Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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Ironically, since I started pirating, I've spent MORE money on movies. (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

93 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (8 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

qBittorrent + Plex makes it pretty easy; you can search for torrents from within qBittorrent, so no scummy sites

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Super cool that you can search for torrents with in qBittorrent. I'll check it out.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It takes a little bit of dicking around, you have to add the torrent sites you want to search, but it's not hard.