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:

  1. Piracy isn’t nearly as bad as the authorities say it is, and may actually increase sales.
  2. Create good-quality encodes.
  3. 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.

      • OneOrTheOtherDontAskMe@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • deadsenator@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          My man’s learning the basics of multiplication right now.

          He should be ready to start slinging drinks any day now! ;-P

    • bighatchester@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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 .