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)
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.
Oh god yes, a minute long FBI warning screen!
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.
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
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.
Most streaming services work like unused gym memberships anyway. Get rid of them.
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’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?
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.
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.)
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.
ads on every plan? nah, morphe time.
Disney DVDs are full of “that button doesn’t work here” zones making previews (ads) hard to skip… which strangely are just not an issue after you rip the feature presentation to your NAS.
Can’t wait for the streaming bubble to entirely pop and we go back to limewire for all digital media.
I’m still sailing the high seas. Never stopped. Smelled the shit years ahead.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
Or do like myself and several of my friends: set up a jellyfin server and rip discs like mad
Cute, but they put adverts on DVDs too…
Not midway through though. I really think that 4 minutes of ads with that dramatic guy’s voicover and all the zoomy effects at the beginning only, and then an uninterrupted film, would be more palletablle for streaming services to do.
Ok, yeah, that’s fair. Been so long since I had a streaming service I’d managed to forget that’s why I got rid of it!
You are probably thinking Mark Elliott. Also there are not a ton of these voice over guys.
You don’t have to rip the adverts :p
Totally skippable on DVD. Some players will even automatically find the longest track on the disc and launch directly into it.
Sony and some other players made the preroll ads unskippable.
Sony? The company that intentionally installed root kits onto people’s computers to prevent them from ripping CDs? They would never
Totally skippable on DVD.
Not always
Choose:
- Buy dvds and be forced to watch trailers, fbi warnings and ads before the film
- Or open qbittorrent find your favourite magnet link, dl, and enjoy on vlc. No ads, no fbi warnings, no trailers… sometimes hardcoded korean subtitles tho xD
ScreenRant has confirmed with Disney that an updated Subscriber Agreement was in fact sent to Disney+ customers across Europe and not to those based in the U.S. The update does not change the viewing experience for customers on Disney+ with a Standard or Premium plan in Europe and won’t impact those in the U.S.
Live content may include advertising or sponsored content. Customers may also see promotional content including trailers for upcoming Disney movies and series. -Screenrant
I was thinking about getting Disney+ at least for a while. Definitely not going to do that now.
buying
Lol
Stop funneling money into the pockets of billionaires, they have enough money; buying movies doesn’t put money into the pockets of the underpaid writers, prop designers, stylists or editors.
The movie is already made, and the low-wage workers are not paid royalties.
Fully disagree. The same as saying “why pay for bread, it’s already made”. You want to to say the workers should earn more, that is a separate conversation, but it’s a very wrong take to say that just because it is already means its worth nothing.
if you take the bread, the guy have one bread less. If you copy a file… you have 2 files.
Digital piracy has no scarcity, and the bread has already been eaten, and the leftover bread is going to be thrown in the trash.
Not at all the same thing. Bread is a one-time consumable. A DVD can be used repeatedly and duplicated at virtually no cost. That’s why there’s no second-hand market for bread. I can’t believe I have to explain this.
second-hand market for bread.
“very interesting… are you planning to include ads in that?” -business executives, probably.
