I took a quick look at your website. The projects look really interesting. But just fyi, you might consider putting the website description text through an English grammar checker.

Both devices made ping attempts. Not hard to confirm with firewall logs bc of timestamps and internal IP addresses.

Physical disc in a cd/dvd/bluray drive

A 1080p player does not require internet connectivity but 4K/UHD discs need to phone home in order to get decryption keys on a per disc basis. There is a lot of discussion about this in the MakeMKV forums if you want to do a deeper dive.

It does but I use makemkv for the Blu-ray decryption

MakeMKV handles my Blu-ray decryption for VLC

It tried to. I use an opnsense firewall which caught it. I copied my logs and submitted the domains to a popular dns blocklist and they’ve already been merged.

Gran Turismo

I’m all good. I really wasn’t asking for tech support. Just sharing something with the community. Don’t worry, Sony didn’t get my data.

Thanks for the helpful thoughts though.

VLC on a Linux laptop. You think my Blu-ray player has the ability to take screenshots?

This is really neat!

I wonder if SELinux is the culprit here. Bazzite is based on Fedora, right (like Nobara)?

It’s not a secret. They’re all on the Awesome Piracy Github page. The abbreviations are in parentheses next to the actual name.

Edit: for some reason you aren’t brought to the linked part of the page. Press enter again after the page is loaded and it should take you to the “Private Trackers” section.

You can go for the interviews at MAM, OPS or RED. They can give out invites for free. I don’t know of any other free way. If you’re willing to shell out some $$ you can buy a seed box through TorrentLeech.