There are plenty of projects that take donations/payments that don’t make profit but stay afloat, normally through the team behind it paying the bills. I guess it depends what the running costs actually are, and if it’s for people or e.g. servers.
Handbrake isn’t recommended any more? That’s what I’d used for my ripping. By original quality, you mean extracting the the mpeg-2 or just that Handbrake did bad transcoding?
It could be that it’s more normalised, or that post-Covid people don’t want to share public transport as much.
Whatever the reason, it’s good news as the more cyclists there are, the more that planners will have to take them into account - making it easier for more to become cyclists. Let’s just hope the momentum continues to fuel this virtuous cycle.
I don’t think you read the article. The data shows that walking and cycling went up massively, as well as increasing public transport use. This is good, and the article as a whole politely makes points compatible with this comm.
Definitely, unless the original source was very inefficiently compressed, it’s not worth the time, effort and quality loss to save a small amount of space.