I posted this in the Anime thread, but figured I'd make a thread just for this.
Let's talk about quality.
A lot of people are probably going to be downloading poor quality stuff. If you're downloading TV shows try to find WEB.DL torrents because they don't have logos/watermarks in the video (you know, the Fox or A&E logo in the bottom right corner). If you're downloading Anime choose good quality fansub groups, try to find fansubs that include both English and Japanese subtitles. If the anime has been dubbed try to find a Dual Audio version. If vp9 or h265 is available go for that, it has almost half the file size for the same quality as vp8/h264. If all you're about to download Xvid don't. Try to look for vp8/h264. If the files are .mp4 try to find .mkv instead. If you're downloading music try to find FLAC files. You can always convert them to mp3, ogg, or vorbis later. If you download things via torrent then include the .torrent file or the magnet link in a textfile in the root directory of the Download so people can verify the files themselves if they're unsure. If people rename files we should come up with a way to preserve the original filenames in a text file or something so if someone has a corrupt file they can search for it online and fix the corrupt file.
We should also have everyone create checksums of their files so we can make sure they aren't corrupt.
What happens when the people responsible for archiving TV show X or Movie Y is never heard from again or their hard drive dies and they weren't keeping proper backups or if they have defective memory or a defective hard drive and are uploading things with defective frames or corrupt subtitles or whatever?
How do we deal with malicious files? There's surely doing to be some autist uploading infected PDFs or a PNG that exploits the libpng bug.
When people archive dank memes how do make sure people have the original, not some that was uploaded to 9gag or has a memegenerator watermark or god forbid a thumbnail? What happens when people convert lossless pngs into jpgs and the image has artifacts? What do you guys think about converting everything into webp (much better compression than png, jpg, gif and lossless)? If we have someone good with bash maybe we can get someone to write a script that does a reverse image search of all their images and downloads the highest quality, watermark free version?
A lot of things may disappear and we may only have one chance, lets do this right.
Anyways, everyone give suggestions, then we can make a comprehensive guide on how to find the best quality files, how to organize them, how to automatically hash files for data integrity, all that stuff.