And its our fault too. Its easy to see shareholders as rich fatcats telling the CEO to "Put MTX in it and make it slow and grindy!", but if any of us have IRAs or retirement accounts, we are the shareholders too. We want the nest egg we set aside to grow, and that leads to the same problem.

At first when I saw the title, I thought this was done to stop people who VPN swap stores. The article however paints a different picture: Developers do not want Lira or Pesos since they are too unstable. Doesn't make sense to price a game at X Argentine Peso if next month X is now 30% less valuable. If you have too much inflation, no one wants your currency. Even the Argentine government or presidential candidates said something along the lines of wanting to swap to the USD too.

I do a lot of AI upscaling, specifically 1080p to 2160p with Topaz VEAI, and its quite good. That said, it isn't magic. It requires a really good source before hand (avoid anything with film grain or has been compressed) and you do not want to make a giant leap. The key idea is the more you tell the AI to fill in the gaps, the more you will get AI shenanigans. If you have a good clean BR rip, then the AI can bring it up to 4k quite easily.

what is the definitive best way to upscale to 1080p in 2023?

1080p to 4k is quite easy, but getting something to 1080p is massive mountain to overcome. Like I said above, you want to leave as little to the AI as possible. Bringing something sub-HD to HD means entrusting the AI with a lot since there isn't much detail to begin with. My best efforts have been 720p-1080p upscales, but I have had some good results with upscaling the 1990s Sabrina live action series and off the top of my head that is 480p. If you look really hard on those upscales, you can see some strangeness like how words in the back ground are just gibberish or maybe a hand doesn't move exactly right, but it is a vast upgrade over the terrible DvD release with its low resolution and interlacing.

If you are going to upscale, I recommend Topaz VEAI. Its really easy to learn (I went from having no video editing experience to being able to do some competent upscales in three months), its a lifetime license with a year of upgrades, and frankly its the best on the market. The only drawback is like any AI, you need a hefty rig. I am rocking a 3080ti, i9 processor, and 128gb of RAM. Its also very time consuming. My hefty rig can do the upscaling part in about 45 minutes, but even taking the mild tweaking in DaVinci out of the equation, encoding that same episode is going to take a good 11 hours unless you want a 200gb episode on your Hard Drive. (Please do not trust Topaz to encode for you, its a good upscaler but its better to let Handbrake do your encodes). Throw in the deinterlacing I do before I even run it through Topaz, and it can take me 24 hours of work spread out over a week to get an episode done.

If you have any specific questions, I will be happy to answer them.

I wonder if AI could do a number on those watermarks. Have a program like Topaz upscale it a bit and add some noise and grain. That should be enough to destroy however they identify it visually.

The NFT is not an image. The NFT is the token on the block chain. You can copy an image all you want, but thats not pirating an NFT. NFTs are inherently unpirateable.

Thank you very much! That is what I will do then.

Yes, I was able to open it in Notepad++. Its XML like you said. Its big at over 2500 lines.

Plenty of people have unprotected sex. That doesn't stop a portion from getting AIDs. I can give you plenty of stories of people downloading a hot (monitored) torrent and then paying thousands of dollars in legal fees after ignoring the notice.

Get a VPN, or a Debrid service if you are strapped for cash. Why roll the dice when you don't have to?

People only reading the headlines? That is the real typical Redditor BS here.

GoT never captured me past the first few episodes. What was bad about the ending?

Still sucks when the game you want has it and you have to try and find a inferior way to scratch the itch with a different game. As a paying customer for 100% of my library, you guys get the better edition. It may still have Denuvo on it, but at least you didn't pay for it.

The Italians are doing a 1,2 punch. Punch 1 is the DNS blocking. Punch 2 is having the ISP also block. So if you are an Italian using an Italian internet provider, you won't be able to connect to the website.