TL;DR at the bottom.
I started getting into torrents about 2 years ago, at the time I started out with downloading YIFY rips and x265 RARBG encodes. I didn’t care about the quality at the time, I was just happy to get movies. But I also wanted stuff like Special Features, and while Tigole and the QxR team occasionally added them for some of their movies, it felt like something was missing.
Eventually I grew dissatisfied with encodes, and wanted to watch movies in the highest quality possible. I would have downloaded BDMVs, but no one seemed to be seeding them, or in the case of less-mainstream/obscure movies, they weren’t on public trackers at all. (I tried downloading REMUXes from FGT, but they always replaced the PGS subtitles with UTF text subtitles, which I didn’t appreciate.) So in early 2022 I bought myself a Blu-ray optical drive, set up MakeMKV, and bought the Blu-ray of the movie I wanted to rip. After that, I bought some more BDs to rip, and I started making my own REMUXes. Some time after that, I flashed my drive with the LibreDrive firmware so I could rip my 4K UHD discs too.
So anyway, my point is that the arguments that piracy is “bad for business” and causes companies to “lose money” are full of hot air. If anything, piracy is good for them and increases sales. There have been numerous occasions where I have wanted to download a REMUX and there were no seeders, and decided it would be easier for me to buy the disc and rip it myself.
So, the main takeaways are:
- Piracy isn’t nearly as bad as the authorities say it is, and may actually increase sales.
- Create good-quality encodes.
- Seed all your torrents.
TL;DR: Started buying and ripping my own Blu-rays due to dissatisfaction with low-quality encodes and lack of seeders.
As Gabe Newell once said:
Piracy is an issue of service, not price
Yep. The video entertainment industry had a great solution to piracy in Netflix and it had moved piracy out of the mainstream… Then companies got competitive and content became fractured across a multitude of platforms.
“now that we finally solved one of the hardest problems we’ve ever faced, let scrap the solution!”
No, it’s actually:
“Now that we’ve gotten everyone locked into one service, let’s squeeze them for every single cent we can until they pop!”It’s literally capitalsim’s job and it will never change.
I would have continued to pay a steadily increasing price for Netflix if they kept being a “one stop shop” for content.
I was very annoyed when they dropped Mythbusters and Dr Who halfway through me watching them, and then loosing all the Disney movies was just a nail in the coffin.
Even if it cost less, I could not be bothered to maintain multiple subscriptions/accounts/passwords for the content I want.I mean, it’d not like it was their choice. I’m sure they would have loved to remain the place where everything was.
The reason why public companies were a mistake
The first step is making them no longer legally people.
Yeah that’s definitely more accurate. That’s the step 3 everyone’s always missing in those 1 2 3? 4 profit! things.
Then companies got competitive
You spelled greedy wrong
Heh, I actually had greedy when intially typing the comment and changed it after some thought.
Greedy might be more apt, as from basic economics you would think price should come down as more players entered the market… But we’ve seen the opposite.
The price of the subscription isnt what bother me personally though, I used to pay alot more for cable, its more the quanity of subscriptions/ accounts/apps that have to be used that drove me away.Yep, it was greed, pure and simple. After seeing how wildly successful Netflix and Hulu were, companies that owned ip weren’t content in just having a small piece of the pie. No, they needed the whole thing.
I hope all of these late-coming streaming services burn to the ground. And I LOVE streaming their content for free.
My preferred solution is to only subscribe to one service at a time, and then switch, when I run out of things to watch.
This also means the providers get less money when they have less content.
Ehhhhh, sorta’. I’ve spent WAY more money thanks to Steam than I would have without it, but I’m still buying everything on sale and cheaper than anyone I know with a console. I think price is still a bit part of the equation for me. Some games that refuse to ever have a decent sale are making me consider the high seas again as they stagnate on my waitlist.
Same for music for me. Only difference now, I get to choose where my money goes. Instead of some streaming company giving next to nothing to the bands I listen to and everything else going to some super popular stuff I don’t enjoy.
Yeah, I’ve spent more money on smaller bands through Bandcamp then I ever have on streaming services, all thanks to piracy, since I realized it’s much better for offline files.
So…you’re going to post torrents and seed all those movies…right?
Nope
Given your username it’s probably for the best.
Hey man why you gotta kink shame people like this
You do realise that you’re saying that piracy didn’t work for you, so you went out and spent your money instead, yeah?
Not saying it didn’t work, in fact I still download encodes. But for stuff I really like, I buy the physical versions.
Upload the remuxes
I’ve been trying to find a place where I can safely do so, but I don’t want to risk getting in legal trouble.
EDIT: Typo.
Some private tracker. Just be careful, and maybe don’t upload things there are already remuxes of
As @Pulp mentioned: Upload to private trackers.
I may or may not have uploaded some music cds I imported from overseas to private trackers.
Consider shooting me a message and I can get you started on a smaller private tracker. Then you can move to better places from there.
How do you get permission to upload to a private tracker? It seems like you need extra special permissions in the ones I’ve seen.
You can upload content to any tracker you’re in (usually). It just requires mod approval. After enough verified uploads you get the “uploader” role where you get to bypass mod verification.
The larger, more general ones do, and they likely won’t allow one-off uploaders. But smaller ones are happy to take uploads, and it may spread from there to elsewhere.
Remember to bind your network interface to a vpn if you live in a country where this stuff is frowned upon
I have the misfortune of being a United States citizen; and yeah I have Mullvad.
Google “Debrid services” and download all the torrents you want without having to wait for seeds. No VPN or extra security measures needed. (Unless you’re paranoid, then by all means, VPN away.)
You’re welcome.
Same here. YIFY torrents were just a gateway drug to 4k HDR blurays.
Far too much of a snob to watch those icky YIFY movies with all of their artifacts.
Various studies showed the same over the last 20-25 years. Pirating does increase revenue for companies and articles torrented.
Yah right I’d like to see a study that shows that.
I believe an eu commissioned report reflected this and has been picked up several times throughout the years. I must admit I’ve never gone through and read it though
That was shown in the early days of Metallica’s (fuck Metallica, btw) bullshit with Napster. The music fans were downloading music, as well as buying music, more.
Fucking Lars. Metallica just did not get it and attacked their fans. Nobody had a problem paying for the music, they just wanted to be able to download it. They didn’t want a CD they wanted an MP3.
I was a huge Metallica fan. Saw them for both Ride the Lightning and Justice when they toured. Most of us got into them by pirating (ie, copying album->tape or tape->tape for/from friends). I spent more on their tickets and concert tees than I would have buying their albums. But after Lars and that Napster shit, I just figured they were dead to me. Haven’t listened to them since.
Oh man, you brought up a really good point. There’s the albums, and then there’s the merch. Metallica junkies would have like 20 band shirts and so much Metallica swag all over their places. Those guys would drop thousands of dollars. They lived for that music. When Lars came out and was basically “it’s about the money” so many fans stopped caring about the music. When they stopped caring about the music they stopped buying the merch.
Sure but I doubt that would be true today. Do people forget we had very limited bandwidth compared to today and lots of the encodes where low bitrate and sucked. Not to mention most people where downloading the mp3 and burning them to CDs back then also.
Are there any good services like bandcamp, but for video? Even if it doesn’t have blockbuster/popular movies I’d be interested. I spend a lot of money on bandcamp because it’s easy and simple: I give them money and in return get bits that I do what I want with.
If you’re looking for DRM-free digital distribution, the best I can think of is Vimeo on Demand. You pay one-time for a movie, and in return you get the option to download the movie as a MP4. There’s mainly arthouse films and documentaries, but you may be able to find a few gems.
Thanks! That’s the sort of thing I’m looking for
Thank you, I’m going to spend so much money buying indie movies
The problem is you’re obsessed with movies to do such things. Just download 1080 and watch it on your tv or mobile and that’s it, you watched a movie. And if you’re willing to help the community, encode, seed, distribute and that’s enough.
I’ve ripped a good number of blu-rays to network storage. If you’re looking for older, less popular stuff it’s the best option. And older releases are usually just a few bucks. The new stuff I torrent because I can usually find a decent rip, but for stuff I want to put in my library a rip from optical disk is the best, but not free of course. You can even do it for free, public libraries often have a good collection of older releases on optical disk.
My local wall-mart has a large number of older blockbusters on their bargain bin. Got all 3 John Wicks for $15 total, and then directly ripped them into my server
I read an article about this many years ago. They had found that pirated games can increase sales:
2017 is many years…I’m old
7 of them. A child was born, went through a bunch of life milestones, and is now starting 1st or 2nd grade (i think? I don’t know how kids work). My man’s learning the basics of multiplication right now.
My man’s learning the basics of multiplication right now.
He should be ready to start slinging drinks any day now! ;-P
Most of the movies I have pirated I have seen in theaters at some point or can’t be easily watched in my country. I have cancelled most of my streaming services because most of them don’t have content that I watch enough to justify paying monthly for .
Same idea with video games. There are many game franchises that I never would have gotten into as a kid if I hadn’t been able to pirate them. I usually still pirate games to try them out, and if I end up enjoying it or want features like online play, I might buy it during a Steam sale.
me too, but usually only with indie games, because triple a studios can go fuck themselves. but like Stardew valley costs $6, imma buy it
Command & Conquer was like that for me. I pirated Red Alert 2, but ended up buying it like six times via various collections. None of that would have happened had I not had that first pirated copy.
Yeah I used to game on console but I got a steam deck thinking I would pirate shit. Then steam sales hit me like a fucking truck.
Anymore it’s a roll of the dice whether the game is functional to a point where you would enjoy it. Most publishers don’t seem to bother with demos anymore (probably because their games are half broken) so we are largely left to create our own demos.
Many others have said before people who pirate spend more on media than those who don’t.
I pay for cable tv (get off my lawn) in addition to several other streaming services.
And sometimes I still can’t get the thing I want. You think I’m going to spend even more when my half dozen existing subscriptions don’t cover this one thing? I don’t think so.
I wouldn’t be the faithful Final Fantasy patron I am today had it not been for a ROM of FF VI my old room mate put on my computer back in college. Now I own nearly ALLLLL of them (the ones available on modern platforms). I’ve also started investing in the Trails series for a similar reason and I don’t regret it.
