Of the former Labour voters who switched to centrist or left-wing parties, 53% cited the PLP’s stance on Palestine as a factor. Likewise, a massive 74% said that their:
opinion of Labour would improve if the next leader were to adopt a strong position on Palestine, such as imposing sanctions on Israel.
However, Burnham has also been a member of the Labour Friends of Israel since 2015
In July 2025, he issued a plea for Mancunians to donate to UKMed, a charity supporting medical access in Gaza. In a video address, he described the suffering of Palestinians as “beyond words”
In a 4 June Guardian interview, Burnham specifically declined to describe Israel’s actions as genocidal:
I can’t judge things of that enormity from where I am as mayor of Greater Manchester. But I do have concerns about the disproportionate nature of what has happened in terms of the destruction, and there has to be a full process of investigation and accountability.
Likewise, when the Palestine Solidarity Campaign asked the Makerfield candidates what they would do to “uphold the rights of Palestinian people”, Burnham stayed silent. Meanwhile, his Green Party counterpart, Sarah Wakefield, was quick to respond
If you thought it would stop at children, you're wrong. It's about eradicating trans people. They're just doing it one step at a time.
Do not give one inch.
If it's anything like all the previous stuff she's pushed, this should be categorically refused.
I would say I hope Andy Burham fires her, but he's indicated he wants more restrictive immigration measures.
If you don't want "small boats", illegal entry, and deaths crossing the border then make it easier to enter. This xenophobia serves no one.
This is very much echoing what happened with Palestine Action in the UK.
Absolutely insane behaviour.
Ali said: "Pro-Israeli lobby groups have paid hundreds of thousands in political donations in the UK. The amount of evidence, which I will refrain from sharing due to limited time, is countless."
He cited a 2024 report by Declassified UK that "13 of the then 25 members of the Labour Cabinet received hundreds of thousands in donations from pro-Israel donors, and that some 180 of Britain’s 650 MPs had accepted such funding during their political careers.
"That is one in four elected members."
As for the Israel shills, I thank them for exposing themselves.
MP Peter Prinsley, who was earlier this year found in breach of parliamentary rules for failing to declare a trip to Israel funded by Labour Friends of Israel.
He said: "Shame on those who have orchestrated this regurgitation of antisemitic tropes. It is ancient just as it is predictable."
Tory MP John Lamont said: "For centuries, at the heart of antisemitism has been the claim that Jews exercise secret control over governments...
Lamont has visited Israel with CFI in the past, including last year.
[Mitchell] said: "I fear the whole thing smacks of an antisemitic conspiracy theory."
Mitchell visited Israel in May 2025 on a trip funded by the lobby group Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI).
[Frith] added: "The UK and Israel have a deep and enduring relationship. Seventy-six years ago, we were rightly proud to recognise the state of Israel. Our commitment to the security of it and its people remains unwavering."
Frith is a member of the lobby group Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) and has been on trips to Israel organised by the group.
He's cute and playful. If everyone is playing cards at the table he'll jump up to get involved.
Always watching.
Majestic
Transcription:
COUNTRIES THAT BAN OR RESTRICT VPN SERVICES: Iran, Belarus, Iraq, North Korea, Turkmenistan, China, Russia, Egypt, India, Myanmar, Oman... United Kingdom?
This is probably referring to this: https://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/gadgets-tech/vpn-ban-uk-b2939311.html
An older post from Mulvad about their issues advertising in the UK: https://mullvad.net/en/and-then/uk
I wanted to document an experiment I undertook trying out AV1 with Grain Synthesis on particularly grainy footage. I'll go over my thoughts and explore Plex compatibility with this feature.
This is going to be another one of my rare highly-detailed technical posts, so feel free to skip to the conclusion if you'd like.
I've been ripping Blu-rays and transcoding them for my Plex server for about 7 years now. In that time I have tweaked my settings a little, but I've broadly settled on h265 as my codec of choice. This is because it is effective at preserving fine details and film grain while still giving you a pretty good compression ratio.
Here's my typical configuration:
If you know anything about film grain, it's that it is absolutely hell on compression algorithms. It's very hard to compress grainy footage without making it look bad. Sometimes, you come across a piece of media that is especially difficult, and that's how I found myself exploring grain synthesis this time.
What piece of media happened to kick this off? Columbo Season 9 Episode 2. No spoilers, I haven't sat down to watch it yet.
Why this in particular? I was making my way through encoding my collection of Columbo Blu-rays and noticed that Season 9 in particular was incredibly grainy. Combine that with the slight sharpening filter I tend to add to my encodes (like a bit of salt, to taste) and the final size of my encodes, instead of being around 30-50% of the original size on disc it was almost 90% at around 20Mbps!
So I set out to try this grain synthesis I had heard about.
Grain Synthesis is a novel approach introduced with the AV1 video codec, but which has only really started seeing limited use in the last few years. See this blog post by Netflix for a great explainer.
The TLDR; is that Grain Synthesis is where you:
Why do this? To save bandwidth and storage space.
The theory is that by denoising, you make the video easier to compress, while still being able to evoke the feel of film grain convincingly.
Does this work in practice? Read on to find out. (Yes, saying that did make me cringe).
The experiment was simple. Target my usual 8-10mbps with AV1 grain synthesis and see how that compares to just crushing the quality down with x265.
After a bit of research, I decided to opt for StaxRip as the application to do my encoding. It supports a lot of AV1 encoders, including:
Which encoder to use?
Well, when I tried AOMEnc and found it SUPER slow. I encode on a 12 core, 24 thread Ryzen CPU, and got 4fps. There are likely ways to get it to run faster, but I didn't play around too much. rav1e does not seem to support Grain Synthesis right now.
So really that left SVT-AV1. That's the one Handbrake includes, but in the past I found the vanilla SVT-AV1 found on there to give me really blotchy results in dark scenes, so I picked SVT-AV1-PSYEX.
While it is technically possible to assemble the grain analysis, denoising and synthesis yourself, the easiest way to use it is actually to use the following two parameters:
--enable-dnl-denoising=1
This turns on denoising. Without this I think grain synthesis is simply added on top of your existing video.
--film-grain=<some integer value>
This sets the strength of the film grain added and, with enable-dnl-denoising=1, the strength of the denoising. Online, people recommend using values of 8-14 depending on the amount of grain.
I found that the best way to dial-in AV1 grain synthesis was to start with a very high quality setting, then gradually increase the noise reduction through the --film-grain value until I got most of the grain off. I could see this by using a video player that doesn't support / has grain synthesis turned off (more on this in Compatibility).
I would however avoid going too far with the noise reduction strength. No need to remove all the grain. Pushing it too far results in the video into a smeary mess. After all, no denoising algorithm is perfect, and the more you crank it, the more you lose real detail.
Then, once I was happy with the clarity, I'd dial down the quality until I either hit my size target or my acceptable lowest quality.
As for the h265 encode, I apply a Light sharpening filter in Handbrake, then reduce the quality until I hit my target.
Note here that the process with h265 has less levers to pull, so it takes less time to dial it in.
See for yourself! Here's a MEGA link to the final encodes . I make no promise that I will keep that link up long-term, but I will personally hold onto the files so if the link dies in the future, try DMing me and hopefully I'll see it and send them to you.
There are 3 files:
no denoise.mkv - a file encoded with no grain synthesis and very high quality setting to act as a baselineAV1 q25 denoise38.mkv - The grain synthesis file. Quality of 25 with film grain setting of 38.x265 crf22.5.mkv - The h265 file. Used a crf of 22.5. Picked to match the AV1 file size.I highly recommend using a tool like video-compare to play them side by side. Grain behaviour is not easily comparable in screenshots and should be compared in motion. The command you want is:
video-compare "AV1 q25 denoise38.mkv" "x265 crf22.5.mkv"
I call this section "Analysis", but it's quite subjective.
To me the AV1 file has cleaner grain. It's fairly convincing in motion, if a bit more regular than is realistic. Reminds me a little of some modern shows that probably have added grain in post-production.
By comparison, the h265 version has made the grain is kind of start-stop and affected by motion in the scene. It has necessarily been compressed and looks worst for it. It's not that bad though.
The better quality retention goes to h265 here. When you look at the details around the eyebrows of the male character here, there is perceivably a little more detail preserved. Good looking grain can give an increased perception of sharpness, which makes up some of the ground on the AV1 side.
Here's a very important point we've only touched on so far: What devices actually support AV1 and grain synthesis, and if they don't support it, what happens?
Well, the answer is that when AV1 is supported, but grain synthesis is not (or it's otherwise broken), the grain synthesis tends to just gets ignored and you play the weirdly smooth, denoised video instead.
Well, I hit my first roadblock directly after my first test encode. I use mpvnet as my player of choice. Turns out grain synthesis is broken for me with the default configuration. After like an hour of debugging, I found that I could fix it by adding vo=gpu instead of the default vo=gpu-next in my config file. This may or may not mean that the grain filter is rendered by the CPU instead of the GPU, affecting performance.
VLC worked out of the box for me. Not sure if that was because it was using CPU grain rendering or if it was because their drivers were less broken.
Neither play has a clear option to turn on or off grain synthesis. In theory, you could configure mpv with format:film-grain=no, but that didn't seem to work for me. It's possible that option only works when GPU grain rendering is in use.
For reference, I use a 3000-series Nvidia GPU. I expect GPU rendering support may depend on what GPU you have. Perhaps it works better with more recent GPUs.
I placed the AV1 file from the experiment on my fully updated Plex server, and tried to play back the episode from a variety of different devices.
When transcoding occurred, the grain-synthesis would be ignored. Meaning that you'd get a transcode of the post-denoise video into h264. No / little grain (depending on how strongly you denoised).
This is somewhat worse than transcoding h265 into h264 for compatibility reasons, but at a high bitrate where the grain is still present. That said, on-the-fly transcoding rarely results in a particularly good looking outcome.
Both encodes turned out very watchable on compatible devices. There was no clear winner over h265 but AV1 + grain synthesis looks decent when it works.
That said, if you or others watch your video on unsupported devices, like on the browser or on your smart tv / chromecast, you may want to opt for h265 instead. At least if that has to be transcoded, you will maintain your grain in the process.
Additionally, the effort you go through tuning AV1 encodes is somewhat higher than just chucking it through a h265 or h264 encoder. In my experience, without grain synthesis AV1 does less well with grainy content than h265 does. Not too surprising given that AV1 is primarily a web standard while h265 comes from a more disc media background.
In this day and age, why are we still using these horrible packing peanuts? These aren't even the dissolvable ones.
The cherry on the cake? This is the side of the box.
I assume the rest of their councillors are just smart enough to keep their mouths shut.
The post as screenshots if you dont want to go to YouTube. Appologies to any blind users as I don't have time to OCR these right now:
As the remaining council votes start slowing down, we see that the greatest growth and numbers go to Reform council members, but the Green Party have gained significant ground.
Meanwhile, Labour have lost over half of the seats up for election this May.
Both. Both is true.
Yeah, calling the only black dude Shacklebolt as well. The more you look the worse it gets.
Controversial take (though maybe not in this community):
If it's needed for survival, it should be free. No exceptions.
The company should be sued into the ground. This is horrendous
If he's not willing to backtrack on Labour's immigration, Israel, disability and trans policies then as far as I'm concerned it's not enough.