I keep getting asked why i keep buying dvds and blurays.
I point at this shit, and at sony taking peoples owned media away without recourse or compensation as to why. They cant take my physical media.
I dropped all my streaming subscriptions the moment one of them put ads on a pair plan… I then spent what would have been a year of subscription fees on my current home server to replace all of them. It’s been about 3 years and I still love it.
I’ve since dropped all internet subscriptions in favor of self hosted alternatives.
Piracy, my girl. Piracy.
Yeah, it continues to provide the best experience. DVDs make you view unskippable fbi warnings not to steal from poor downtrodden corporations
People asked why I never gor rid of DVDs. Well here ya go
Personally, I just go without media nowadays. If Big Media is so obsessed with making their works unavailable to all but a few select people, then so be it - until people realize that they don’t need the circus to survive, the producers will keep inflating the prices until infinity
I dream of the circus from when I was a child. Now I’m just too depressed to to get out of bed to worry about going to it.
Honestly how I sleep knowing I can type some variation of “movie online free” and stream whatever I want with a robust adblocker and vpn
I thrifted so many Blurays only to find out I can easily stream shit for free. But I like shiny things.
Also how I sleep knowing I have 85% of my library digitized as a (single point lmao) backup and waiting for memory prices to drop so I can get around to the rest…
Well, I never got to digitize my vhs tapes but oh well.
I was dumbfounded when I saw my wife sitting through a 1mn30s unskippable ad on whathisname (some streaming service) in the middle of her korean drama. I asked “don’t you pay for this”. She told me “my sister does”. I went and grabbed the rest of the episodes for her on extratorrent. Unbelievable
And that’s the problem. You’re home. This is your home. And you’re letting some corporation invade it and tell you what to watch while supposedly off work. On your TV. In your home.
Fuck that.
i need to find better torrent sites - i am still raw dogging pirate bay. (i mean vpn and in a docker container yadda yadda but damn those popups)
You should probably think about private torrent sites, which is a whole subject into itself, since you need to find ones that allow public sign-ups, and then build reputation to get into better ones. There’s too much to get into, but spend some time familiarizing yourself with what’s out there:
https://hdvinnie.github.io/Private-Trackers-Spreadsheet/
Until then: https://fmhy.net/
Edit: From FMHY, here is a guide: https://clarasguide.valeena.workers.dev/Guides/private-trackers/#private-trackers-general
thanks!
Torrent quest is my go to. Definitely use a vpn and all that
I’ll just say, apart from this site (any public tracker always use a VPN), for private trackers: be careful about using a VPN for signups and only read the rules first before turning it on. Many trackers have specific rules about VPN use.
thanks!
DVDs had unskippable ads and trailers. You had to watch them every time you put in the DVD. Some players let you skip to the title menu, but not all.
And if you were able to skip them, God forbid you lost your remote control, and your DVD player didn’t have a reasonable amount of buttons on the front of it
Oh god yes, a minute long FBI warning screen!
If you’re in the US, go to your local library and ask if they have a “Friends of The Library.” It’s where most US libraries sell their used media, including DVDs. I have about a thousand DVDs, they cost maybe $2,000, and the money went to the library.
- Tubi has lots of content with about the same amount of ads as Netflix.
- Through your library, you have a certain amount of either per month, or first come-first serve content through Hoopla or Kanopy
- Pirate
Tubi has lots of content with about the same amount of ads as Netflix.
Tubi has no ads, if you use uBlock Origin with Firefox.
If you’re anywhere, go to this neat website called Pirate Bay, and they have almost every movie ever, completely for free – no ads, and it’s yours as long as you want to keep it.
If you want to be safe, also sign up for a VPN, so your ISP doesn’t snoop on you downloading things (looking at you, Comcast). But a decent VPN is like $5-10 per year.
proton is free
edit: the free tier doesn’t give them much anyway so you can still complain about their CEO
I thought the free tier didn’t support port forwarding. Isn’t that necessary for bittorrent?
I’m a stream pirate, since all I’ve *only ever heard is to never download anything. Isn’t there tons of risk with downloading content?
What others have said is valid as well, but joining a good private tracker means content is moderated so risc is very low.
VPN is only needed if you live somewhere where either ISPs or some organization sends letters.
There is also the Arr suite that basically allows you to build your own streaming service.
I haven’t used a live antivirus in more that a decade, by avoiding just raw dogging the open web I’ve never had a problem.
The actual situation is that the people who benefit from you continuing to pay for overpriced content you don’t own on the internet ALSO pay bots to flood your world with overblown warnings about the dangers.
The risk tends to be hugely overblown.
1: Use a VPN so your ISP can’t tattle on you for downloading things.
2: Virus scan stuff you download before opening/running it.
3: Keep good backups (you should be doing this anyway) so you can restore from backup if some kind of virus/malware manages to evade your virus scan.
Do those three things, and the risk of downloading pirated shit will be incredibly low. (And streaming isn’t zero-risk, either. The streaming apps or the streaming files themselves could theoretically be compromised, after all.)
There’s mild risk in torrenting only because the upload side of torrenting is “sharing”.
Practically speaking, if you aren’t financially profiting off piracy (like the guy you pay for your stream access), you are vanishingly unlikely to see any consequences for media piracy. And the methods to make you significantly safer are not a big leap.
But streaming is sick. The difference between deciding you want something and then acquiring it is very different from an IPTV subscription where there’s just like 40,000 channels of shit streaming RIGHT NOW.
Can’t wait for the streaming bubble to entirely pop and we go back to limewire for all digital media.
I never quit stealing and am always boggled that so many people have these subscriptions.
For a brief moment there pretty much everything was on Netflix and it was a good price for a good service.
Then it slowly got worse and worse and the content got split between more and more services and my own laziness and, honestly, how much I liked Netflix when it WAS good kept me going. But eventually it became too much.
Yaarrr! Fin me by the jelly me locals are all that I needs these days.
I think that’s exactly what it is. Netflix was killer and worth it. And then it was a SLOW bleed to enshittification where suddenly people are paying just as much to 15 streaming services as they were with a premium cable package.
Absolutely this, when netflix had everything, i had no issues. Especially my wife liked having content in different languages… But now everything is so fragmented it’s insane
Regional ISP traffic scan centers have got a lot better at sniffing stuff like torrents. It’s 3 cease letters and poof no more access to that ISP, with monopolies in place, that pretty much means no more Internet for you. 1 letter is usually enough to scare lay people away from doing it again, despite tools like VPNs. I realize it’s common sense to us but I also get why people don’t gamble with access to a basic utility.
It’s how the market shakes out.
Basically, the main advantage to piracy is price. No legitimate vendor is going to beat $0
It also used to be that you’d get sub-par quality compared to the physical version. However pirates have really stepped up over the last 20 years and now often offer the best version of any given media. Lossless audio and 4K video are widely available.
The place where legitimate services still beat piracy is convenience. Streaming services are easy to use, the content is always what it says it is, and people generally want to do the right thing and pay for services rather than steal them.
However, when piracy beats legit options on both price and convenience, people flock to piracy.
Yep. When Netflix cracked down on password sharing and disrupted my ability to use my brothers account once in a while, i switched to a plex share. It costs less, doesn’t give a damn about who’s licensing what, has no ads and doesn’t try to spy on me.
I didn’t pirate for around ten years when Netflix had everything and Disney with Hulu was $15.
It was so much less hassle it was worth it.
Now it isn’t worth it.
Piracy isn’t just a price thing. It’s literally more convenient than having 4 or 5 streaming services and still potentially needing to pay extra just to watch a major movie that just came out
Honestly after so long sailing the high seas, I find streaming interfaces clunky and annoying. I like all my stuff in a nice clean file tree.
Piracy is not stealing.
Would you download a car?
Hell yeah, if I could.
I already did. But the STL is huge and I don’t know what to do now.
You got a 3D printer? Just slice it into pieces and reassemble after printing.
Where do you download your movies? All I ever found was streaming services but I want to download and watch offline.
The bible of the seas has a section on this. Read its verses.
There is a cost vs ease balance, when the cost is such that the ease of streaming vs piracy is low enough it makes sense.
Like I have spent the last hour trying to get my vpn set up to work with a torrent client. Now the settings for my vpn are so messed up I cannot get it to connect at all. So the ease of piracy now is so great that the cost of streaming is looking like the better option.
DL torrent, open it, go take a shit. Here on Kodi. I mean compared to the stupid login dance you have to do on Netflix every 2 days, hoops you have to do with your VPN or adblock giving your spy TV internet etc, that’s not even valid anymore.
Also what’s an hour or two, learning things, once in a while vs getting ass raped by tech bros 24/24? And paying for it.
DL torrent
Still trying to set up the vpn. Finally was able to reset it enough to get basic access back.
compared to the stupid login dance you have to do on Netflix every 2 days, hoops you have to do with your VPN or adblock giving your spy TV internet etc
I have not had to log into a streaming service in a year, maybe 18 months. Do not have a spy tv, so no issues there.
I’m still sailing the high seas. Never stopped. Smelled the shit years ahead.
DVD is limited to a 4GB size, bluray bumps that to 40/80GB which allows for virtually full quality media*.
Of course your local library might not have the film/show you want or the bluray is prohibitaly expensive or not even available in your region, in which case the arrrrrr stack of software can get you what you need automagically.
*
Only theaters (and people willing to drop several hundred dollars) get access to the 300GB+ uncompressed movie data DCP, so a 70GB 4K bluray rip (H.265 with Dolby Vision) is indistinguishable unless you put it on a theater sized projector and painstakingly look for differences in quality.
TV Shows however don’t get streamed in such high quality (and definitely not broadcast), so the bluray is the definitive top quality version of the media, and you can tell the difference in quality from a stream rip vs a bluray rip. The uncompressed version is a project file sitting on the studio’s server that you will never see or practically need (unless it gets shown in theater in which case the studio may opt to make a DCP).
I’m pretty sure there is some insane group out there that torrents DCPs but I’ve never seen them lol.
*8.5GB - dual layer is usually used for movies.
The biggest problem of DVD is the low resolution MPEG-2.
If it was something like AV1 (at 1080p), it would still be pretty competitive.You don’t need high quality video for most movies/tv. Friends and Avengers aren’t any better in HD or UHD. Avatar, Interstellar, and other movies that focus a lot on visuals will benefit though.
It’s more to say DVD is fine for most things and for things you want in higher quality, buy it in higher quality.
Yarrr matey. 🏴☠️
Crazy. Disney channel as a kid was the only one that didn’t have ads outside promos for their own material. Knew a lot of kids who were basically only allowed to watch Disney for that alone.
PBS anyone?
PBS’ only problem is their programming skewed young. And after dinner, good luck getting a kid to watch Jim Lehrer.
I enjoy replaying old games and I have discs. So jog on. Oh yeah and I can repair electronics.
Or do like myself and several of my friends: set up a jellyfin server and rip discs like mad
