22 +0000

Sure it is. Smart watches even do it using the simplest possible “camera” (an LED).

New comment by neckro23 in "All Delisted Steam Games"

neckro23 — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 03:41:50 +0000

At least for the PC versions of Vice City and San Andreas, the originals are missing the music too. A bunch of licenses expired 10 years after release and the Steam releases got updated accordingly.

New comment by neckro23 in "Winamp clone in Swift for macOS"

neckro23 — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 03:41:52 +0000

Milkdrop and Project M are both available as vis plugins for Foobar2k, on Windows at least: https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_vis_milk2

New comment by neckro23 in "Mac Source Ports – Run old games on new Macs"

neckro23 — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 17:16:21 +0000

Also one of the first DOS games that had Amiga-module-style music (mixed samples) instead of Adlib or MIDI. This later evolved into the UMX system used in Unreal and Deus Ex.

New comment by neckro23 in "iPad Pro with M5 chip"

neckro23 — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 17:00:24 +0000

Psst, you can get uBlock Origin (lite) for Safari now. Works pretty well.

New comment by neckro23 in "Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music"

neckro23 — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 03:59:26 +0000

Soulseek is still around (somehow) and thriving. Of course on there, discovery is more or less "check out the library of this person who had something you were looking for".

New comment by neckro23 in "My Deus Ex lipsyncing fix mod"

neckro23 — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 20:10:21 +0000

The GEP gun is ironically the pro choice to make if you know what you’re doing. All of the other weapons on offer can be found in the first level, and the GEP works as a fantastic “lockpick” even if you never fire it in anger.

New comment by neckro23 in "All clickwheel iPod games have now been preserved for posterity"

neckro23 — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 15:43:32 +0000

Original iPods (and early iPhones) weren’t locked down as much. There were a number of utils that could manage your library. ml_ipod plugin for WinAmp comes to mind.

New comment by neckro23 in "Seedbox Lite: A lightweight torrent streaming app with instant playback"

neckro23 — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 19:17:09 +0000

Outside of a private tracker (which takes measures to keep random untracked peers from getting on the torrent), not really. Individual seeder clients can detect bad behavior like leeching and ban by IP, but each torrent is likely to have a different seeding pool.

So the penalty is mostly just on individual torrents. Of course, trying to pull something like this on a private tracker would get you banned real fast...

New comment by neckro23 in "FFmpeg 8.0"

neckro23 — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 16:05:55 +0000

Not necessarily. A lot of video software either leverages the Windows/MacOS system codecs (ex. Media Player Classic, Quicktime) or proprietary vendor codecs (Adobe/Blackmagic).

Linux doesn't really have a system codec API though so any Linux video software you see (ex. VLC, Handbrake) is almost certainly using ffmpeg under the hood (or its foundation, libavcodec).

New comment by neckro23 in "FFmpeg 8.0 adds Whisper support"

neckro23 — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 15:53:57 +0000

In my experience it works ok. The "English" model actually knows a lot of languages and will translate directly to English.

You can also transcribe it to Japanese and use a translator to convert to English. This can sometimes help for more semantically complex dialogue.

For example, using faster-whisper-xxl [1]:

Direct translation:

    faster-whisper-xxl.exe --language English --model large-v2 --ff_vocal_extract mdx_kim2 --vad_method pyannote_v3 --standard

Use Japanese, then translate:

    faster-whisper-xxl.exe --language Japanese --task translate --model large-v2 --ff_vocal_extract mdx_kim2 --vad_method pyannote_v3 --standard

1. https://github.com/Purfview/whisper-standalone-win

New comment by neckro23 in "FFmpeg 8.0 adds Whisper support"

neckro23 — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 15:43:30 +0000

Pre-processing with a vocal extraction model (bs-rofomer or similar) helps a lot with the hallucinations, especially with poor quality sources.

New comment by neckro23 in "Show HN: Modernized file manager and program manager from Windows 3.x"

neckro23 — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 19:27:50 +0000

The Vista-style minimize/maximize icons on the inner windows look way out of place, and the style changes entirely when I maximize. Can't seem to minimize a window either.

Windows 10 is applying smooth scrolling to the windows, which I can disable in Performance Options but you might want to override the setting. Waiting for the scrolling to catch up is pretty at odds with the "fast, lightweight" aesthetic you're going for.

New comment by neckro23 in "LaborBerlin: State-of-the-Art 16mm Projector"

neckro23 — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 00:51:45 +0000

Silent films used several different speeds. The rest are for telecines.

New comment by neckro23 in "Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers"

neckro23 — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 19:56:13 +0000

No tracker necessary, you can just use DHT: https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/

New comment by neckro23 in "How to (actually) send DTMF on Android without being the default call app"

neckro23 — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 20:49:03 +0000

You could do this with any terminal program. Your modem won't emit any noise until it hears a carrier tone, so you could just dial, pick up the extension, hang up the modem.

New comment by neckro23 in "Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful"

neckro23 — Sat, 17 May 2025 19:15:16 +0000

Android is overwhelmingly preferred by working-class people, in my experience. The phones are simply cheaper.

New comment by neckro23 in "Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative"

neckro23 — Tue, 06 May 2025 22:34:24 +0000

It would take a ton of work, especially for a show as long-running as The Simpsons. The original materials probably aren't even available anymore.

I believe the reason they were able to remaster lots of old Japanese anime OVAs in HD is because the animation was recorded to film first. I wouldn't be surprised if the Simpsons just used videotape instead.

New comment by neckro23 in "The movie mistake mystery from "Revenge of the Sith""

neckro23 — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 19:29:00 +0000

It's a travesty. I was sourcing video for an Alien/Aliens watch party (for a couple of adolescents who had never seen either) and I had to hunt down a copy of the older HD Bluray of Aliens because the 4k remaster looked so awful.

(By contrast, the 4k of Alien looks fantastic.)