Video Transcoding VS CyberChef

I use this project by Don Melton to get a Blu-ray video down to an 8 - 10 GB file size: https://github.com/donmelton/video_transcoding

It uses HandBrake, FFmpeg, MKVToolNix, and MP4v2 with some custom tuned settings and has really good results from my experience.

I have primarily used Plex and pretty much everything you said is accurate for Plex as well. Limited transcoding based on the machine it is running on. As disc has become cheaper, I have pretty much stopped doing batch transcodes, which is great for the most part. But there are definitely negatives when you want to watch something offline, or remotely. Biggest pain point is subtitles though. Since they aren't ripped as text and then sent to a client, they have to be burned in to the video itself and transcoded on the fly. Which means losing out on 'forced' ones if it can't transcode fast enough.

Plex has definitely started to try and commercialize itself more and offer other stuff, when all I want is access to my own media. So I may look into Jellyfin more soon.

As for batch transcode jobs, I had a system that I was able to set up as essentially a black box. Drop a rip into a folder and out the other side comes a smaller one at a reasonable quality. With forced subs burned right into the actual video. Mostly based on https://github.com/donmelton/video_transcoding

I use Don Melton’s tools to transcode videos to mp4 files. His tools makes use of Handbrake but he has it tuned to produce very small video files of very high quality. You are unlikely to notice the difference when watching the videos.

Checkout https://github.com/donmelton/video_transcoding. In my experience produces higher quality and smaller files than handbrake alone.

When I was ripping my disc collection, I used Don Melton’s library. Don originally started the Safari and Webkit project at Apple but after he retired, he spent some significant time trying to create an easy way of compressing video but resting quality. Great collection of tools in my opinion that leverage handbrake for encoding. Good luck!

Check out https://github.com/donmelton/video_transcoding

I've been using Don Melton's Video Transcoding tool for my whole library. I upgraded my NAS to a Synology DS1019+ a few months ago, so now I have the space to store the untranscoded MakeMKV files. I've had issues with playback in my system, so I don't mind manually transcoding.

Check out https://github.com/donmelton/video_transcoding – I use it to turn raw Blu-ray tips from 30+ gigs down to 5-7 with no noticeable loss of quality.

Then we take the encrypted text and use CyberChef to decrypt it.

Let's go to CyberChef and insert our pieces of evidence.

A parameter was changed from '2AMBCgIQBg' to 'CgIIAdgDAQ%3D%3D' which is just the correct base64 encoding they should have been using the entire time.

I don't think this was a hostile action by Google, I think someone just added better input validation for security reasons and it accidently broke the bad requests they were sending.

https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/#recipe=URL_Decode()From_Ba...

❗This is indeed the flag, but the text is encrypted with Base64. Usually, the presence of padding character "=" indicates that's Base64 type of encoding (but that's only one of the hints). To decrypt it, we can use CyberChef. Copy-paste the text and we either:

It uses a combination of magic bytes (like the `file` command), entropy analysis and character frequency detection to determine whether an output is likely to be of interest to the user.

The file type mechanism is written here[0]. There's a list of all signatures we detect here[1].

[0] https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef/blob/master/src/core/lib/F...

I think this can be deciphered using CyberChef...