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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Yep.
I’m a fan of a certain sport, and they didn’t have a reasonable way of making it available on demand… so I sailed the seas. But lo and behold once an app was available, I was happy to pay as I’m no longer having to wait.
Someone smarter than I said. The largest part of piracy is a delivery issue. Make thing’s available and people will pay for them.
I suspect your story is not unusual. Piracy is, at worst, a morally neutral action.
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.
I bought more CDs while Napster was in its heyday than the entire rest of my life combined.
Similar outcome. At this point, I mostly just rent 4k online because my massive Plex library has bit-for-bit Blu-ray rips of everything I care about enough to have on hand. But I spent years building that library by ripping physical media.
I still buy and rip CDs because I love album art and want high quality. If not for the former, I’d likely go flacc or lossless and buy online.
