I’d spend a lot more money on TV and movies if I could get them without DRM and in high quality. No question. Both in streaming and in disc form.
I’d spend a lot more money on TV and movies if I could get them without DRM and in high quality. No question. Both in streaming and in disc form.
There are some free, open-source command line tools that can do this.
First off, there’s exiftool. It’s the go-to utility to read and write metadata in a wide variety of file types, like mp3, jpg, and you guessed it, pdf. It’s very easy to use:
To read all the metadata in a file: exiftool -a -All <file>
(where <file> is the path to your pdf).
To erase all the metadata in a file: exiftool -a -All="" <file>
(that’s two double-quotes, to indicate a blank string). Please note that this will overwrite your file in-place! If you want to save the output as a new file, use exiftool -a -All="" -o <output_file> <file>
.
exiftool is likely all you need for your use case, but if you need more advanced PDF manipulation, with a truly dizzying array of options, there’s Ghostscript. Ghostscript can read, write, and convert PDFs, and provides hooks to apply any PostScript commands and options.
To simply print out information on a PDF file: gs -dPDFINFO -dBATCH <file>
. This will show you the metadata, such as author, title, etc.
I’m…not going to give you an example of how to use Ghostscript to edit metadata because I’m not confident I’d get it right. The gist is that you use PostScript commands with the -c flag. It is truly arcane but extraordinarily powerful.
If you’re on Linux, you can likely get both of these with your distro’s default package manager. On Mac, use Homebrew or MacPorts. On Windows, you can download prebuilt binaries from their web sites. I think you can even run them on Android using Tmux Termux.
I just see pirating software as supporting a company I hate instead of supporting an open source project I like
Yes!
Adobe owes a huge part of their success to piracy. It made it impossible for smaller companies to get a foothold back in the 90s because everyone just pirated Photoshop. It never would have become so entrenched (or grown so exploitative in licensing) if people had instead used cheaper/free alternatives.
I’ve heard many of the Nvidia/Wayland issues have been resolved. I personally can’t use it because I’m running an LTS distro with too many old packages. e.g. mpv does support Wayland now, but my distro is stuck on 0.34 and you need 0.35+ if you run Wayland.
I’m planning to hop distros again because of this.
Isn’t that just asking for trouble? From the Real-Debrid TOS:
The User acknowledges not to use our service to download copyright infringement digital files punishable by a suspension of his account and reporting to competent organizations and authorities
Logging policy is not great:
Files links that Users download are stored in a database for legal concerns and our internal use. All saved links are erased within 1 month for security reasons and service needs. However all requests made on our site are stored for 1 year, the legal retention period.
Doesn’t look like you can sign up anonymously (unless you consider bitcoin and email anonymous, which they’re generally not).
How long until they get raided?
Same. The day games start introducing arbitrary resolution limits based on my OS or browser choice, the way streaming sites do, is the day I’ll start pirating games.
Piracy, for me, is a matter of functionality, not price.
I bought more CDs while Napster was in its heyday than the entire rest of my life combined.
AFAIK there’s still no way to dynamically link to posts or comments on Lemmy. :( You can only link communities or users.
Anyway, totally agree. Being technically able to bypass DRM doesn’t make it okay. I’m honestly not sure how to rip a Blu-ray on Linux anyway. I haven’t looked into it in years so maybe it’s easier now than I remember.