Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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It's a way bigger pain in the ass than people think it is. I remember having to parse output from a tool for work that had tons of output in tabular format, mixed with normal sentence like strings. JSON, YAML, or XML outputs weren't available so I had to do a nasty mess of grep, awk, cut, and head/tail, to get what I wanted. My first attempt was literally counting the characters so I could cut out exactly what I needed, but as we all know, hardcoding values is a recipe for headaches later on.

“\ “ and [tab] and * are your friends. I’ve been using spaces in Unix filesystems since the early 90s with no issues. Also, using terminal fonts that•put•a•faint•dot•in•each•space•character helps.

Yeah I was gonna say this is something anyone in tech knows, spaces are a plague

I.too.prefer.dots.over.spaces.

Look up SMDB (smoke monster's database). You can download a tool (I forget what it's actually called, I think one is called ROM manager) which reads the SMDB files and compares the hashes to your ROMs and will categorize and rename them for you. It looks for duplicates, unofficial releases/hacks/patches, categorizes them by country (US, EU and Japan largely), and more. It's a pretty nifty tool.

I spent like two hours going through PS1 ROMs and was like "there's got to be a better way!" (insert cheesy black and white infomerical cutaway), started looking up stuff and there it was. Not all game systems are supported (mostly NES, SNES, Genesis/MegaDrive, and a few others) but you can build SMDB "packs" yourself.

I forget if it works on Windows, but I know it works on Linux and it's either a script or a compiled binary, I forget which, but you can definitely script it, I've done so myself since the command string tends to be a bit long.

I think your workflow is not optimal. Are you using software like Radarr and Sonarr? They do the renaming for you and come with Kodi integration. Or is this not feasible?

I've always liked underscores better because it differentiates from the file extension. It just makes sense. Except it is a wider character, so it'd be longer.

You should know that in most filesystems that are not NTFS, spaces in file names are not well supported.

“Titles”? It’s not a title, it’s a file name that contains a lot of details about the rip. In the post’s example it tells you that it’s the movie Split, ripped from blu ray, in 1080p, with audio tracks in Italian and English, and encoded in x265. You probably would hate a lot more not being able to tell the difference between split.mp4 recorded on my cellphone in the movie theater and split.mp4 in ultra hd 4k ripped straight from Netflix.

It's legacy, white spaces weren't allowed as characters on most FTP software, which is how the warez scene shares it's releases. It used to be underscores, but dots are closer to a white space regarding separation (space wise), so most release groups use dots nowadays.

Generally, a white space as a character in filenames and directories is "frowned upon" in many operating systems, Windows included (somewhat). It makes writing scripts and software more comlicated because it's used as as a separator for giving command line/terminal options to commands and binaries (programs).

Spaces are a headache whenever you're not using a graphical interface.