Iirc the white border is a helldivers2 issue

As for minimizing the game I don’t remember having that issue but it has been a while since I played.

I know you are mostly asking about ripping the media. But I would recommend looking at tiny media manager to pull metadata and organize.

I haven’t read the article. But I’d assume this is for the same reason that not not string is faster than bool(string). Which is to say that it has to do with having to look up a global function rather than a known keyword.