Every once in a while I'll try to watch something through the Intended Method™ and it always proves itself to be a worse experience.
Most recent example - I was watching Malcolm in the Middle on Disney+ with my girlfriend, and we found that there are entire audio tracks missing in multiple episodes. Usually some kind of ADR, like someone talking off camera. There's an episode where Reese rents an apartment and there's a recurring bit of him talking to his depressed neighbour through the wall. But you'd have no idea because they somehow completely deleted the neighbour's dialogue from the audio, so it's just Reese having a one-sided conversation with a wall. We saw multiple episodes where something like this happened, and when I looked online there were reports of it dating back years.
Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata, etc. No one providing official routes to this media seems to care. You have AI-upscaled "4k" movies where the actors don't even look like themselves and there are hallucinated artifacts and things that aren't there. Images cropped to widescreen, like the infamous Duff Beer joke being out of frame in The Simpsons. TV series with edits or entire episodes removed because they were deemed too offensive. Movies and shows randomly appearing and disappearing so you have to endlessly manage subscriptions and switch between different apps with better or worse players just to watch a single series. Just a nightmare.
>... like the infamous Duff Beer joke being out of frame in The Simpsons.
My collection of The Simpsons, seasons 1-13, are all TV rips from waaaaayyyyy back in the 00's. Sure, it's not super high-quality, but at least they don't look like the ugly remasters (on some of the ones I've tried watching on Disney+, they look like someone's drawn over the old cells), the aspect ratio is the original so nothing's missing and, as a personal bonus, they've got the old Q13 logo in the bottom (I grew up in western WA). They still look great on my newer TV.
Edit: Oh, and the Michael Jackson episode never suddenly disappeared from my library.
To me it is the difference between art and product.
A show like The Simpsons is both. The viewers care about the art, and we tolerate the product to get it. The creators are creating art, compromising with the corporation and broadcaster to make it enough of a product. But the corp/broadcaster only care about the product. The art is the chocolate around the advertising pill.
So when the product-minded people control preservation and resharing of the product, the art always gets compromised. Jokes are clipped. Audio is broken. Episodes are pulled. For all the wrong reasons.
Same with Beavis and Butthead with all its music videos, it seems like it cant be properly released with alm that intact so its up to King Turd to do the dirty work and make it avaikable to all
This happens with any TV or Movie that has music, and its incredibly frustrating. Always best to download to not confuse yourself as to why the media is somehow different than you remember.
They are unlikely partners. And yet it is the model that allows arts to get something out there while it gets exploited for gains. But at the end those with the money make the final call.
Alas, we would hope that it would be the best art that gets preserved but a lot of the time it is some of the most mass produced.
The terminology is art vs content. Anybody talking about "content", by definition, do not actually care about what that content is, just that it is contained into something they charge for.
To me content often implies a kind of volume of work. Always be posting. Don’t miss a few days or your viewers go elsewhere. Lots and lots of content!
The concerns of a product are the salability. Is has to fit perfectly into a 22 mins slot. It can’t upset the wrong people. It has to fit the mood and culture that our advertisers want. Etc.
This is a great example of when pulling out a dictionary implies that you've lost the argument, because if people were using the word in the same sense as the dictionary definition, you would have no need of the dictionary to “prove” the meaning.
User toyg is using the same definition than Richard Stallman (I tried to find the relevant essay but can't; I just remember RMS also pushed back against "content"). Toyg is not making up a new line of thought, this has been argued before. Not only by Stallman, either, this dislike for the term "content" is also espoused by some here on HN (and I agree, to be clear).
I think it goes beyond latching on the dictionary definition, and really looking into how platform owners see the bits they push around. It's not about being "clever" with words to score a point, but actually about the meaning we want to give art, be it novels, drawings, music or shows/movies.
Also, "platform owners" (or advertisers, as another comment puts it) managed to install this term and so most of us use it, so it's no longer just platform owners. Which is why RMS railed against it.
Your point is valid (and I make a similar one frequently), but it doesn't gain from being presented as good term vs bad term use. It's the context that makes it pejorative.
In the context of advertisers, content is just what you deliver for a price (Netflix, Disney), or against which you slap advertising (Youtube). You want more of it so you can charge more, and care little what fills this content pipeline.
For classic simpsons seasons, you can find DVDs on eBay for pretty cheap with the original crops and commentary tracks. I hear there are are rips of those available too.
I managed to grab season 1 thru 10 on DVD for $15. Ripped them to storage, probably the best presentation you can get out of it.
But some of those old rips hold up. Not great but they will do.
A few years ago I did see a rip that pushed the limits of codecs. It was, at that point, every season of Futurama before Hulu brought it back but it fit on a single layer DVD. It was squeezed just a little too much as that was something like 100ish episodes. But neat to see.
This is the key, streaming content providers delete and edit things to match the feeling of society at the moment or perceived societal pressures.
Really not how history should work imho
For a while I was really happy because it sounded like the owners of the Intended Method™ had finally realized how much damage to their bottom line their terrible UX was having, so I fondly remembered TPB but moved over to the official platforms... then we started getting some hulu exclusives (not available in Canada) and the H(o)BOGo, and then a few more platform fragmentations... I have enough going on that I can't currently be bothered switching over to TPB but I ended up culling my streaming down to just Dropout, Nebula, severely modified Youtube and some patreons I care about.
I am happy to speak with my wallet and tell the services to get lost and I'd be heading back to TPB if I were still in a phase of my life where discussing the latest Battlestar Galactica, Lost or Game of Thrones was a central focus of my socialization - as it is though, the cost to follow the Intended Method™ is simply too expensive in money, discovery time, and platform bugs for me to give a damn.
Maybe they'll learn their lesson again and sanity will reign - but the current media pricing is too expensive (in a myriad of ways) for the value it's providing.
1. buy movie on iTunes
2. have kids that can't do long distance drives
3. obtain dvd players for car
4. realized I can't play films that I "bought" on DVD players
It feels like the "Buy" button on iTunes/Apple TV is misleading, and should be renamed to "License to watch on Apple devices". Obvious in hindsight, but this type of DRM severely restricts use cases.
Netflix has the same problem. Downloaded some TV shows for my daughter to watch while we were travelling. Worked fine on the plane, arrived to the hotel, connected to WiFi "This content is not available in your location". Ok, disconnect, don't need wifi. Same message, "This content is not available in your location".
I spent a couple of years travelling around the world, and this is what drove me to piracy. Every time I moved country, the streaming services would change and the show I was watching yesterday is no longer available in this country.
Luckily the torrent sites are available from every country.
I've had movies I've "bought" disappear from the Apple account. I guess they lost the license and I'm supposed to download all purchases and manually copy between devices. I contacted Apple and they offered a free rental as compensation. "Buy" doesn't mean the same on these streaming platforms, its just a longer-term rental.
I left Apple Music over this. My albums would keep quietly disappearing. I spent hours on the phone with their support, and despite their promises, nothing ever changed. I left Apple Music, and then all of their cloud services as well. Today, I'm 100% Apple-free, happily playing MP3s from Bandcamp in my Emacs. :)
When I purchase stuff, I don't wanna read a legal contract. No one wants, no one does.
The contrariam in me thinks: If the contract is that crucial, let's have a mandatory, non skippable, slow scrolling of it, or maybe audio version slowly read.
As in, I had a physical CD I had purchased, ripped to MP3, and loaded onto my iPhone.
iTunes recognised it, linked it to the matching official entry in their music store, they lost the licence and deleted all customer copies including mine.
While I agree it seems obvious you can’t do that, based on how these platforms have limited things for a long time… but that really should be something you can do.
Why can’t I get the file and put it on another device? Why can’t I burn it to a dvd? It makes sense that Apple aren’t required to make more software for random devices, but why can’t I have the file and do what I want with it?
You’re absolutely right. If it was a song from iTunes you bought you sure as hell could burn it on a dvd or cd or whatever. (Right? It’s been a long time.) So if I buy a movie why can’t I archive it on a DVD?
honestly given these types of shenanigans from the big platforms, I think buying physical discs is underrated. At least for the classics that you really want to add to your long-term collection
Not at all (hence saying "obvious in hindsight"). Simply pointing out that, at the time, my purchasing decision wasn't influenced by how many use cases it would restrict.
Also, IIRC, there was a period where you could burn Audio CDs from music that you purchased on iTunes.
edit: turns out music purchased on iTunes is DRM-free!
Haven't used iTunes in more than a decade, but it used to have options for converting files to different formats and burning playlists to disks and ripping CDs.
Actually there were some DVD players back in the day that could play digital files burned to DVD or CD, and it was totally possible to burn DVDs that could play normally on most players from video files.
Are you trying to listen in Dolby surround on a stereo setup? Disney+ defaults to surround sound and you’ll lose some audio channels if your speakers are stereo
Channel issues are like 90% of issues like this, but it's not always user error. Often a cheap production will just ship the front left + right channels as the stereo mix, instead of down mixing all the left + center channels into the stereo left etc. This is endemic in back catalogs on streaming providers where the catalog is a bulk assets that nobody reviews and is passed around between companies that don't care about the quality they deliver to each other.
User error but blaming the service to make an ideological point.
The dialog is just fine if you have a surround sound system or spend 5 seconds once to select stereo sound. Importantly, the dialog is still missing in the torrent versions taken from the surround sound stream because the same problem occurs. You only get the missing dialog in stereo if you download the stereo rip.
Those involved in the creation of the art can write a contract that stops it being ruined by future owners. When the Bobs sold their rights to Back to the Future they added terms to protect the brand. I know of one time where they intervened to stop a 3D conversion that Universal wanted. (Personally, I think 3D conversion can work well, e.g. Titanic, but other times it is monstrous, e.g. Star Wars Ep 1)
Thing is, most people don't really care about this. They watch something in the evening maybe weekend and that is it. This will not change and these services are meant for the masses.
On missing audio: usually I notice this when I watch with subtitles at night and then end up rewatching during the day with audio at much higher volume… And the thing that is said to be said is just… Not there?
Lately whenever I watch movies my remote stays in my hand so I can boost the volume during dialogue and turn it down during loud action scenes. I've had two different soundbars, one of them quite expensive, and it's an issue on both.
From my understanding it’s not which soundbar that’s the issue, it’s that you’re only using a soundbar for audio. The channels all get compressed into one device with a couple speakers instead of whatever it was originally created for, like five or seven speakers with a subwoofer
You're right. I just don't want surround.I have two big, nice speakers for my tv, and that's what I want. But I still have to actively work the remote, especially with a kid sleeping in my house.
This is the first year I have cancelled all my subs. Used to be a TPB regular around the time it took off. Years later I tried to go legit and have had subs with all the major streamers (netflix, disney, amazon etc) But the way you get squeezed year on year for what was standard before e.g. 4K or no ads to be gradually offered worse terms and degraded output quality just bites after a while. I can't justify spending €20-30 per month on what isn't the best quality available for the content on offer.
Plus I've found "legit" to be a moving goal post. One day a show is on one platform, the next it's on another, or it becomes unavailable except for [insert random foreign country here]. Even HD is a ripoff sometimes when half the episode comes in all compressed looking. They'll blame my bandwidth except I have no problem streaming an episode without adaptive compression over Bittorrent.
People can say what they want about piracy, but it continues to be what I consider a necessity against culturally important media being further tainted by rent seekers looking to make another buck in any way they can.
i feel like this is an important piece. even if you want to do the "right thing", is it really supporting these platforms that horse-trade content in huge multi-billion dollar deals just so they can increase their userbase with the intent to jam more ads down their throat? have any of these platforms _improved_ the experience for the average creator? they're poison, it almost makes it feel more righteous to steal.
Yeah all the streaming services have gotten so bad and they are adding ads and they are lowering quality and they are getting too expensive. Arghgg I say
I mean in the end this is still theft. Someone spent time and effort working on this. And you took a shit on that effort because it was inconvenient not to. Like the creators of said content you stole would not approve of what you did.
I totally get it. I'm a thief as well. But I guess the difference is, I don't need to rationalize everything into some sort of twisted sense justice. I steal because I don't care what the creator thinks.
I truly feel old when we are rehashing the same thing that happened when TPB, Limewire etc were taking off.
Down to the arguments being made why this is “theft”. I also can’t believe that the arguments by the general pop have shifted to support multi billion dollar companies and their narrative.
Also fun, Google purchased movies over the years getting moved to Youtube and then seemingly losing all surround sound content and coming through as 2-channel only (Android TV).
I will add to the list that for some weird reason in my country original language is not always available for all movies, and the subtitle experience in genenal is lacking.
In some Netflix shows, they say words in the english audio that are translated in French with different words with a similar meaning, and with english close-caption words that are also different from the original english audio.
My favorite example of bad Netflix subtitles is Suits (2011). The music during the intro is the same throughout the series, from the song Ima Robot - Greenback Boogie. The English subtitles for the lyrics are wrong every single season, and they're wrong in a different way for every one of those seasons. The lyrics are not at all hard to understand--they've pretty specifically cut together some of the lyrics that are easiest to understand--so it's extremely obvious, but somehow nobody at any point figured out that they could just do it right once and not look totally incompetent.
After the initial Netflix release of the first 3.5 seasons (might have been 4.5, it was a baffling cutoff) they somehow decided not to add the rest, so I pirated it. Every single pirated intro came with perfectly correct lyrics.
French part of Switzerland. Quite a few shows and movies, ie anime but also others, have original audio track (so lets say japanese for anime) and only german subs. You can probably count number of folks on your fingers and toes who would even be able, let alone willing to watch this in such combination from this region of meagre 2.2 million folks but quite rich on average.
So torrents it is, its legal here, lightning speed, always superb quality (one can choose any movie in range between 1GB and 50 GB for 1080p and all is very good looking), get it in a minute, and watch.
I don't blame Netflix generally (well for those german subs I definitely do, I know they have english ones just couldn't be bothered and I have hard time believing they have region issue with english subs) but license owners, they are the ultimate fuckers messing with content holders/resellers/renters, and consequently us users.
Also, torrents are so convenient, I won't be paying some service just to see a single show a year. I just won't even for a month and shuffle things like idiot, thats a bad proposition.
Downloading such content is not prohibited by law in Switzerland, thus legal. Uploading however is a different story.
So stating that torrenting is legal is not actually true. Unless maybe you simply fake your upload.
Even for English speakers, the subtitle experience with pirated movies is often lacking. Movies with non-English-speaking characters are often meant to have subtitles for their dialog and not for English speakers by default, but many pirated versions don't do this. I recently saw discussions online of a lot of people saying they went an embarrassingly long time without knowing there were supposed to be subtitles for the aliens in District 9 or the mute hand-signing girl in The Boys.
The Intended Method(tm) is an intentionally gimped feeding trough designed primarily to pacify uninquisitive minds and line Hollywood exec pockets. They have never ever been honest in their accounting or reasonable in their expectations, let alone charitable enough to let the art propagate amongst its consumers in the manner they see fit (without court interventions). So I don't see why we have to be honest in our consumption.
There is plenty of money to be made in secondary sources -- merchandising and so on. They can give up trying to lock down information that naturally wants to be free. But they won't, because greed.
> Most recent example - I was watching Malcolm in the Middle on Disney+ with my girlfriend, and we found that there are entire audio tracks missing in multiple episodes.
The licenses for the song tracks have also expired; so they removed these too. The main noticeable difference is being the intro sequence originally sung by There Might be Giants which has been replaced with a less-impressive cover that ruins the vibe.
Why can't these tracks just forever live with the series? I went and bought the DVD box-set just because of such. A £2 purchase that I than ripped to my NAS.
I've not watched the latest remake because I don't want to ruin the original vibe of such a great show.
If they're shouting at neighbours through a wall I'd be willing to bet that the dialogue is happening because of loud copyrighted music being played at the same time. They probably just did some automated music detection and cut the whole audio track in those sections.
I know. And I am commenting on that the licensed music within the series has been replaced due to expired licensing for which that itself is ridiculous.
Re-licensing music is a two-fold challenge. Sometimes it's much more efficient to use substitute music, instead of negotiating for new rights.
First, licensing arrangements for "all marketing channels" only account for the channels that exist at the time. When a new market channel opens up, such as streaming, music labels will require new licensing terms for that channel. If they don't, they might not get paid. (TV & movie studios are just as ruthless as music labels).
Second, in turn, the labels often have to get new permission from artists for the new channel. Tracking down all artists can be a challenge and require resources that they can't recoup.
This is a good point. Another problem with streaming services, specifically for music streaming services, is that they can change the track of a previously released album with no user choice to hear the original. Example: Track 4 of Elephunk by the Black Eyed Peas. It was universally replaced with the “clean” version of the song. I’m not a fan of rewriting history.
Disney+ is truly unmitigated dogshit. It constantly chokes and stutters, seems to cause my NVIDIA Sheild to peg its CPU and/or page to disk, or something, to the point where it becomes unresponsive for multiple seconds at a time. I genuinely cannot understand how you could so utterly bungle software that's been a solved problem for over a decade.
> But you'd have no idea because they somehow completely deleted the neighbour's dialogue from the audio
This sounds pretty unlikely. It's more likely that there's an issue with your surround system, and that audio "should" be coming from your rear speakers but for some reason it's not.
This also reminded me of another issue - the show was filmed to be broadcast in 4:3 but apparently someone along the line decided 16:9 is inherently better, so they put out the show in widescreen and now there's a ton of shots where you can see things you're not supposed to see. Someone else standing in for an actor that wasn't there when they filmed, or a toy doll in place of a real baby because they filmed on a day the baby actor wasn't there.
This shouldn't be an issue anybody has. We've had Dolby surround sound for over 40 years now, and everything was fine until recently. We had quadrophonic sound years before that.
>and we found that there are entire audio tracks missing in multiple episodes
Personally for me the worst case of this is Scrubs. The soundtrack of the show is so incredibly crucial to its atmosphere. There's a scene with the Coral's Dreaming of You that they've replaced with some awful generic track in the streaming versions. That people see the show now and maybe don't even know it is just a crime.
> Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata, etc.
The thing with free is you will tend to be less demanding & most certainly more forgiving even if not less resentful.
One reason why finding market fit for products built for free consumers is harder than for paid. The ones paying you will want their problems solved pronto, and if you're diligent enough, you'll end up building a product that solves those same "hair on the fire" problems for many others with hopefully deeper pockets.
> Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata
A friend once pointed that out. He pays a lot and gets low quality. That was what changed his mind. That was also almost twenty years ago.
Most people changed. US corporations trying to raid people in foreign countries is, in my opinion, no longer acceptable at all. The swedish government should be ashamed for acting as US proxies here (nowadays with Trump this is more clear, but even 20 years ago or 25 years ago, it should have been a no-brainer).
> you have to endlessly manage subscriptions and switch between different apps with better or worse players just to watch a single series.
Obligatory classic joke:
Have you seen the new show? It's on Tubu. It's literally on Heebee. It's on Poodee with ads. It's literally on Dippy. You can probably find it on Weeno. Dude it's on Gumpy. It's a Pheebo original. It's on Poob. You can watch it on Poob. You can go to Poob and watch it. Log onto Poob right now. Go to Poob. Dive into Poob. You can Poob it. It's on Poob. Poob has it for you. Poob has it for you.
It's very strange to think about this in the current context. Anything P2P used to be the Anti Christ of the Software Industry. The lengths Microsoft and game vendors went to prevent copying is insane. Installing Windows as well as various Higher End software is a huge pain because of this.
On the other hand Microsoft is very much leading with OpenAI in vacuuming any content, stripping effectively copyright claims.
That being said, nowadays the only use case for me to use Pirate Bay is when I cannot get a movie elsewhere. I'd pay for it but it's not possible - because of copyright...
The software industry certainly didn't give up. Most smaller game studios outsource their copy protection to Steam. Larger studios use Denuvo which works better than ever. Some Denuvo games stay uncracked for years. Non-entertainment software mostly moved to SaaS with a subscription model which is essentially uncrackable or, where that was not feasible (CAD and video editing), use extremely invasive copy protection measures. For example, Dassault can catch your Solidworks cracks even on an airgapped computer. They taint every file you create as pirated and when you give that file to a licensed user, their legitimate copy will phone home and have their lawyers force the legitimate user to betray you.
Steam's DRM is completely symbolic. There are widespread cracks available and Steam is AFAIK not even bothering with the cat and mouse game, and Denuvo games released this year are being cracked in < 24 hours.
I would never underestimate the lengths people are willing to go to to 'crack' games. Countless online-only games have been cracked with users reverse engineering the network protocol and writing their own servers. LLMs will probably greatly ease that process as well.
The SteamDRM wrapper tool itself, freely distributed through the Stramworks SDK, used to straight up ship with a feature to strip the DRM from any exe.
> They taint every file you create as pirated and when you give that file to a licensed user, their legitimate copy will phone home and have their lawyers force the legitimate user to betray you.
Can this be manipulated to frame arbitrary users for piracy?
Oh wow that's really smart of them, now you have a reason to send your hacked version along the cad file so the user on the other side can escape from their spyware :D
Recently wanted to watch Troy and could not find it for streaming anywhere, nor a pay-to-rent on the streaming platforms like youtube. You can "buy" it but as we've learned recently these companies don't really let you own a copy and reserve the right to remove your access in the future. So I just went ahead and pirated it.
It's not strange at all. It is all about power. At that time, power was obtained by opposing P2P and opposing piracy. Today power is obtained by piracy so they do piracy.
They're organizations run by people who may or may not have something that could be described as narcissistic personality disorder.
It's not particularly strange; the rationale for organizations like Microsoft and OpenAI is to be immune to any and all rules that could possibly foreseeably impact shareholder value. If you're not paying for their wares, you're impacting shareholder value. If you're asking them to actually license out content that they're training an AI on, you're impacting shareholder value.
Rules for thee, not for me, especially when it makes me - the special person who charitably graces society with my presence - a rich person.
If the corporates are OK downloading content in breach of licences for training their intelligences, which apparently they are, I consider myself OK doing the same to train the model in my head.
I don't think I'd prefer this, tbh. I would want to see the whole topic information when choosing what exact torrent to download. Is it marked "verified" or "questionable"? If it's "questionable", is it for some arbitrary formality, or something like "the audio is desynced"? Are there many different dubs (because I'd rather prefer not to have them, as they're bloating the files?)...
They all do have auto firing things that would not necessarily show on a screenshot. It's a cat and mouse game between these sites and filter maintainers.
But even for those I recommend the popup blocker strict extension.
I might be misremembering, but wasn't YIFY/YTS known for their awful quality ultra compressed releases? I thought they closed down many years ago tho, so no idea if they are the same people or if they still focus on low-quality releases.
Not those exact markings, but TPB does have user-markings displayed that can serve as a vouch for credibility.
- Normal User, no special status (No Skull)
- Trusted (Pink Skull)
- VIP (Green Skull)
- Helper (Blue Skull, Legacy)
- Moderator (Black MOD Tag)
- Super Moderator (Red MOD Tag)
- Administrator (Black ADMIN Tag)
You can turn it on in `View -> Search engine`. Then a new tab will appear next to the main transfers one. You can (have to?) add search plugins, which is done from the same search tab (look for a button in the bottom right). And I think to remember you need to have Python installed for the search tab to work, but qBittorrent should prompt you automatically for it.
I might be misremembering something, so ask again if something I said didn't work or wasn't where I said.
Free extra tip: did you know qBittorrent has support for themes? I got a pretty clean dark theme one, but no way I can remember the name or where I found it.
Although the raid and the subsequent criminal investigation were
carried out in Sweden, the US Government played a major role behind
the scenes.
As for why the US Gov was willing to act as MPAA's private enforcer...
(2012) Chris Dodd [MPAA chief] went on Fox News to explicitly threaten
politicians who accept MPAA campaign donations that they’d better
pass Hollywood’s favorite legislation… or else:
Trading law for campaign donations is a place one might go after years of trading Gov power for campaign donations.
When it comes to films, I torrent exclusively remuxes or whole Blu-Ray images. TPB hasn't been relevant for me for the last 15 years or more, since it never had a culture of such large file sizes, just small re-encodes. I wonder why, because obviously that data doesn't have to pass through TPB's own servers.
> it never had a culture of such large file sizes, just small re-encodes. I wonder why, because obviously that data doesn't have to pass through TPB's own servers.
We (the users) have to concern ourselves with how big the file is. And TPB tends to surface the most popular stuff first.
Usually a 1080p re-encode is good enough quality for me. And a lot of the time if I'm looking for a movie to watch right away I'd rather just get it fast so I can start watching.
Where do you find those? I use 1337 and dht search engines. Can't be bothered to fiddle with private trackers. Wondering if you found something better.
I commented somewhere else already, but you can search directly from qBittorrent. Search by title, then filter by "Remux" or sort by size. Keep in mind tho that a blu-ray release must exist in the first place, and that some 4k blu-rays are just not very good to begin with (upscaling and what not).
thepiratebay is fine they just don’t run indexes often so searches often fail for stuff just uploaded within last hour or two. Limetorrents updates indices frequently but uses ad providers that try to hijack your clicks and presses so it takes three or four clicks to get one click that isn’t hijacked. There is a bit of non overlap between those two sites.
Sounds like something that a browser like Brave was built to combat. I haven't visited the site in question but for a lot of the ad-heavy sites I do visit, I jump over to Brave to deal with the nonsense.
That’s not RARBG. That’s a quasi-domain squatter trying to lure people in with the name of a legendary community, but just showing the same crap results as any other public torrent aggregator and presumably loading it with ads (that I mercifully don’t see with Firefox uBlock Origin) in order to profit.
I honestly wouldn’t bother with public trackers. They work great for debrid services with something like kodi or stremio but if you want to “own” or build your collection you have much better options
1. Private trackers - people seed, they have rules on uploads and actually moderate
2. Usenet is still alive and thriving for this.
3. Libraries still exist and you can rent and rip media there
4.Internet Archive is a great resource for old stuff
5. Just buy physical copies and rip em. Can check eBay etc.
Generally a lot of them you can get an invite from someone on Reddit or discord. A lot also open up for a week or so allowing people to register every year or whenever a major tracker goes down so the refuges can join. you can check places like Reddit /r/opensignups.
A lot of mainstream stuff is ripped already, the “ratio” on some is more if you download a torrent, they want you to seed it for x amount of time or seed it back x amount to the community. I don’t know of any that expect you to be ripping and uploading that way, it’s recommended but a lot have groups for mainstream content.
There are a few “elitist” private trackers that require “interviews” and stuff, but don’t let that scare you off 99% of them are all just grab and invite or sign up and seed back to community for the week or so minimum (preferably longer) and your good to go!
Regarding seed ratio, generally by perma seeding. Many private sites either use seed time requirements instead of ratio or offer bonus points for seed time which can be exchanged for ratio. But also as new editions and formats are released, the library has a bit more turnaround than your music sites of yesteryear.
I was looking for this european movie from 10 years ago only last month, could not find it anywhere on line, streaming or torrent. I'm pretty confident there is still a lot of stuff missing.
hey there's a project idea: a "todo list" for rippers that scrapes imdb and checks what's not in pirate bay (and then looks for dvd's on ebay / libraries)
What movie was it? There’s a good chance I can find it.
If you’re in Reddit, there’s also a subreddit dedicated specifically to this kind of thing (requests for stuff that is no longer available) called /r/DHExchange
Public trackers like the piratebay face a lot of issues with retention. If it’s not mainstream or recent people often don’t seed or maintain it. If you join a private tracker there’s ones dedicated to keeping older sources like that a live!
For really obscure content, internet archive, your library, usenet or even eBay are the go to!
SoulSeek was also pretty good for finding obscure music. I like collecting everything that was released (not live performances, though) and SoulSeek filled some, but not all gaps I had.
use their RSS feed + a seed box to automatically grab stuff as it’s posted some sites have ratio free for large files to get them seeded faster. at least that’s what I did a decade plus ago.
But good luck to see a live seed. I have a torrent from ~2010 which is stuck at 2%, so some seed did come online some years ago I was able to leech those meager bits from them - but not ever since.
Same for my own torrent on TPB from 2008, i tried to dload it in 2015 and wasn't sucessful in it despite it was 1st one for some years for that particular title.
For any query, just look at the file sizes (or sort by file size if the view allows you). Then you can see that there just aren’t many movie torrents on TPB larger than single-digit GB. A Blu-Ray remux will be minimum 14GB, and often much larger.
They are not popular because with meager 20 TB drive, you can either have entire movie collection of all movies you actually like (and then some more), and visit again, or you can have 20x less content without much visible gain of quality (if you see it its either rare too complex scene, bad reencode or you are simply sitting too close to TV). Same goes for audio, even 2GB rips have good 5.1 or 7.1 tracks.
Its not hard to decide what to prefer. Even with 1GB/s optic fiber I just couldn't be bothered to download 20-40x larger files and then struggle to see any difference in 4k on 75" screen.
And lets be honest - apart from poor folks with OCD or similar trait, after 1 minute of watching I couldn't care less about audiovisual quality, heck I enjoy even 720p rip if its the only thing available.
Not only does TPB not have many remuxes, but it also has fairly few re-encodes using the modern high-quality codecs that you are talking about.
It’s funny to hear someone say that hard drive sizes are too small, and internet connections too slow, when RuTracker (a tracker whose core audience is former USSR, often shitty provincial cities) has a very lively culture of remuxes.
Ya I still have mad love for TPB. My ISP was blocking my private tracker recently and while I would usually just run things through a seedbox it made me happy I could still turn to my trusty ol' friend.
I'm happy making one-shot payments for most types of media.
But I want to start a new bittorrent tracker for individual movies or episodes for which the provider requires you to create a recurring subscription, to rip off such content unabashedly.
> TPB has become an institution that people just expected to be there. Noone willing to take the technology further. The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design. It never changed except for one thing – the ads. More and more ads was filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful they somehow ended up even worse.
> As a big fan of the KLF I once learned that it’s great to burn great things up. At least then you can quit while you’re on top. I think I left TPB just a little bit after that top, and not when it’s as shitty as it was when it was closed today. It feels good that it might have closed down forever, just a real shame the way it did that. A planned retirement would have given the community time and a way to kick off something new, something better, something faster, something more reliable and with no chance of corrupting itself. Something that had a soul and could retain it.
The pirate bay raid is a good example of the kind of soft power the US has lost with their recent behavior. Hard to imagine Stockholm police being as receptive nowadays.
edit: I'm very sorry for making a relevant comment that extrapolate on the content of the shared article.
Meanwhile a huge portion of them are filmed in other countries, edited by brits, staring europeans, etc.
There's a good reason major studios have spent billions on film studios in the UK instead of the US.
Take something like Andor. Filmed in the UK and Spain, with a team of staff almost exclusively from the UK and EU. With a Mexican lead actor, 1 American co-lead, and then tons of British Actors, a few Australians, Swedish, German, Irish, etc.
Very few big movies or tv shows can be classed as "American" these days. They require people and facilities from all over the place.
Even if that's true, the influence is on the decline. It's a combination of factors: fewer and fewer era-defining works and simply novel messages to tell, franchises sucked dry, games and youtube replacing movies.
Less and less though. New-ish Hollywood movies started feeling like a slop before ChatGPT was released with all their endless "Batman vs Pikachu"-likes.
Anecdotally, the people I talk to outside the U.S. see the film industry there as stuck in a Disney/Marvel pattern for the most part. Sure, there are good films, but there's a lot of cynical slop being turned out too and it's become so prevalent that it's a bit of a joke at this point. I blame the stagnation on the extreme consolidation of media companies.
People I know watch less and less each year. I don't think it's because they're getting older, as the reasons they cite usually revolves around how the source material has been butchered.
And if subscriber numbers were still going up, I sincerely doubt that the producers kept increasing the subscription cost over the last few years.
Honestly, I think that soft power has been massively damaged too, with people looking for less virtue signalling and less asinine gender swaps along with contrived homosexuality in their media
American troops have been granted full immunity against Swedish law when they are in Sweden, according to the most recent military treaties. I don't know if you consider such a deal to be soft power or hard power. But it is a lot more than any server room raid.
Yandex is the best search engine. Sites like Fmovies or moviesjoy include nearly everything. I couldn't find the Monty Python series, but Yandex's first results were ready to play it for me in seconds.
This has been my go-to for discovering new things to watch for 15 years. If something doesn't show up in the top-100 list, I'm generally unaware of it.
We need to raid those lobbyists. How much money did the
get from the USA?
So the real pirates was the swedish government. It's time
to completely change the whole government. Back in 2006
they thought they targeted only few individuals. I am sure
there are many more people who don't support what the
swedish government did. Did they ever apologize for serving
US corporations here? How much financial kickback did they
get there?
For some reason I thought the pirate bay was like fake/scam urls now. Is that or was that not the case? I thought I was remember the URL constantly changing and it was hard to keep up.
<3 Still a great public tracker. We absolutely need people who will run sites like this and crack and bypass stiff like Denuvo and so on. We really do need to keep these sort of skills, tools, and communities alive to be able to resist digital oppression and techno-fascists. Sounds corny as hell but it's true imo.
The hypocrisy of tech bros claiming to make well into the six figures being unwilling up pay a few dollars a month for dozens or hundreds of hours of entertainment while simultaneously expecting that everyone else should pay for the increasingly buggier software that pays their salaries....
Most of the problems many of you are complaining about with streamers are the result of your fellow programmers doing poor work. Consider the irony that many in this discussion won't pay for Disney+ because of the technical issues on the software side of things.
So not to hijack this thread or anything but there's one good metric (if nothing else... the fact FB overwrote your email while Google seems to believe in data liberation, and fewer breaches) to tell apart the difference between those two companies
Google had been asked to remove Pirate Bay in results. They didn't. On Google, and I don't really know how it changed over the years, but there'd be a notice about links removed due to DMCA, if it came to that, basically. (Okay, Youtube, which they own, has always been a bit aggressive, and that isn't nothing)
Facebook? Facebook wouldn't let you SEND a link to PB in private messages. It still deletes your post now if you link Anna's Archive. This after apparently heavily scraping LibGen
I don't love Google for a lot of reasons but I damn well feel better using it compared to Mr. "Dumb Fucks"
> For now, the site remains online, twenty years after Hollywood thought it had seen the last of it. And whoever is in charge today, will likely do everything possible to keep it that way.
I'm vaguely aware that other people than the original group are running it now.
Also, I don't torrent much, but it seems pretty stagnant and dead. It's been occasionally useful to me to find older stuff that doesn't seem to be well represented on newer (public) sites.
I've never not found something that has been publicly released on it. Though, I don't typically stray too far from the mainstream path for the media I'm looking for.
I can absolutely find new stuff on there. It took Project Hail Mary a little while to get on there, presumably because it was a cinema release only for quite a while but a good quality version popped up after a couple of weeks, and a bad quality "guy holding a camcorder in the cinema" version showed up after about 1 week, IIRC
I don't recall exactly when it went onto streaming, but I'm pretty sure I got a good quality version before that. It may have been released for streaming in other regions earlier than I thought though, I don't keep super up to date with that sort of thing, as I generally don't watch movies super soon after they're released
I find the stream rips to be really shitty quality.. The original source is very low bitrate, compressed tae fuck. I find for stream rips from netflix for example I need to download a 4k rip in order to watch in 1080, and that's acceptable.
Torrenting is alive and well… for recent releases and new stuff. All the old stuff is pretty hard to find now. When demonoid was around you could find just about everything. The worst part is for a lot of it there isn’t a legal way to get them either.
That's the tragedy of the MAFIAA death throes period imo.. With all their lawsuits and bullshit they never even slowed down the big public trackers and torrents of the popular stuff they were trying to stop being shared.. Instead they killed loads of small private trackers which housed exquisitely curated collections of stuff that wasn't available anywhere else for neither love nor money.
It's kind of cool but also kind of spooky: A legally targeted site just staying online for 20 years, not because of obscurity, but simply because it can't be taken down.
I don't know who's included in your "our", but I rather strongly like that American/Swedish/EU/whoever institutions don't have the capability to control the entire world and would prefer it stay that way. That's the beauty of the internet, and it's concerning that many people regard that lack of complete global control as an "incapability". Your laws don't, and shouldn't, apply to me.
I think the site has been hosted by the police since them. They probably use it as a honeypot or something - except the site is so poorly managed that no one really comes :D
Every once in a while I'll try to watch something through the Intended Method™ and it always proves itself to be a worse experience.
Most recent example - I was watching Malcolm in the Middle on Disney+ with my girlfriend, and we found that there are entire audio tracks missing in multiple episodes. Usually some kind of ADR, like someone talking off camera. There's an episode where Reese rents an apartment and there's a recurring bit of him talking to his depressed neighbour through the wall. But you'd have no idea because they somehow completely deleted the neighbour's dialogue from the audio, so it's just Reese having a one-sided conversation with a wall. We saw multiple episodes where something like this happened, and when I looked online there were reports of it dating back years.
Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata, etc. No one providing official routes to this media seems to care. You have AI-upscaled "4k" movies where the actors don't even look like themselves and there are hallucinated artifacts and things that aren't there. Images cropped to widescreen, like the infamous Duff Beer joke being out of frame in The Simpsons. TV series with edits or entire episodes removed because they were deemed too offensive. Movies and shows randomly appearing and disappearing so you have to endlessly manage subscriptions and switch between different apps with better or worse players just to watch a single series. Just a nightmare.
Not to go off on a complete tangent, but...
>... like the infamous Duff Beer joke being out of frame in The Simpsons.
My collection of The Simpsons, seasons 1-13, are all TV rips from waaaaayyyyy back in the 00's. Sure, it's not super high-quality, but at least they don't look like the ugly remasters (on some of the ones I've tried watching on Disney+, they look like someone's drawn over the old cells), the aspect ratio is the original so nothing's missing and, as a personal bonus, they've got the old Q13 logo in the bottom (I grew up in western WA). They still look great on my newer TV.
Edit: Oh, and the Michael Jackson episode never suddenly disappeared from my library.
To me it is the difference between art and product.
A show like The Simpsons is both. The viewers care about the art, and we tolerate the product to get it. The creators are creating art, compromising with the corporation and broadcaster to make it enough of a product. But the corp/broadcaster only care about the product. The art is the chocolate around the advertising pill.
So when the product-minded people control preservation and resharing of the product, the art always gets compromised. Jokes are clipped. Audio is broken. Episodes are pulled. For all the wrong reasons.
Same with Beavis and Butthead with all its music videos, it seems like it cant be properly released with alm that intact so its up to King Turd to do the dirty work and make it avaikable to all
This happens with any TV or Movie that has music, and its incredibly frustrating. Always best to download to not confuse yourself as to why the media is somehow different than you remember.
They are unlikely partners. And yet it is the model that allows arts to get something out there while it gets exploited for gains. But at the end those with the money make the final call.
Alas, we would hope that it would be the best art that gets preserved but a lot of the time it is some of the most mass produced.
The terminology is art vs content. Anybody talking about "content", by definition, do not actually care about what that content is, just that it is contained into something they charge for.
No I don’t think that’s what I’m going for.
To me content often implies a kind of volume of work. Always be posting. Don’t miss a few days or your viewers go elsewhere. Lots and lots of content!
The concerns of a product are the salability. Is has to fit perfectly into a 22 mins slot. It can’t upset the wrong people. It has to fit the mood and culture that our advertisers want. Etc.
You seem to be violently agreeing with the parent commenter. What you're saying matches their definition.
No, it doesn't. You get good at something by doing it a lot, consistently; it's basically rule 1 of learning any artform.
This still doesn't contradict the framing of "art vs content".
It absolutely does for a movie.
This is a great example of when pulling out a dictionary implies that you've lost the argument, because if people were using the word in the same sense as the dictionary definition, you would have no need of the dictionary to “prove” the meaning.
User toyg is using the same definition than Richard Stallman (I tried to find the relevant essay but can't; I just remember RMS also pushed back against "content"). Toyg is not making up a new line of thought, this has been argued before. Not only by Stallman, either, this dislike for the term "content" is also espoused by some here on HN (and I agree, to be clear).
I think it goes beyond latching on the dictionary definition, and really looking into how platform owners see the bits they push around. It's not about being "clever" with words to score a point, but actually about the meaning we want to give art, be it novels, drawings, music or shows/movies.
If they said “platform owners” I'd give them credit for that, but they didn't; they said “anyone”.
Context matters.
Also, "platform owners" (or advertisers, as another comment puts it) managed to install this term and so most of us use it, so it's no longer just platform owners. Which is why RMS railed against it.
Your point is valid (and I make a similar one frequently), but it doesn't gain from being presented as good term vs bad term use. It's the context that makes it pejorative.
In the context of advertisers, content is just what you deliver for a price (Netflix, Disney), or against which you slap advertising (Youtube). You want more of it so you can charge more, and care little what fills this content pipeline.
For classic simpsons seasons, you can find DVDs on eBay for pretty cheap with the original crops and commentary tracks. I hear there are are rips of those available too.
I managed to grab season 1 thru 10 on DVD for $15. Ripped them to storage, probably the best presentation you can get out of it.
But some of those old rips hold up. Not great but they will do.
A few years ago I did see a rip that pushed the limits of codecs. It was, at that point, every season of Futurama before Hulu brought it back but it fit on a single layer DVD. It was squeezed just a little too much as that was something like 100ish episodes. But neat to see.
you need to upload that torrent :)
What MJ episode?!
They must be thinking of John Jay Smith's guest episode.
CHALMERS: Yes, and you call him John Jay Smith despite the fact that the voice is obviously Michael Jackson's.
This is the key, streaming content providers delete and edit things to match the feeling of society at the moment or perceived societal pressures. Really not how history should work imho
For a while I was really happy because it sounded like the owners of the Intended Method™ had finally realized how much damage to their bottom line their terrible UX was having, so I fondly remembered TPB but moved over to the official platforms... then we started getting some hulu exclusives (not available in Canada) and the H(o)BOGo, and then a few more platform fragmentations... I have enough going on that I can't currently be bothered switching over to TPB but I ended up culling my streaming down to just Dropout, Nebula, severely modified Youtube and some patreons I care about.
I am happy to speak with my wallet and tell the services to get lost and I'd be heading back to TPB if I were still in a phase of my life where discussing the latest Battlestar Galactica, Lost or Game of Thrones was a central focus of my socialization - as it is though, the cost to follow the Intended Method™ is simply too expensive in money, discovery time, and platform bugs for me to give a damn.
Maybe they'll learn their lesson again and sanity will reign - but the current media pricing is too expensive (in a myriad of ways) for the value it's providing.
A recent experience I had was :
1. buy movie on iTunes 2. have kids that can't do long distance drives 3. obtain dvd players for car 4. realized I can't play films that I "bought" on DVD players
It feels like the "Buy" button on iTunes/Apple TV is misleading, and should be renamed to "License to watch on Apple devices". Obvious in hindsight, but this type of DRM severely restricts use cases.
Netflix has the same problem. Downloaded some TV shows for my daughter to watch while we were travelling. Worked fine on the plane, arrived to the hotel, connected to WiFi "This content is not available in your location". Ok, disconnect, don't need wifi. Same message, "This content is not available in your location".
I spent a couple of years travelling around the world, and this is what drove me to piracy. Every time I moved country, the streaming services would change and the show I was watching yesterday is no longer available in this country.
Luckily the torrent sites are available from every country.
I've had movies I've "bought" disappear from the Apple account. I guess they lost the license and I'm supposed to download all purchases and manually copy between devices. I contacted Apple and they offered a free rental as compensation. "Buy" doesn't mean the same on these streaming platforms, its just a longer-term rental.
I left Apple Music over this. My albums would keep quietly disappearing. I spent hours on the phone with their support, and despite their promises, nothing ever changed. I left Apple Music, and then all of their cloud services as well. Today, I'm 100% Apple-free, happily playing MP3s from Bandcamp in my Emacs. :)
Good job, almost the full Stallman! ;)
Stallman would never use an MP3 as it used to be a proprietary format.
It says right in the TOS that it's licensed, not sold. Then the button says "Buy". It's intentionally misleading and contradictory.
Fuck the TOS.
When I purchase stuff, I don't wanna read a legal contract. No one wants, no one does.
The contrariam in me thinks: If the contract is that crucial, let's have a mandatory, non skippable, slow scrolling of it, or maybe audio version slowly read.
I bet all TOS would get much simpler and tame!
Whaaat... oh wow that's bleak. I guess Apple do whatever they want.
I’ve had Apple delete my music from my devices.
As in, I had a physical CD I had purchased, ripped to MP3, and loaded onto my iPhone.
iTunes recognised it, linked it to the matching official entry in their music store, they lost the licence and deleted all customer copies including mine.
I don't think it's really that misleading. You're buying a license and I'm hard pressed to think of some other interpretation of that.
That the license kind of sucks and comes with restrictions is the bigger problem than any inherent deception
While I agree with you in spirit... were you expecting that you could... burn the film to a DVD or something?
Of course buying a movie on itunes means you can only watch it on capable devices. You can't play a youtube video on a VHS player either.
You used to be able to buy songs on iTunes and burn them to CD. Why would the expectation for movies be any different?
While I agree it seems obvious you can’t do that, based on how these platforms have limited things for a long time… but that really should be something you can do.
Why can’t I get the file and put it on another device? Why can’t I burn it to a dvd? It makes sense that Apple aren’t required to make more software for random devices, but why can’t I have the file and do what I want with it?
You’re absolutely right. If it was a song from iTunes you bought you sure as hell could burn it on a dvd or cd or whatever. (Right? It’s been a long time.) So if I buy a movie why can’t I archive it on a DVD?
The upcoming financial quarter is a big issue for whomever licenced that content to Apple and to a lesser extant Apple Inc themselves.
honestly given these types of shenanigans from the big platforms, I think buying physical discs is underrated. At least for the classics that you really want to add to your long-term collection
Not at all (hence saying "obvious in hindsight"). Simply pointing out that, at the time, my purchasing decision wasn't influenced by how many use cases it would restrict.
Also, IIRC, there was a period where you could burn Audio CDs from music that you purchased on iTunes.
edit: turns out music purchased on iTunes is DRM-free!
> there was a period where you could burn Audio CDs from music that you purchased on iTunes.
Music purchased on iTunes is DRM-free, so you can definitely burn CDs with them.
Ah very nice. I suppose it makes sense that music is DRM-free but films aren't
I suppose it makes sense that music is DRM-free but films aren't
Why?
It's orders of magnitude more expensive to make a movie than it is to make a track.
yeah exactly
Haven't used iTunes in more than a decade, but it used to have options for converting files to different formats and burning playlists to disks and ripping CDs.
Actually there were some DVD players back in the day that could play digital files burned to DVD or CD, and it was totally possible to burn DVDs that could play normally on most players from video files.
Ah yes, the divx that wasn’t self-destructing discs.
buying a video game at Walmart means you're only able to play it there, it's so obvious:)
Of course b̵u̵y̵i̵n̵g̵ licensing a movie on itunes...
Are you trying to listen in Dolby surround on a stereo setup? Disney+ defaults to surround sound and you’ll lose some audio channels if your speakers are stereo
Channel issues are like 90% of issues like this, but it's not always user error. Often a cheap production will just ship the front left + right channels as the stereo mix, instead of down mixing all the left + center channels into the stereo left etc. This is endemic in back catalogs on streaming providers where the catalog is a bulk assets that nobody reviews and is passed around between companies that don't care about the quality they deliver to each other.
That seems like a terrible default, aren't most people listening in stereo at best?
This is basically the issue.
User error but blaming the service to make an ideological point.
The dialog is just fine if you have a surround sound system or spend 5 seconds once to select stereo sound. Importantly, the dialog is still missing in the torrent versions taken from the surround sound stream because the same problem occurs. You only get the missing dialog in stereo if you download the stereo rip.
>User error but blaming the service to make an ideological point
A streaming service incorrectly defaulting to surround sound is most certainly not a user error.
Ultimately history has proven that copyright owners can't be trusted to preserve their own IP and preservation should be entirely legal.
Those involved in the creation of the art can write a contract that stops it being ruined by future owners. When the Bobs sold their rights to Back to the Future they added terms to protect the brand. I know of one time where they intervened to stop a 3D conversion that Universal wanted. (Personally, I think 3D conversion can work well, e.g. Titanic, but other times it is monstrous, e.g. Star Wars Ep 1)
Thing is, most people don't really care about this. They watch something in the evening maybe weekend and that is it. This will not change and these services are meant for the masses.
I'm in China and often get blocked by Netflix or Prime Video for using a VPN... Torrents are often the only thing that works.
On missing audio: usually I notice this when I watch with subtitles at night and then end up rewatching during the day with audio at much higher volume… And the thing that is said to be said is just… Not there?
The fact that they refuse to balance audio for standard stereo setups is a whole other nightmare.
Lately whenever I watch movies my remote stays in my hand so I can boost the volume during dialogue and turn it down during loud action scenes. I've had two different soundbars, one of them quite expensive, and it's an issue on both.
From my understanding it’s not which soundbar that’s the issue, it’s that you’re only using a soundbar for audio. The channels all get compressed into one device with a couple speakers instead of whatever it was originally created for, like five or seven speakers with a subwoofer
You're right. I just don't want surround.I have two big, nice speakers for my tv, and that's what I want. But I still have to actively work the remote, especially with a kid sleeping in my house.
I’m in the same boat. I have a couple floor standers for audio, but I added a center channel and it helped with dialogue
I'd swear to any diety "The Game" on HBO was a screener. No thank you, I'll just trawl the high seas for loot.
This is the first year I have cancelled all my subs. Used to be a TPB regular around the time it took off. Years later I tried to go legit and have had subs with all the major streamers (netflix, disney, amazon etc) But the way you get squeezed year on year for what was standard before e.g. 4K or no ads to be gradually offered worse terms and degraded output quality just bites after a while. I can't justify spending €20-30 per month on what isn't the best quality available for the content on offer.
Plus I've found "legit" to be a moving goal post. One day a show is on one platform, the next it's on another, or it becomes unavailable except for [insert random foreign country here]. Even HD is a ripoff sometimes when half the episode comes in all compressed looking. They'll blame my bandwidth except I have no problem streaming an episode without adaptive compression over Bittorrent.
People can say what they want about piracy, but it continues to be what I consider a necessity against culturally important media being further tainted by rent seekers looking to make another buck in any way they can.
i feel like this is an important piece. even if you want to do the "right thing", is it really supporting these platforms that horse-trade content in huge multi-billion dollar deals just so they can increase their userbase with the intent to jam more ads down their throat? have any of these platforms _improved_ the experience for the average creator? they're poison, it almost makes it feel more righteous to steal.
Yeah, I was a pirate as a kid. I said “give me a place where I can pay to have legal access to everything and I will.”
Then Netflix came along and introduced streaming. I was happy. It began to fragment a bit, I could live with that.
Now it’s 10 different platforms with rotating content, I need a 3rd party website to know where and when to watch a particular thing, it’s a mess.
Not only that, unlike with cable they make it difficult to record the content they’re serving me so I can watch later myself.
I am now a pirate again.
> Used to be a TPB regular around the time it took off. Years later I tried to go legit
I still pay for subs but never utilize them because piracy is a superior experience.
Yeah all the streaming services have gotten so bad and they are adding ads and they are lowering quality and they are getting too expensive. Arghgg I say
I mean in the end this is still theft. Someone spent time and effort working on this. And you took a shit on that effort because it was inconvenient not to. Like the creators of said content you stole would not approve of what you did.
I totally get it. I'm a thief as well. But I guess the difference is, I don't need to rationalize everything into some sort of twisted sense justice. I steal because I don't care what the creator thinks.
I truly feel old when we are rehashing the same thing that happened when TPB, Limewire etc were taking off.
Down to the arguments being made why this is “theft”. I also can’t believe that the arguments by the general pop have shifted to support multi billion dollar companies and their narrative.
RAM is too expensive to waste on "streaming"
I have always prefered downloading
Also fun, Google purchased movies over the years getting moved to Youtube and then seemingly losing all surround sound content and coming through as 2-channel only (Android TV).
I will add to the list that for some weird reason in my country original language is not always available for all movies, and the subtitle experience in genenal is lacking.
I am in the french-speaking part of Canada.
In some Netflix shows, they say words in the english audio that are translated in French with different words with a similar meaning, and with english close-caption words that are also different from the original english audio.
Quite amazing.
My favorite example of bad Netflix subtitles is Suits (2011). The music during the intro is the same throughout the series, from the song Ima Robot - Greenback Boogie. The English subtitles for the lyrics are wrong every single season, and they're wrong in a different way for every one of those seasons. The lyrics are not at all hard to understand--they've pretty specifically cut together some of the lyrics that are easiest to understand--so it's extremely obvious, but somehow nobody at any point figured out that they could just do it right once and not look totally incompetent.
After the initial Netflix release of the first 3.5 seasons (might have been 4.5, it was a baffling cutoff) they somehow decided not to add the rest, so I pirated it. Every single pirated intro came with perfectly correct lyrics.
French part of Switzerland. Quite a few shows and movies, ie anime but also others, have original audio track (so lets say japanese for anime) and only german subs. You can probably count number of folks on your fingers and toes who would even be able, let alone willing to watch this in such combination from this region of meagre 2.2 million folks but quite rich on average.
So torrents it is, its legal here, lightning speed, always superb quality (one can choose any movie in range between 1GB and 50 GB for 1080p and all is very good looking), get it in a minute, and watch.
I don't blame Netflix generally (well for those german subs I definitely do, I know they have english ones just couldn't be bothered and I have hard time believing they have region issue with english subs) but license owners, they are the ultimate fuckers messing with content holders/resellers/renters, and consequently us users.
Also, torrents are so convenient, I won't be paying some service just to see a single show a year. I just won't even for a month and shuffle things like idiot, thats a bad proposition.
Downloading such content is not prohibited by law in Switzerland, thus legal. Uploading however is a different story. So stating that torrenting is legal is not actually true. Unless maybe you simply fake your upload.
Even for English speakers, the subtitle experience with pirated movies is often lacking. Movies with non-English-speaking characters are often meant to have subtitles for their dialog and not for English speakers by default, but many pirated versions don't do this. I recently saw discussions online of a lot of people saying they went an embarrassingly long time without knowing there were supposed to be subtitles for the aliens in District 9 or the mute hand-signing girl in The Boys.
The Intended Method(tm) is an intentionally gimped feeding trough designed primarily to pacify uninquisitive minds and line Hollywood exec pockets. They have never ever been honest in their accounting or reasonable in their expectations, let alone charitable enough to let the art propagate amongst its consumers in the manner they see fit (without court interventions). So I don't see why we have to be honest in our consumption.
There is plenty of money to be made in secondary sources -- merchandising and so on. They can give up trying to lock down information that naturally wants to be free. But they won't, because greed.
> Most recent example - I was watching Malcolm in the Middle on Disney+ with my girlfriend, and we found that there are entire audio tracks missing in multiple episodes.
The licenses for the song tracks have also expired; so they removed these too. The main noticeable difference is being the intro sequence originally sung by There Might be Giants which has been replaced with a less-impressive cover that ruins the vibe.
Why can't these tracks just forever live with the series? I went and bought the DVD box-set just because of such. A £2 purchase that I than ripped to my NAS.
I've not watched the latest remake because I don't want to ruin the original vibe of such a great show.
Real acting, real filming; the last of it's kind.
> That's because the license for the tracks expired
They're talking about pieces of dialogue in the show, not licensed music.
If they're shouting at neighbours through a wall I'd be willing to bet that the dialogue is happening because of loud copyrighted music being played at the same time. They probably just did some automated music detection and cut the whole audio track in those sections.
Edit: I lost the bet and there's no notable music involved: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Pu8-dxRkoTI
I know. And I am commenting on that the licensed music within the series has been replaced due to expired licensing for which that itself is ridiculous.
Re-licensing music is a two-fold challenge. Sometimes it's much more efficient to use substitute music, instead of negotiating for new rights.
First, licensing arrangements for "all marketing channels" only account for the channels that exist at the time. When a new market channel opens up, such as streaming, music labels will require new licensing terms for that channel. If they don't, they might not get paid. (TV & movie studios are just as ruthless as music labels).
Second, in turn, the labels often have to get new permission from artists for the new channel. Tracking down all artists can be a challenge and require resources that they can't recoup.
And all that just strengthens the case for piracy: you actually get the original thing.
Hah! How soon 'till some MBA comes up with a scheme to start licensing movies one word at a time?
Don't worry. Now that you can license actors 'likeness' for AI generation, they'll be replacing the people in the shows soon too.
I have never seen an episode that had a cover of the theme song.
Maybe that was a thing with the new reboot? I don't know because I heard nothing that made me want to watch it.
This is a good point. Another problem with streaming services, specifically for music streaming services, is that they can change the track of a previously released album with no user choice to hear the original. Example: Track 4 of Elephunk by the Black Eyed Peas. It was universally replaced with the “clean” version of the song. I’m not a fan of rewriting history.
Disney+ is truly unmitigated dogshit. It constantly chokes and stutters, seems to cause my NVIDIA Sheild to peg its CPU and/or page to disk, or something, to the point where it becomes unresponsive for multiple seconds at a time. I genuinely cannot understand how you could so utterly bungle software that's been a solved problem for over a decade.
> But you'd have no idea because they somehow completely deleted the neighbour's dialogue from the audio
This sounds pretty unlikely. It's more likely that there's an issue with your surround system, and that audio "should" be coming from your rear speakers but for some reason it's not.
It wasn't a surround sound system, we were watching on the built-in app on a Fire TV from the TV's speakers.
Also just Google "malcolm in the middle missing audio" and you'll find a ton of people with the issue
https://www.reddit.com/r/malcolminthemiddle/comments/1kggg7d...
This also reminded me of another issue - the show was filmed to be broadcast in 4:3 but apparently someone along the line decided 16:9 is inherently better, so they put out the show in widescreen and now there's a ton of shots where you can see things you're not supposed to see. Someone else standing in for an actor that wasn't there when they filmed, or a toy doll in place of a real baby because they filmed on a day the baby actor wasn't there.
Yup. That’s your issue. Disney+ outputting Dolby 5.1 and your speakers are stereo.
This shouldn't be an issue anybody has. We've had Dolby surround sound for over 40 years now, and everything was fine until recently. We had quadrophonic sound years before that.
Well it's still their fault for not making sure their audio works on a normal, non-surround setup
Also worth noting that we switched the audio track to Spanish and you can hear it just fine.
That's not what the link says. In fact it is specifically saying it should be working in stereo but tdolby surround has missing channels.
The Mad Men AI upscale was such trash. You could see cameras, crew, equipment, etc. total mess that showed no care for the material.
stremio.
I experienced the same trying to watch One Piece on Crunchy Roll.
Many of the episodes on their dubbed versions were just awful or de-synced. It can continue like that for 3-4 episodes then suddenly fix itself.
Then when I watch in Japanese with subtitles, the subtitles can occasionally be missing on some scenes.
>and we found that there are entire audio tracks missing in multiple episodes
Personally for me the worst case of this is Scrubs. The soundtrack of the show is so incredibly crucial to its atmosphere. There's a scene with the Coral's Dreaming of You that they've replaced with some awful generic track in the streaming versions. That people see the show now and maybe don't even know it is just a crime.
Many times I purchase or rent a movie now, and immediately go to torrent it and feel guilt-free.
Torrent meets my needs better than official methods.
I don't feel guilty about it because I still paid. Now, if only, I could have a better way to filter out the garbage from the gold.
> Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata, etc.
The thing with free is you will tend to be less demanding & most certainly more forgiving even if not less resentful.
One reason why finding market fit for products built for free consumers is harder than for paid. The ones paying you will want their problems solved pronto, and if you're diligent enough, you'll end up building a product that solves those same "hair on the fire" problems for many others with hopefully deeper pockets.
It doesn't seem you understood we talk about movies and tv shows, not some customer app solving... problems?
Puzzling comment overall, will refrain from usual tropes and assume in good faith its 'lost in translation'.
Not talking about movies or apps, but a general observation on the dynamics of free v paid, from both, the supply & demand sides.
> Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata
A friend once pointed that out. He pays a lot and gets low quality. That was what changed his mind. That was also almost twenty years ago.
Most people changed. US corporations trying to raid people in foreign countries is, in my opinion, no longer acceptable at all. The swedish government should be ashamed for acting as US proxies here (nowadays with Trump this is more clear, but even 20 years ago or 25 years ago, it should have been a no-brainer).
> you have to endlessly manage subscriptions and switch between different apps with better or worse players just to watch a single series.
Obligatory classic joke:
Have you seen the new show? It's on Tubu. It's literally on Heebee. It's on Poodee with ads. It's literally on Dippy. You can probably find it on Weeno. Dude it's on Gumpy. It's a Pheebo original. It's on Poob. You can watch it on Poob. You can go to Poob and watch it. Log onto Poob right now. Go to Poob. Dive into Poob. You can Poob it. It's on Poob. Poob has it for you. Poob has it for you.
It's very strange to think about this in the current context. Anything P2P used to be the Anti Christ of the Software Industry. The lengths Microsoft and game vendors went to prevent copying is insane. Installing Windows as well as various Higher End software is a huge pain because of this.
On the other hand Microsoft is very much leading with OpenAI in vacuuming any content, stripping effectively copyright claims.
That being said, nowadays the only use case for me to use Pirate Bay is when I cannot get a movie elsewhere. I'd pay for it but it's not possible - because of copyright...
The software industry mostly gave up when they saw it wasn't working.
Even the music industry (of all of them!) mostly gave up.
Only Hollywood and the wider film/TV industry is so stubborn.
The software industry certainly didn't give up. Most smaller game studios outsource their copy protection to Steam. Larger studios use Denuvo which works better than ever. Some Denuvo games stay uncracked for years. Non-entertainment software mostly moved to SaaS with a subscription model which is essentially uncrackable or, where that was not feasible (CAD and video editing), use extremely invasive copy protection measures. For example, Dassault can catch your Solidworks cracks even on an airgapped computer. They taint every file you create as pirated and when you give that file to a licensed user, their legitimate copy will phone home and have their lawyers force the legitimate user to betray you.
Steam's DRM is completely symbolic. There are widespread cracks available and Steam is AFAIK not even bothering with the cat and mouse game, and Denuvo games released this year are being cracked in < 24 hours.
I would never underestimate the lengths people are willing to go to to 'crack' games. Countless online-only games have been cracked with users reverse engineering the network protocol and writing their own servers. LLMs will probably greatly ease that process as well.
The SteamDRM wrapper tool itself, freely distributed through the Stramworks SDK, used to straight up ship with a feature to strip the DRM from any exe.
> Some Denuvo games stay uncracked for years
this era is well and truly over. you've got pre-release hypervisor bypasses and then a conventional crack a couple weeks later.
edit: i might've misinterpreted your comment, i expect some older denovo titles might never get the modern treatment
> They taint every file you create as pirated and when you give that file to a licensed user, their legitimate copy will phone home and have their lawyers force the legitimate user to betray you.
Can this be manipulated to frame arbitrary users for piracy?
Oh wow that's really smart of them, now you have a reason to send your hacked version along the cad file so the user on the other side can escape from their spyware :D
Recently wanted to watch Troy and could not find it for streaming anywhere, nor a pay-to-rent on the streaming platforms like youtube. You can "buy" it but as we've learned recently these companies don't really let you own a copy and reserve the right to remove your access in the future. So I just went ahead and pirated it.
It's not strange at all. It is all about power. At that time, power was obtained by opposing P2P and opposing piracy. Today power is obtained by piracy so they do piracy.
They're organizations run by people who may or may not have something that could be described as narcissistic personality disorder.
It's not particularly strange; the rationale for organizations like Microsoft and OpenAI is to be immune to any and all rules that could possibly foreseeably impact shareholder value. If you're not paying for their wares, you're impacting shareholder value. If you're asking them to actually license out content that they're training an AI on, you're impacting shareholder value.
Rules for thee, not for me, especially when it makes me - the special person who charitably graces society with my presence - a rich person.
If the corporates are OK downloading content in breach of licences for training their intelligences, which apparently they are, I consider myself OK doing the same to train the model in my head.
I haven't visited a torrent site since I found out I could search for them from within qBittorrent.
I don't think I'd prefer this, tbh. I would want to see the whole topic information when choosing what exact torrent to download. Is it marked "verified" or "questionable"? If it's "questionable", is it for some arbitrary formality, or something like "the audio is desynced"? Are there many different dubs (because I'd rather prefer not to have them, as they're bloating the files?)...
After a certain point, you get a sense of which release groups to trust or not.
Not to mention you can just open the download page from within qBittorrent.
I had no idea! As much as I appreciate TPB, their ads are cursed.
You browse torrent sites without uBlock Origin?
You use anything on the web without uBlock Origin?
They are cursed even with it.
wtf you talk about? here's my example of searching latest euphoria episode:
i.postimg.cc/tJ2tMJYm/pb-example.jpg
Do you see any ads there?
You mean you don't use Firefox? Then that's on you bro!!
They all do have auto firing things that would not necessarily show on a screenshot. It's a cat and mouse game between these sites and filter maintainers.
But even for those I recommend the popup blocker strict extension.
I only used Rutracker and Rarbg (rip), TPB felt sketchier. I wonder what's the "prime" English-language public tracker now? 1337?
1337 is OK. Rarbg too. For movies, nothing beats YTS imo.
I might be misremembering, but wasn't YIFY/YTS known for their awful quality ultra compressed releases? I thought they closed down many years ago tho, so no idea if they are the same people or if they still focus on low-quality releases.
tpb.party works without JS. It's the main mirror I use.
I've never seen a torrent site that had things marked.
Not those exact markings, but TPB does have user-markings displayed that can serve as a vouch for credibility.
- Normal User, no special status (No Skull) - Trusted (Pink Skull) - VIP (Green Skull) - Helper (Blue Skull, Legacy) - Moderator (Black MOD Tag) - Super Moderator (Red MOD Tag) - Administrator (Black ADMIN Tag)
https://pirates-forum.org/Thread-ThePirateBay-Want-Trusted-V...
Weird, I don't think I have ever seen that. Granted, I'm not a frequent user of TPB.
Perhaps you could try visiting the famous one mentioned in the headline.
What he is describing is how Rutracker does things.
You can? Tell me how
You can turn it on in `View -> Search engine`. Then a new tab will appear next to the main transfers one. You can (have to?) add search plugins, which is done from the same search tab (look for a button in the bottom right). And I think to remember you need to have Python installed for the search tab to work, but qBittorrent should prompt you automatically for it.
I might be misremembering something, so ask again if something I said didn't work or wasn't where I said.
Free extra tip: did you know qBittorrent has support for themes? I got a pretty clean dark theme one, but no way I can remember the name or where I found it.
I love qBittorrent.
https://www.techdirt.com/2012/01/20/mpaa-directly-publicly-t...
When it comes to films, I torrent exclusively remuxes or whole Blu-Ray images. TPB hasn't been relevant for me for the last 15 years or more, since it never had a culture of such large file sizes, just small re-encodes. I wonder why, because obviously that data doesn't have to pass through TPB's own servers.
> it never had a culture of such large file sizes, just small re-encodes. I wonder why, because obviously that data doesn't have to pass through TPB's own servers.
We (the users) have to concern ourselves with how big the file is. And TPB tends to surface the most popular stuff first.
Usually a 1080p re-encode is good enough quality for me. And a lot of the time if I'm looking for a movie to watch right away I'd rather just get it fast so I can start watching.
Where do you find those? I use 1337 and dht search engines. Can't be bothered to fiddle with private trackers. Wondering if you found something better.
E.g. ext.to aggregates torrents from a lot of public trackers, very often you can find good releases there.
I commented somewhere else already, but you can search directly from qBittorrent. Search by title, then filter by "Remux" or sort by size. Keep in mind tho that a blu-ray release must exist in the first place, and that some 4k blu-rays are just not very good to begin with (upscaling and what not).
RARBG used to be the way to go, until they shut down. I'm not aware of a good public replacement.
thepiratebay is fine they just don’t run indexes often so searches often fail for stuff just uploaded within last hour or two. Limetorrents updates indices frequently but uses ad providers that try to hijack your clicks and presses so it takes three or four clicks to get one click that isn’t hijacked. There is a bit of non overlap between those two sites.
Sounds like something that a browser like Brave was built to combat. I haven't visited the site in question but for a lot of the ad-heavy sites I do visit, I jump over to Brave to deal with the nonsense.
> RARBG used to be the way to go, until they shut down. I'm not aware of a good public replacement.
https://therarbg.to/
That’s not RARBG. That’s a quasi-domain squatter trying to lure people in with the name of a legendary community, but just showing the same crap results as any other public torrent aggregator and presumably loading it with ads (that I mercifully don’t see with Firefox uBlock Origin) in order to profit.
Whatever this is, it's not RARBG.
I honestly wouldn’t bother with public trackers. They work great for debrid services with something like kodi or stremio but if you want to “own” or build your collection you have much better options 1. Private trackers - people seed, they have rules on uploads and actually moderate
2. Usenet is still alive and thriving for this.
3. Libraries still exist and you can rent and rip media there
4.Internet Archive is a great resource for old stuff
5. Just buy physical copies and rip em. Can check eBay etc.
How do you join private trackers from scratch?
I used to do this kind of things decades ago, but there was also still a few things not ripped and uploaded you had _some_ chance of participating.
Nowadays I imagine ~everything under the sun is already ripped, so how can you contribute to seed ratio? (or is that not even a thing anymore?)
Generally a lot of them you can get an invite from someone on Reddit or discord. A lot also open up for a week or so allowing people to register every year or whenever a major tracker goes down so the refuges can join. you can check places like Reddit /r/opensignups.
A lot of mainstream stuff is ripped already, the “ratio” on some is more if you download a torrent, they want you to seed it for x amount of time or seed it back x amount to the community. I don’t know of any that expect you to be ripping and uploading that way, it’s recommended but a lot have groups for mainstream content.
There are a few “elitist” private trackers that require “interviews” and stuff, but don’t let that scare you off 99% of them are all just grab and invite or sign up and seed back to community for the week or so minimum (preferably longer) and your good to go!
>> How do you join private trackers from scratch?
https://old.reddit.com/r/trackers/wiki/how_to_get_started
Regarding seed ratio, generally by perma seeding. Many private sites either use seed time requirements instead of ratio or offer bonus points for seed time which can be exchanged for ratio. But also as new editions and formats are released, the library has a bit more turnaround than your music sites of yesteryear.
I was looking for this european movie from 10 years ago only last month, could not find it anywhere on line, streaming or torrent. I'm pretty confident there is still a lot of stuff missing.
hey there's a project idea: a "todo list" for rippers that scrapes imdb and checks what's not in pirate bay (and then looks for dvd's on ebay / libraries)
What movie was it? There’s a good chance I can find it.
If you’re in Reddit, there’s also a subreddit dedicated specifically to this kind of thing (requests for stuff that is no longer available) called /r/DHExchange
Public trackers like the piratebay face a lot of issues with retention. If it’s not mainstream or recent people often don’t seed or maintain it. If you join a private tracker there’s ones dedicated to keeping older sources like that a live!
For really obscure content, internet archive, your library, usenet or even eBay are the go to!
SoulSeek was also pretty good for finding obscure music. I like collecting everything that was released (not live performances, though) and SoulSeek filled some, but not all gaps I had.
It's not E2EE IIRC, though, so use with caution.
Out of curiosity, what movie?
> hey there's a project idea: a "todo list" for rippers that scrapes imdb and checks what's not in pirate ba
Private sites do things like this, archival efforts and have request systems.
Piracy is and always has been the only way for more obscure stuff.
Personally I do not feel guilty pirating a decades old TV show or movie. And I really doubt the industry cares much either.
How can anyone sit through a length of a film, especially a European one, and not have a cigarette?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VzSiilYSKs
use their RSS feed + a seed box to automatically grab stuff as it’s posted some sites have ratio free for large files to get them seeded faster. at least that’s what I did a decade plus ago.
> ~everything under the sun is already ripped
But good luck to see a live seed. I have a torrent from ~2010 which is stuck at 2%, so some seed did come online some years ago I was able to leech those meager bits from them - but not ever since.
Same for my own torrent on TPB from 2008, i tried to dload it in 2015 and wasn't sucessful in it despite it was 1st one for some years for that particular title.
Don't give up hope, though. I've had torrents complete after a few years. I've long lost anything from 2010, though.
Try other protocols/services (listed in other comments in the thread) or maybe offer a bounty if it's something you can't buy.
I had one finish after 2 years recently. Someone in China came online and completed the last few MB.
I've got three open right now for ebooks which I don't think will ever finish. (one is 3.5TB)
Are you sure what you're looking for isn't on TPB as well? Just lower down the list.
I torrent TPB because it's what people know. I don't care for private trackers, I just want to support the common torrenters.
For any query, just look at the file sizes (or sort by file size if the view allows you). Then you can see that there just aren’t many movie torrents on TPB larger than single-digit GB. A Blu-Ray remux will be minimum 14GB, and often much larger.
They are not popular because with meager 20 TB drive, you can either have entire movie collection of all movies you actually like (and then some more), and visit again, or you can have 20x less content without much visible gain of quality (if you see it its either rare too complex scene, bad reencode or you are simply sitting too close to TV). Same goes for audio, even 2GB rips have good 5.1 or 7.1 tracks.
Its not hard to decide what to prefer. Even with 1GB/s optic fiber I just couldn't be bothered to download 20-40x larger files and then struggle to see any difference in 4k on 75" screen.
And lets be honest - apart from poor folks with OCD or similar trait, after 1 minute of watching I couldn't care less about audiovisual quality, heck I enjoy even 720p rip if its the only thing available.
Not only does TPB not have many remuxes, but it also has fairly few re-encodes using the modern high-quality codecs that you are talking about.
It’s funny to hear someone say that hard drive sizes are too small, and internet connections too slow, when RuTracker (a tracker whose core audience is former USSR, often shitty provincial cities) has a very lively culture of remuxes.
Sometimes feel like I'm the only one still using it around me, but the service is still great and functional
Ya I still have mad love for TPB. My ISP was blocking my private tracker recently and while I would usually just run things through a seedbox it made me happy I could still turn to my trusty ol' friend.
I'm happy making one-shot payments for most types of media.
But I want to start a new bittorrent tracker for individual movies or episodes for which the provider requires you to create a recurring subscription, to rip off such content unabashedly.
From "The Pirate Bay down, forever?" (2014)
> TPB has become an institution that people just expected to be there. Noone willing to take the technology further. The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design. It never changed except for one thing – the ads. More and more ads was filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful they somehow ended up even worse.
> As a big fan of the KLF I once learned that it’s great to burn great things up. At least then you can quit while you’re on top. I think I left TPB just a little bit after that top, and not when it’s as shitty as it was when it was closed today. It feels good that it might have closed down forever, just a real shame the way it did that. A planned retirement would have given the community time and a way to kick off something new, something better, something faster, something more reliable and with no chance of corrupting itself. Something that had a soul and could retain it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160712155638/http://blog.broke...
> As a big fan of the KLF I once learned that it’s great to burn great things up.
For anyone who doesn't know, the KLF took a million pounds in cash, and set it on fire. For no obvious reason.
A much more interesting article would cover HOW they are still up. Would love to know the details of the how in this case.
Here you go:
https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-runs-on-21-raid-proo...
... said the FBI/NSA agent
The pirate bay raid is a good example of the kind of soft power the US has lost with their recent behavior. Hard to imagine Stockholm police being as receptive nowadays.
edit: I'm very sorry for making a relevant comment that extrapolate on the content of the shared article.
Paradoxically, it's also a good example of the kind of soft power the US still has: we're all watching their movies.
"Their movies"
Meanwhile a huge portion of them are filmed in other countries, edited by brits, staring europeans, etc.
There's a good reason major studios have spent billions on film studios in the UK instead of the US.
Take something like Andor. Filmed in the UK and Spain, with a team of staff almost exclusively from the UK and EU. With a Mexican lead actor, 1 American co-lead, and then tons of British Actors, a few Australians, Swedish, German, Irish, etc.
Very few big movies or tv shows can be classed as "American" these days. They require people and facilities from all over the place.
Even if that's true, the influence is on the decline. It's a combination of factors: fewer and fewer era-defining works and simply novel messages to tell, franchises sucked dry, games and youtube replacing movies.
You can always ruin your advantages. People seem to currently like a lot of US culture and dislike the US (or, it's government at least).
Less and less though. New-ish Hollywood movies started feeling like a slop before ChatGPT was released with all their endless "Batman vs Pikachu"-likes.
Anecdotally, the people I talk to outside the U.S. see the film industry there as stuck in a Disney/Marvel pattern for the most part. Sure, there are good films, but there's a lot of cynical slop being turned out too and it's become so prevalent that it's a bit of a joke at this point. I blame the stagnation on the extreme consolidation of media companies.
Are we though?
People I know watch less and less each year. I don't think it's because they're getting older, as the reasons they cite usually revolves around how the source material has been butchered.
And if subscriber numbers were still going up, I sincerely doubt that the producers kept increasing the subscription cost over the last few years.
Honestly, I think that soft power has been massively damaged too, with people looking for less virtue signalling and less asinine gender swaps along with contrived homosexuality in their media
U.S. population pyramid graph is sobering enough.
Speak for yourself.
You've not seen Dune?
I have not seen Dune.
American troops have been granted full immunity against Swedish law when they are in Sweden, according to the most recent military treaties. I don't know if you consider such a deal to be soft power or hard power. But it is a lot more than any server room raid.
Yes! thank fuck!
Great documentary on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6qcJt2NPY8
I was hoping someone shared this! Truly a great doc.
I'm curious why IPFS never took off (I haven't dug into it much), but it seems more decentralized than BT.
For most of that 20y, TPB was behind OVPN (vpn provider). They're the other provider I trust besides Mullvad.
So many gigabytes downloaded! Long live the King !
It works great with a nice stremio setup for live streaming. No subscriptions necessary anymore.
All the best stuff doesn’t get licensed by streaming services at all
Entire generations of people have no idea something exists
Yandex is the best search engine. Sites like Fmovies or moviesjoy include nearly everything. I couldn't find the Monty Python series, but Yandex's first results were ready to play it for me in seconds.
If its not on their top 100/48 hr list then its not worth watching.
This has been my go-to for discovering new things to watch for 15 years. If something doesn't show up in the top-100 list, I'm generally unaware of it.
Remember how liberating it was to record TV shows or movies to VHS tape? My dad still has VHS tapes of Simpsons recordings that I'd rewatch as a kid.
We need to raid those lobbyists. How much money did the get from the USA?
So the real pirates was the swedish government. It's time to completely change the whole government. Back in 2006 they thought they targeted only few individuals. I am sure there are many more people who don't support what the swedish government did. Did they ever apologize for serving US corporations here? How much financial kickback did they get there?
For some reason I thought the pirate bay was like fake/scam urls now. Is that or was that not the case? I thought I was remember the URL constantly changing and it was hard to keep up.
In non free countries it wont show up since the ISP will block the domain (eg. Oz). Free countries show it …
It's been thepiratebay.org for ages now (or so I heard, not that I'd ever go there ever, of course).
You're probably in the US? Doesn't work here in the UK like half of the internet these days.
The industry combats piracy by making fake websites that deliver scam URLs. But I've almost never had a problem finding the real TPB link.
<3 Still a great public tracker. We absolutely need people who will run sites like this and crack and bypass stiff like Denuvo and so on. We really do need to keep these sort of skills, tools, and communities alive to be able to resist digital oppression and techno-fascists. Sounds corny as hell but it's true imo.
agreed. the walls are closing in so skills need to remain sharp.
For a brief moment I used Netflix, but very quickly went back to actually watching anything by I want.
I feel for the kids that are waking up to this enshitification, without a clue on how to sail.
The hypocrisy of tech bros claiming to make well into the six figures being unwilling up pay a few dollars a month for dozens or hundreds of hours of entertainment while simultaneously expecting that everyone else should pay for the increasingly buggier software that pays their salaries....
Most of the problems many of you are complaining about with streamers are the result of your fellow programmers doing poor work. Consider the irony that many in this discussion won't pay for Disney+ because of the technical issues on the software side of things.
So not to hijack this thread or anything but there's one good metric (if nothing else... the fact FB overwrote your email while Google seems to believe in data liberation, and fewer breaches) to tell apart the difference between those two companies
Google had been asked to remove Pirate Bay in results. They didn't. On Google, and I don't really know how it changed over the years, but there'd be a notice about links removed due to DMCA, if it came to that, basically. (Okay, Youtube, which they own, has always been a bit aggressive, and that isn't nothing)
Facebook? Facebook wouldn't let you SEND a link to PB in private messages. It still deletes your post now if you link Anna's Archive. This after apparently heavily scraping LibGen
I don't love Google for a lot of reasons but I damn well feel better using it compared to Mr. "Dumb Fucks"
Try to use Yandex for some shady stuff and see what actually google blocks and doesn't.
> For now, the site remains online, twenty years after Hollywood thought it had seen the last of it. And whoever is in charge today, will likely do everything possible to keep it that way.
I'm vaguely aware that other people than the original group are running it now.
Also, I don't torrent much, but it seems pretty stagnant and dead. It's been occasionally useful to me to find older stuff that doesn't seem to be well represented on newer (public) sites.
I've never not found something that has been publicly released on it. Though, I don't typically stray too far from the mainstream path for the media I'm looking for.
For one, not every entry of the Stormlight Archives is on it.
I can absolutely find new stuff on there. It took Project Hail Mary a little while to get on there, presumably because it was a cinema release only for quite a while but a good quality version popped up after a couple of weeks, and a bad quality "guy holding a camcorder in the cinema" version showed up after about 1 week, IIRC
once it hit streaming services the webrip was on it within hours.
I don't recall exactly when it went onto streaming, but I'm pretty sure I got a good quality version before that. It may have been released for streaming in other regions earlier than I thought though, I don't keep super up to date with that sort of thing, as I generally don't watch movies super soon after they're released
I find the stream rips to be really shitty quality.. The original source is very low bitrate, compressed tae fuck. I find for stream rips from netflix for example I need to download a 4k rip in order to watch in 1080, and that's acceptable.
Torrenting is alive and well… for recent releases and new stuff. All the old stuff is pretty hard to find now. When demonoid was around you could find just about everything. The worst part is for a lot of it there isn’t a legal way to get them either.
That's the tragedy of the MAFIAA death throes period imo.. With all their lawsuits and bullshit they never even slowed down the big public trackers and torrents of the popular stuff they were trying to stop being shared.. Instead they killed loads of small private trackers which housed exquisitely curated collections of stuff that wasn't available anywhere else for neither love nor money.
/top/48hall seems pretty fresh and healthy. What do you mean by stagnant?
> on newer (public) sites
Example of said sites?
rutracker, 1337x, nyaa are the first that come to mind.
newer? my rutracker account is an adult, I'm pretty sure.
It's marginally newer than TPB
ext in tonga
I use Stremio with pirate bay torrents. There literally isn’t anything that came out and isn’t on there.
Tons of Japanese shows and movies are not there at all.
Not a single Utaban episode is there, even though there's many on youtube.
It's kind of cool but also kind of spooky: A legally targeted site just staying online for 20 years, not because of obscurity, but simply because it can't be taken down.
Are our institutions this incapable?
I don't know who's included in your "our", but I rather strongly like that American/Swedish/EU/whoever institutions don't have the capability to control the entire world and would prefer it stay that way. That's the beauty of the internet, and it's concerning that many people regard that lack of complete global control as an "incapability". Your laws don't, and shouldn't, apply to me.
I'm astounded that they've been able to keep that domain name.
God I hope so
I think the site has been hosted by the police since them. They probably use it as a honeypot or something - except the site is so poorly managed that no one really comes :D
References for this claim?
I can't wait to be indicted for downloading Daria with the original soundtrack, something no one will sell me.