Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ @lemmy.dbzer0.com

2y ago

Ironically, since I started pirating, I've spent MORE money on movies.

TL;DR at the bottom.

I started getting into torrents about 2 years ago, at the time I started out with downloading YIFY rips and x265 RARBG encodes. I didn't care about the quality at the time, I was just happy to get movies. But I also wanted stuff like Special Features, and while Tigole and the QxR team occasionally added them for some of their movies, it felt like something was missing.

Eventually I grew dissatisfied with encodes, and wanted to watch movies in the highest quality possible. I would have downloaded BDMVs, but no one seemed to be seeding them, or in the case of less-mainstream/obscure movies, they weren't on public trackers at all. (I tried downloading REMUXes from FGT, but they always replaced the PGS subtitles with UTF text subtitles, which I didn't appreciate.) So in early 2022 I bought myself a Blu-ray optical drive, set up MakeMKV, and bought the Blu-ray of the movie I wanted to rip. After that, I bought some more BDs to rip, and I started making my own REMUXes. Some time after that, I flashed my drive with the LibreDrive firmware so I could rip my 4K UHD discs too.

So anyway, my point is that the arguments that piracy is "bad for business" and causes companies to "lose money" are full of hot air. If anything, piracy is good for them and increases sales. There have been numerous occasions where I have wanted to download a REMUX and there were no seeders, and decided it would be easier for me to buy the disc and rip it myself.

So, the main takeaways are:

Piracy isn't nearly as bad as the authorities say it is, and may actually increase sales.
Create good-quality encodes.
Seed all your torrents.

TL;DR: Started buying and ripping my own Blu-rays due to dissatisfaction with low-quality encodes and lack of seeders.

87 comments

As Gabe Newell once said:
Piracy is an issue of service, not price
- Yep. The video entertainment industry had a great solution to piracy in Netflix and it had moved piracy out of the mainstream... Then companies got competitive and content became fractured across a multitude of platforms.
  
  "now that we finally solved one of the hardest problems we've ever faced, let scrap the solution!"
  
  Then companies got competitive
  You spelled greedy wrong
  
  My preferred solution is to only subscribe to one service at a time, and then switch, when I run out of things to watch.
  This also means the providers get less money when they have less content.
- And companies just don't seem to get it. They saw Netflix boom in popularity and said, "Hey, I wanna do that," without realizing that having all your content in one platform was what made it so successful.
- Ehhhhh, sorta'. I've spent WAY more money thanks to Steam than I would have without it, but I'm still buying everything on sale and cheaper than anyone I know with a console. I think price is still a bit part of the equation for me. Some games that refuse to ever have a decent sale are making me consider the high seas again as they stagnate on my waitlist.

Same for music for me. Only difference now, I get to choose where my money goes. Instead of some streaming company giving next to nothing to the bands I listen to and everything else going to some super popular stuff I don't enjoy.
- Yeah, I've spent more money on smaller bands through Bandcamp then I ever have on streaming services, all thanks to piracy, since I realized it's much better for offline files.

So...you're going to post torrents and seed all those movies...right?
- Nope
  
  Given your username it's probably for the best.

You do realise that you're saying that piracy didn't work for you, so you went out and spent your money instead, yeah?
- Not saying it didn't work, in fact I still download encodes. But for stuff I really like, I buy the physical versions.
  
  Upload the remuxes

Same here. YIFY torrents were just a gateway drug to 4k HDR blurays.
- Far too much of a snob to watch those icky YIFY movies with all of their artifacts.

Various studies showed the same over the last 20-25 years. Pirating does increase revenue for companies and articles torrented.
- Yah right I'd like to see a study that shows that.
  
  I believe an eu commissioned report reflected this and has been picked up several times throughout the years. I must admit I've never gone through and read it though

That was shown in the early days of Metallica's (fuck Metallica, btw) bullshit with Napster. The music fans were downloading music, as well as buying music, more.
- Fucking Lars. Metallica just did not get it and attacked their fans. Nobody had a problem paying for the music, they just wanted to be able to download it. They didn't want a CD they wanted an MP3.
  
  I was a huge Metallica fan. Saw them for both Ride the Lightning and Justice when they toured. Most of us got into them by pirating (ie, copying album->tape or tape->tape for/from friends). I spent more on their tickets and concert tees than I would have buying their albums. But after Lars and that Napster shit, I just figured they were dead to me. Haven't listened to them since.
- Sure but I doubt that would be true today. Do people forget we had very limited bandwidth compared to today and lots of the encodes where low bitrate and sucked. Not to mention most people where downloading the mp3 and burning them to CDs back then also.

Are there any good services like bandcamp, but for video? Even if it doesn't have blockbuster/popular movies I'd be interested. I spend a lot of money on bandcamp because it's easy and simple: I give them money and in return get bits that I do what I want with.
- If you're looking for DRM-free digital distribution, the best I can think of is Vimeo on Demand. You pay one-time for a movie, and in return you get the option to download the movie as a MP4. There's mainly arthouse films and documentaries, but you may be able to find a few gems.
  
  Thanks! That's the sort of thing I'm looking for
  
  Thank you, I'm going to spend so much money buying indie movies

The problem is you're obsessed with movies to do such things. Just download 1080 and watch it on your tv or mobile and that's it, you watched a movie. And if you're willing to help the community, encode, seed, distribute and that's enough.

I've ripped a good number of blu-rays to network storage. If you're looking for older, less popular stuff it's the best option. And older releases are usually just a few bucks. The new stuff I torrent because I can usually find a decent rip, but for stuff I want to put in my library a rip from optical disk is the best, but not free of course. You can even do it for free, public libraries often have a good collection of older releases on optical disk.

My local wall-mart has a large number of older blockbusters on their bargain bin. Got all 3 John Wicks for $15 total, and then directly ripped them into my server

Same idea with video games. There are many game franchises that I never would have gotten into as a kid if I hadn't been able to pirate them. I usually still pirate games to try them out, and if I end up enjoying it or want features like online play, I might buy it during a Steam sale.
- me too, but usually only with indie games, because triple a studios can go fuck themselves. but like Stardew valley costs $6, imma buy it
- Command & Conquer was like that for me. I pirated Red Alert 2, but ended up buying it like six times via various collections. None of that would have happened had I not had that first pirated copy.
- Yeah I used to game on console but I got a steam deck thinking I would pirate shit. Then steam sales hit me like a fucking truck.
- Anymore it's a roll of the dice whether the game is functional to a point where you would enjoy it. Most publishers don't seem to bother with demos anymore (probably because their games are half broken) so we are largely left to create our own demos.

I read an article about this many years ago. They had found that pirated games can increase sales:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy-doesnt-hurt-game-sales-may-actually-help/
- 2017 is many years…I’m old
  
  7 of them. A child was born, went through a bunch of life milestones, and is now starting 1st or 2nd grade (i think? I don't know how kids work). My man's learning the basics of multiplication right now.
- Most of the movies I have pirated I have seen in theaters at some point or can't be easily watched in my country. I have cancelled most of my streaming services because most of them don't have content that I watch enough to justify paying monthly for .

Many others have said before people who pirate spend more on media than those who don’t.
I pay for cable tv (get off my lawn) in addition to several other streaming services.
And sometimes I still can’t get the thing I want. You think I’m going to spend even more when my half dozen existing subscriptions don’t cover this one thing? I don’t think so.

Yep.
I’m a fan of a certain sport, and they didn’t have a reasonable way of making it available on demand… so I sailed the seas. But lo and behold once an app was available, I was happy to pay as I’m no longer having to wait.
Someone smarter than I said. The largest part of piracy is a delivery issue. Make thing’s available and people will pay for them.

I wouldn't be the faithful Final Fantasy patron I am today had it not been for a ROM of FF VI my old room mate put on my computer back in college. Now I own nearly ALLLLL of them (the ones available on modern platforms). I've also started investing in the Trails series for a similar reason and I don't regret it.

I bought more CDs while Napster was in its heyday than the entire rest of my life combined.

Every video game I've ever pirated and played for more than 30m I now legitimately own.

Avid reader here, and I sometimes browse books on pirate bay. When I find one I like I download the ebook and if I read it I also buy a print edition. Not everyone does that, of course, but in my case piracy generates sales.

This happened to me too. I download movies and shows onto my plex and watch them at my leisure. If I love a show or movie I get the Blu-ray and watch it in 4K/atmos! It’s nice being able to sample things before buying.

Similar outcome. At this point, I mostly just rent 4k online because my massive Plex library has bit-for-bit Blu-ray rips of everything I care about enough to have on hand. But I spent years building that library by ripping physical media.
I still buy and rip CDs because I love album art and want high quality. If not for the former, I'd likely go flacc or lossless and buy online.

The problem with older media is that you have to actively create torrents, the tracker might fold, etc.
With eD2K, it's very old school P2P filesharing, just give it a directory and the files on it are shared on the network.
Of course, the "push" part to torrent tracker sites isn't as active.
I use both torrents and eD2K, depending on what I'm looking for.

I suspect your story is not unusual. Piracy is, at worst, a morally neutral action.

So much this. Watched so many anime for free that I ended up spending a bunch of money on figurines, mangas and other merchandise!

I started pirating around 2000. Early days of bittorrent, before that Napster and others. Maybe I'm out of touch and/or old. But YT premium/music has be very convenient and cost effective for me. As far as movies, paying for a couple of streaming services is way easier than delving through scummy torrent sites waiting for movies to download.
I'm fairly tech savvy but I've been off the high seas for awhile. If anyone knows a way to get movies/music with the same ease of use as the paid stuff I'd love to know about it.
- qBittorrent + Plex makes it pretty easy; you can search for torrents from within qBittorrent, so no scummy sites
  
  Super cool that you can search for torrents with in qBittorrent. I'll check it out.
- Fair. I use YouTube almost exclusively on PC and my phone, and setting up an ad-free environment on both was fairly easy for me. But if I were to switch to a TV, I just might have bought yt premium. It's not that expensive, after all.
  Also, I still pay for netflix. It just has the right amount of convenience that I am ok with to pay money for.
- Bflix.gg or some other similar site, in a browser with ublock. That's what I do for 90% of what my girlfriend and i watch, then we torrent some things that were really excited about, or like a season at a time of a tv show.
- Using the *arrs is pretty convenient if you know how to use docker (or even if you dont) and then you can connect them to Plex or jellyfin to view, it won't be instant like Netflix and co but at least its free/cheaper (cost of VPN or seedbox). You can even setup overseerr or jellyseerr to simplify the movie/show requests.
- As far as movies, paying for a couple of streaming services is way easier than delving through scummy torrent sites waiting for movies to download.
  That's all well and good until you basically start google searching whatever you want to watch to see which subscription it's on. Super Mario Movie? Not HBO or Netflix, it's on Peacock. Snowpiercer (show)? Not streaming on any service anymore.
  At a certain point having it available is more convenient than paying 5 different subscriptions to see which has what.
  Also it can be very easy to automate this so you don't even have to search anymore. You just put in the name and it does it for ya!

@TheImpressiveX if you don't have money to spend but the movie is older, one can also hit up charity stores. I find good Blu ray and dvds for a few dollars at the local st Vincent DePaul stores all the time. It takes patience but it pays off. I've got some great full seasons of TV shows too for like $5
Just check disk for damage before buying and that the right disk is in the right box.

I used to have a lot of Blu-ray Disc movie resources, but I wanted to play Blu-ray Disc on different devices, or convert Blu-ray Disc into different formats, such as MP4, so I wanna know how to rip blu-ray. My friend recommended Handbrake to me. Although it is a free software, I have to install libdvdcss specially, and there are still a series of problems, so I finally bought a paid software, DVDFab, which is a one-time payment for permanent use, and it is still available at present.
- Handbrake only converts an existing Blu-ray rip to a video format, it doesn't rip DVDs and Blu-rays on its' own.
  You can install MakeMKV to rip your discs, then convert them to video files in HandBrake.

I'm so confused by the tier list of what is good resolution. I thought AV1 was the best encode at the moment, I'm not concerned with size but resolution. Are these remixes the best for that?
- Remux is lossless usually so it's the closest to blu-ray
- It's not about resolution, it's also about bitrate. Higher bitrate = higher quality.
  Though I am excited for the futute of AV1. I'm still confused how they managed to make videos look great while keeping bitrate and file sizes low...
  
  It's not just bitrate but how good the retail encode of a Blu-ray is. There are certain movies where a smaller bit-rated Blu-ray is actually the best option. Private trackers are filled with comparisons between all the available Blu-rays to figure out of which one is the best in terms of video/audio quality. Buying a Blu-ray may still not get you the best quality.

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