Every once in a while I'll try to watch something through the Intended Method™ and it always proves itself to be a worse experience.
Most recent example - I was watching Malcolm in the Middle on Disney+ with my girlfriend, and we found that there are entire audio tracks missing in multiple episodes. Usually some kind of ADR, like someone talking off camera. There's an episode where Reese rents an apartment and there's a recurring bit of him talking to his depressed neighbour through the wall. But you'd have no idea because they somehow completely deleted the neighbour's dialogue from the audio, so it's just Reese having a one-sided conversation with a wall. We saw multiple episodes where something like this happened, and when I looked online there were reports of it dating back years.
Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata, etc. No one providing official routes to this media seems to care. You have AI-upscaled "4k" movies where the actors don't even look like themselves and there are hallucinated artifacts and things that aren't there. Images cropped to widescreen, like the infamous Duff Beer joke being out of frame in The Simpsons. TV series with edits or entire episodes removed because they were deemed too offensive. Movies and shows randomly appearing and disappearing so you have to endlessly manage subscriptions and switch between different apps with better or worse players just to watch a single series. Just a nightmare.
>... like the infamous Duff Beer joke being out of frame in The Simpsons.
My collection of The Simpsons, seasons 1-13, are all TV rips from waaaaayyyyy back in the 00's. Sure, it's not super high-quality, but at least they don't look like the ugly remasters (on some of the ones I've tried watching on Disney+, they look like someone's drawn over the old cells), the aspect ratio is the original so nothing's missing and, as a personal bonus, they've got the old Q13 logo in the bottom (I grew up in western WA). They still look great on my newer TV.
Edit: Oh, and the Michael Jackson episode never suddenly disappeared from my library.
To me it is the difference between art and product.
A show like The Simpsons is both. The viewers care about the art, and we tolerate the product to get it. The creators are creating art, compromising with the corporation and broadcaster to make it enough of a product. But the corp/broadcaster only care about the product. The art is the chocolate around the advertising pill.
So when the product-minded people control preservation and resharing of the product, the art always gets compromised. Jokes are clipped. Audio is broken. Episodes are pulled. For all the wrong reasons.
The terminology is art vs content. Anybody talking about "content", by definition, do not actually care about what that content is, just that it is contained into something they charge for.
To me content often implies a kind of volume of work. Always be posting. Don’t miss a few days or your viewers go elsewhere. Lots and lots of content!
The concerns of a product are the salability. Is has to fit perfectly into a 22 mins slot. It can’t upset the wrong people. It has to fit the mood and culture that our advertisers want. Etc.
This is a great example of when pulling out a dictionary implies that you've lost the argument, because if people were using the word in the same sense as the dictionary definition, you would have no need of the dictionary to “prove” the meaning.
This is the key, streaming content providers delete and edit things to match the feeling of society at the moment or perceived societal pressures.
Really not how history should work imho
1. buy movie on iTunes
2. have kids that can't do long distance drives
3. obtain dvd players for car
4. realized I can't play films that I "bought" on DVD players
It feels like the "Buy" button on iTunes/Apple TV is misleading, and should be renamed to "License to watch on Apple devices". Obvious in hindsight, but this type of DRM severely restricts use cases.
Netflix has the same problem. Downloaded some TV shows for my daughter to watch while we were travelling. Worked fine on the plane, arrived to the hotel, connected to WiFi "This content is not available in your location". Ok, disconnect, don't need wifi. Same message, "This content is not available in your location".
While I agree it seems obvious you can’t do that, based on how these platforms have limited things for a long time… but that really should be something you can do.
Why can’t I get the file and put it on another device? Why can’t I burn it to a dvd? It makes sense that Apple aren’t required to make more software for random devices, but why can’t I have the file and do what I want with it?
Not at all (hence saying "obvious in hindsight"). Simply pointing out that, at the time, my purchasing decision wasn't influenced by how many use cases it would restrict.
Also, IIRC, there was a period where you could burn Audio CDs from music that you purchased on iTunes.
edit: turns out music purchased on iTunes is DRM-free!
Are you trying to listen in Dolby surround on a stereo setup? Disney+ defaults to surround sound and you’ll lose some audio channels if your speakers are stereo
Channel issues are like 90% of issues like this, but it's not always user error. Often a cheap production will just ship the front left + right channels as the stereo mix, instead of down mixing all the left + center channels into the stereo left etc. This is endemic in back catalogs on streaming providers where the catalog is a bulk assets that nobody reviews and is passed around between companies that don't care about the quality they deliver to each other.
On missing audio: usually I notice this when I watch with subtitles at night and then end up rewatching during the day with audio at much higher volume… And the thing that is said to be said is just… Not there?
Lately whenever I watch movies my remote stays in my hand so I can boost the volume during dialogue and turn it down during loud action scenes. I've had two different soundbars, one of them quite expensive, and it's an issue on both.
From my understanding it’s not which soundbar that’s the issue, it’s that you’re only using a soundbar for audio. The channels all get compressed into one device with a couple speakers instead of whatever it was originally created for, like five or seven speakers with a subwoofer
This is the first year I have cancelled all my subs. Used to be a TPB regular around the time it took off. Years later I tried to go legit and have had subs with all the major streamers (netflix, disney, amazon etc) But the way you get squeezed year on year for what was standard before e.g. 4K or no ads to be gradually offered worse terms and degraded output quality just bites after a while. I can't justify spending €20-30 per month on what isn't the best quality available for the content on offer.
Plus I've found "legit" to be a moving goal post. One day a show is on one platform, the next it's on another, or it becomes unavailable except for [insert random foreign country here]. Even HD is a ripoff sometimes when half the episode comes in all compressed looking. They'll blame my bandwidth except I have no problem streaming an episode without adaptive compression over Bittorrent.
People can say what they want about piracy, but it continues to be what I consider a necessity against culturally important media being further tainted by rent seekers looking to make another buck in any way they can.
Yeah all the streaming services have gotten so bad and they are adding ads and they are lowering quality and they are getting too expensive. Arghgg I say
I will add to the list that for some weird reason in my country original language is not always available for all movies, and the subtitle experience in genenal is lacking.
In some Netflix shows, they say words in the english audio that are translated in French with different words with a similar meaning, and with english close-caption words that are also different from the original english audio.
> But you'd have no idea because they somehow completely deleted the neighbour's dialogue from the audio
This sounds pretty unlikely. It's more likely that there's an issue with your surround system, and that audio "should" be coming from your rear speakers but for some reason it's not.
This also reminded me of another issue - the show was filmed to be broadcast in 4:3 but apparently someone along the line decided 16:9 is inherently better, so they put out the show in widescreen and now there's a ton of shots where you can see things you're not supposed to see. Someone else standing in for an actor that wasn't there when they filmed, or a toy doll in place of a real baby because they filmed on a day the baby actor wasn't there.
Disney+ is truly unmitigated dogshit. It constantly chokes and stutters, seems to cause my NVIDIA Sheild to peg its CPU and/or page to disk, or something, to the point where it becomes unresponsive for multiple seconds at a time. I genuinely cannot understand how you could so utterly bungle software that's been a solved problem for over a decade.
> Most recent example - I was watching Malcolm in the Middle on Disney+ with my girlfriend, and we found that there are entire audio tracks missing in multiple episodes.
The licenses for the song tracks have also expired; so they removed these too. The main noticeable difference is being the intro sequence originally sung by There Might be Giants which has been replaced with a less-impressive cover that ruins the vibe.
Why can't these tracks just forever live with the series? I went and bought the DVD box-set just because of such. A £2 purchase that I than ripped to my NAS.
I've not watched the latest remake because I don't want to ruin the original vibe of such a great show.
I know. And I am commenting on that the licensed music within the series has been replaced due to expired licensing for which that itself is ridiculous.
Re-licensing music is a two-fold challenge. Sometimes it's much more efficient to use substitute music, instead of negotiating for new rights.
First, licensing arrangements for "all marketing channels" only account for the channels that exist at the time. When a new market channel opens up, such as streaming, music labels will require new licensing terms for that channel. If they don't, they might not get paid. (TV & movie studios are just as ruthless as music labels).
Second, in turn, the labels often have to get new permission from artists for the new channel. Tracking down all artists can be a challenge and require resources that they can't recoup.
This is a good point. Another problem with streaming services, specifically for music streaming services, is that they can change the track of a previously released album with no user choice to hear the original. Example: Track 4 of Elephunk by the Black Eyed Peas. It was universally replaced with the “clean” version of the song. I’m not a fan of rewriting history.
> Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata
A friend once pointed that out. He pays a lot and gets low quality. That was what changed his mind. That was also almost twenty years ago.
Most people changed. US corporations trying to raid people in foreign countries is, in my opinion, no longer acceptable at all. The swedish government should be ashamed for acting as US proxies here (nowadays with Trump this is more clear, but even 20 years ago or 25 years ago, it should have been a no-brainer).
It's very strange to think about this in the current context. Anything P2P used to be the Anti Christ of the Software Industry. The lengths Microsoft and game vendors went to prevent copying is insane. Installing Windows as well as various Higher End software is a huge pain because of this.
On the other hand Microsoft is very much leading with OpenAI in vacuuming any content, stripping effectively copyright claims.
That being said, nowadays the only use case for me to use Pirate Bay is when I cannot get a movie elsewhere. I'd pay for it but it's not possible - because of copyright...
The software industry certainly didn't give up. Most smaller game studios outsource their copy protection to Steam. Larger studios use Denuvo which works better than ever. Some Denuvo games stay uncracked for years. Non-entertainment software mostly moved to SaaS with a subscription model which is essentially uncrackable or, where that was not feasible (CAD and video editing), use extremely invasive copy protection measures. For example, Dassault can catch your Solidworks cracks even on an airgapped computer. They taint every file you create as pirated and when you give that file to a licensed user, their legitimate copy will phone home and have their lawyers force the legitimate user to betray you.
Oh wow that's really smart of them, now you have a reason to send your hacked version along the cad file so the user on the other side can escape from their spyware :D
They're organizations run by people who may or may not have something that could be described as narcissistic personality disorder.
It's not particularly strange; the rationale for organizations like Microsoft and OpenAI is to be immune to any and all rules that could possibly foreseeably impact shareholder value. If you're not paying for their wares, you're impacting shareholder value. If you're asking them to actually license out content that they're training an AI on, you're impacting shareholder value.
Rules for thee, not for me, especially when it makes me - the special person who charitably graces society with my presence - a rich person.
I don't think I'd prefer this, tbh. I would want to see the whole topic information when choosing what exact torrent to download. Is it marked "verified" or "questionable"? If it's "questionable", is it for some arbitrary formality, or something like "the audio is desynced"? Are there many different dubs (because I'd rather prefer not to have them, as they're bloating the files?)...
Not those exact markings, but TPB does have user-markings displayed that can serve as a vouch for credibility.
- Normal User, no special status (No Skull)
- Trusted (Pink Skull)
- VIP (Green Skull)
- Helper (Blue Skull, Legacy)
- Moderator (Black MOD Tag)
- Super Moderator (Red MOD Tag)
- Administrator (Black ADMIN Tag)
When it comes to films, I torrent exclusively remuxes or whole Blu-Ray images. TPB hasn't been relevant for me for the last 15 years or more, since it never had a culture of such large file sizes, just small re-encodes. I wonder why, because obviously that data doesn't have to pass through TPB's own servers.
> it never had a culture of such large file sizes, just small re-encodes. I wonder why, because obviously that data doesn't have to pass through TPB's own servers.
We (the users) have to concern ourselves with how big the file is. And TPB tends to surface the most popular stuff first.
Usually a 1080p re-encode is good enough quality for me. And a lot of the time if I'm looking for a movie to watch right away I'd rather just get it fast so I can start watching.
Where do you find those? I use 1337 and dht search engines. Can't be bothered to fiddle with private trackers. Wondering if you found something better.
thepiratebay is fine they just don’t run indexes often so searches often fail for stuff just uploaded within last hour or two. Limetorrents updates indices frequently but uses ad providers that try to hijack your clicks and presses so it takes three or four clicks to get one click that isn’t hijacked. There is a bit of non overlap between those two sites.
I honestly wouldn’t bother with public trackers. They work great for debrid services with something like kodi or stremio but if you want to “own” or build your collection you have much better options
1. Private trackers - people seed, they have rules on uploads and actually moderate
2. Usenet is still alive and thriving for this.
3. Libraries still exist and you can rent and rip media there
4.Internet Archive is a great resource for old stuff
5. Just buy physical copies and rip em. Can check eBay etc.
Generally a lot of them you can get an invite from someone on Reddit or discord. A lot also open up for a week or so allowing people to register every year or whenever a major tracker goes down so the refuges can join. you can check places like Reddit /r/opensignups.
A lot of mainstream stuff is ripped already, the “ratio” on some is more if you download a torrent, they want you to seed it for x amount of time or seed it back x amount to the community. I don’t know of any that expect you to be ripping and uploading that way, it’s recommended but a lot have groups for mainstream content.
There are a few “elitist” private trackers that require “interviews” and stuff, but don’t let that scare you off 99% of them are all just grab and invite or sign up and seed back to community for the week or so minimum (preferably longer) and your good to go!
Regarding seed ratio, generally by perma seeding. Many private sites either use seed time requirements instead of ratio or offer bonus points for seed time which can be exchanged for ratio. But also as new editions and formats are released, the library has a bit more turnaround than your music sites of yesteryear.
I was looking for this european movie from 10 years ago only last month, could not find it anywhere on line, streaming or torrent. I'm pretty confident there is still a lot of stuff missing.
hey there's a project idea: a "todo list" for rippers that scrapes imdb and checks what's not in pirate bay (and then looks for dvd's on ebay / libraries)
Public trackers like the piratebay face a lot of issues with retention. If it’s not mainstream or recent people often don’t seed or maintain it. If you join a private tracker there’s ones dedicated to keeping older sources like that a live!
For really obscure content, internet archive, your library, usenet or even eBay are the go to!
use their RSS feed + a seed box to automatically grab stuff as it’s posted some sites have ratio free for large files to get them seeded faster. at least that’s what I did a decade plus ago.
Ya I still have mad love for TPB. My ISP was blocking my private tracker recently and while I would usually just run things through a seedbox it made me happy I could still turn to my trusty ol' friend.
It's kind of cool but also kind of spooky: A legally targeted site just staying online for 20 years, not because of obscurity, but simply because it can't be taken down.
I don't know who's included in your "our", but I rather strongly like that American/Swedish/EU/whoever institutions don't have the capability to control the entire world and would prefer it stay that way. That's the beauty of the internet, and it's concerning that many people regard that lack of complete global control as an "incapability". Your laws don't, and shouldn't, apply to me.
> TPB has become an institution that people just expected to be there. Noone willing to take the technology further. The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design. It never changed except for one thing – the ads. More and more ads was filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful they somehow ended up even worse.
> As a big fan of the KLF I once learned that it’s great to burn great things up. At least then you can quit while you’re on top. I think I left TPB just a little bit after that top, and not when it’s as shitty as it was when it was closed today. It feels good that it might have closed down forever, just a real shame the way it did that. A planned retirement would have given the community time and a way to kick off something new, something better, something faster, something more reliable and with no chance of corrupting itself. Something that had a soul and could retain it.
The pirate bay raid is a good example of the kind of soft power the US has lost with their recent behavior. Hard to imagine Stockholm police being as receptive nowadays.
edit: I'm very sorry for making a relevant comment that extrapolate on the content of the shared article.
People I know watch less and less each year. I don't think it's because they're getting older, as the reasons they cite usually revolves around how the source material has been butchered.
And if subscriber numbers were still going up, I sincerely doubt that the producers kept increasing the subscription cost over the last few years.
Honestly, I think that soft power has been massively damaged too, with people looking for less virtue signalling and less asinine gender swaps along with contrived homosexuality in their media
American troops have been granted full immunity against Swedish law when they are in Sweden, according to the most recent military treaties. I don't know if you consider such a deal to be soft power or hard power. But it is a lot more than any server room raid.
This has been my go-to for discovering new things to watch for 15 years. If something doesn't show up in the top-100 list, I'm generally unaware of it.
We need to raid those lobbyists. How much money did the
get from the USA?
So the real pirates was the swedish government. It's time
to completely change the whole government. Back in 2006
they thought they targeted only few individuals. I am sure
there are many more people who don't support what the
swedish government did. Did they ever apologize for serving
US corporations here? How much financial kickback did they
get there?
For some reason I thought the pirate bay was like fake/scam urls now. Is that or was that not the case? I thought I was remember the URL constantly changing and it was hard to keep up.
<3 Still a great public tracker. We absolutely need people who will run sites like this and crack and bypass stiff like Denuvo and so on. We really do need to keep these sort of skills, tools, and communities alive to be able to resist digital oppression and techno-fascists. Sounds corny as hell but it's true imo.
So not to hijack this thread or anything but there's one good metric (if nothing else... the fact FB overwrote your email while Google seems to believe in data liberation, and fewer breaches) to tell apart the difference between those two companies
Google had been asked to remove Pirate Bay in results. They didn't. On Google, and I don't really know how it changed over the years, but there'd be a notice about links removed due to DMCA, if it came to that, basically. (Okay, Youtube, which they own, has always been a bit aggressive, and that isn't nothing)
Facebook? Facebook wouldn't let you SEND a link to PB in private messages. It still deletes your post now if you link Anna's Archive. This after apparently heavily scraping LibGen
I don't love Google for a lot of reasons but I damn well feel better using it compared to Mr. "Dumb Fucks"
> For now, the site remains online, twenty years after Hollywood thought it had seen the last of it. And whoever is in charge today, will likely do everything possible to keep it that way.
I'm vaguely aware that other people than the original group are running it now.
Also, I don't torrent much, but it seems pretty stagnant and dead. It's been occasionally useful to me to find older stuff that doesn't seem to be well represented on newer (public) sites.
I've never not found something that has been publicly released on it. Though, I don't typically stray too far from the mainstream path for the media I'm looking for.
I can absolutely find new stuff on there. It took Project Hail Mary a little while to get on there, presumably because it was a cinema release only for quite a while but a good quality version popped up after a couple of weeks, and a bad quality "guy holding a camcorder in the cinema" version showed up after about 1 week, IIRC
I don't recall exactly when it went onto streaming, but I'm pretty sure I got a good quality version before that. It may have been released for streaming in other regions earlier than I thought though, I don't keep super up to date with that sort of thing, as I generally don't watch movies super soon after they're released
I find the stream rips to be really shitty quality.. The original source is very low bitrate, compressed tae fuck. I find for stream rips from netflix for example I need to download a 4k rip in order to watch in 1080, and that's acceptable.
Torrenting is alive and well… for recent releases and new stuff. All the old stuff is pretty hard to find now. When demonoid was around you could find just about everything. The worst part is for a lot of it there isn’t a legal way to get them either.
That's the tragedy of the MAFIAA death throes period imo.. With all their lawsuits and bullshit they never even slowed down the big public trackers and torrents of the popular stuff they were trying to stop being shared.. Instead they killed loads of small private trackers which housed exquisitely curated collections of stuff that wasn't available anywhere else for neither love nor money.
I think the site has been hosted by the police since them. They probably use it as a honeypot or something - except the site is so poorly managed that no one really comes :D
Every once in a while I'll try to watch something through the Intended Method™ and it always proves itself to be a worse experience.
Most recent example - I was watching Malcolm in the Middle on Disney+ with my girlfriend, and we found that there are entire audio tracks missing in multiple episodes. Usually some kind of ADR, like someone talking off camera. There's an episode where Reese rents an apartment and there's a recurring bit of him talking to his depressed neighbour through the wall. But you'd have no idea because they somehow completely deleted the neighbour's dialogue from the audio, so it's just Reese having a one-sided conversation with a wall. We saw multiple episodes where something like this happened, and when I looked online there were reports of it dating back years.
Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata, etc. No one providing official routes to this media seems to care. You have AI-upscaled "4k" movies where the actors don't even look like themselves and there are hallucinated artifacts and things that aren't there. Images cropped to widescreen, like the infamous Duff Beer joke being out of frame in The Simpsons. TV series with edits or entire episodes removed because they were deemed too offensive. Movies and shows randomly appearing and disappearing so you have to endlessly manage subscriptions and switch between different apps with better or worse players just to watch a single series. Just a nightmare.
Not to go off on a complete tangent, but...
>... like the infamous Duff Beer joke being out of frame in The Simpsons.
My collection of The Simpsons, seasons 1-13, are all TV rips from waaaaayyyyy back in the 00's. Sure, it's not super high-quality, but at least they don't look like the ugly remasters (on some of the ones I've tried watching on Disney+, they look like someone's drawn over the old cells), the aspect ratio is the original so nothing's missing and, as a personal bonus, they've got the old Q13 logo in the bottom (I grew up in western WA). They still look great on my newer TV.
Edit: Oh, and the Michael Jackson episode never suddenly disappeared from my library.
To me it is the difference between art and product.
A show like The Simpsons is both. The viewers care about the art, and we tolerate the product to get it. The creators are creating art, compromising with the corporation and broadcaster to make it enough of a product. But the corp/broadcaster only care about the product. The art is the chocolate around the advertising pill.
So when the product-minded people control preservation and resharing of the product, the art always gets compromised. Jokes are clipped. Audio is broken. Episodes are pulled. For all the wrong reasons.
The terminology is art vs content. Anybody talking about "content", by definition, do not actually care about what that content is, just that it is contained into something they charge for.
No I don’t think that’s what I’m going for.
To me content often implies a kind of volume of work. Always be posting. Don’t miss a few days or your viewers go elsewhere. Lots and lots of content!
The concerns of a product are the salability. Is has to fit perfectly into a 22 mins slot. It can’t upset the wrong people. It has to fit the mood and culture that our advertisers want. Etc.
This is a great example of when pulling out a dictionary implies that you've lost the argument, because if people were using the word in the same sense as the dictionary definition, you would have no need of the dictionary to “prove” the meaning.
This is the key, streaming content providers delete and edit things to match the feeling of society at the moment or perceived societal pressures. Really not how history should work imho
A recent experience I had was :
1. buy movie on iTunes 2. have kids that can't do long distance drives 3. obtain dvd players for car 4. realized I can't play films that I "bought" on DVD players
It feels like the "Buy" button on iTunes/Apple TV is misleading, and should be renamed to "License to watch on Apple devices". Obvious in hindsight, but this type of DRM severely restricts use cases.
Netflix has the same problem. Downloaded some TV shows for my daughter to watch while we were travelling. Worked fine on the plane, arrived to the hotel, connected to WiFi "This content is not available in your location". Ok, disconnect, don't need wifi. Same message, "This content is not available in your location".
While I agree with you in spirit... were you expecting that you could... burn the film to a DVD or something?
Of course buying a movie on itunes means you can only watch it on capable devices. You can't play a youtube video on a VHS player either.
While I agree it seems obvious you can’t do that, based on how these platforms have limited things for a long time… but that really should be something you can do.
Why can’t I get the file and put it on another device? Why can’t I burn it to a dvd? It makes sense that Apple aren’t required to make more software for random devices, but why can’t I have the file and do what I want with it?
Not at all (hence saying "obvious in hindsight"). Simply pointing out that, at the time, my purchasing decision wasn't influenced by how many use cases it would restrict.
Also, IIRC, there was a period where you could burn Audio CDs from music that you purchased on iTunes.
edit: turns out music purchased on iTunes is DRM-free!
> there was a period where you could burn Audio CDs from music that you purchased on iTunes.
Music purchased on iTunes is DRM-free, so you can definitely burn CDs with them.
Ah very nice. I suppose it makes sense that music is DRM-free but films aren't
I suppose it makes sense that music is DRM-free but films aren't
Why?
Of course b̵u̵y̵i̵n̵g̵ licensing a movie on itunes...
Are you trying to listen in Dolby surround on a stereo setup? Disney+ defaults to surround sound and you’ll lose some audio channels if your speakers are stereo
Channel issues are like 90% of issues like this, but it's not always user error. Often a cheap production will just ship the front left + right channels as the stereo mix, instead of down mixing all the left + center channels into the stereo left etc. This is endemic in back catalogs on streaming providers where the catalog is a bulk assets that nobody reviews and is passed around between companies that don't care about the quality they deliver to each other.
That seems like a terrible default, aren't most people listening in stereo at best?
The Mad Men AI upscale was such trash. You could see cameras, crew, equipment, etc. total mess that showed no care for the material.
On missing audio: usually I notice this when I watch with subtitles at night and then end up rewatching during the day with audio at much higher volume… And the thing that is said to be said is just… Not there?
The fact that they refuse to balance audio for standard stereo setups is a whole other nightmare.
Lately whenever I watch movies my remote stays in my hand so I can boost the volume during dialogue and turn it down during loud action scenes. I've had two different soundbars, one of them quite expensive, and it's an issue on both.
From my understanding it’s not which soundbar that’s the issue, it’s that you’re only using a soundbar for audio. The channels all get compressed into one device with a couple speakers instead of whatever it was originally created for, like five or seven speakers with a subwoofer
This is the first year I have cancelled all my subs. Used to be a TPB regular around the time it took off. Years later I tried to go legit and have had subs with all the major streamers (netflix, disney, amazon etc) But the way you get squeezed year on year for what was standard before e.g. 4K or no ads to be gradually offered worse terms and degraded output quality just bites after a while. I can't justify spending €20-30 per month on what isn't the best quality available for the content on offer.
Plus I've found "legit" to be a moving goal post. One day a show is on one platform, the next it's on another, or it becomes unavailable except for [insert random foreign country here]. Even HD is a ripoff sometimes when half the episode comes in all compressed looking. They'll blame my bandwidth except I have no problem streaming an episode without adaptive compression over Bittorrent.
People can say what they want about piracy, but it continues to be what I consider a necessity against culturally important media being further tainted by rent seekers looking to make another buck in any way they can.
Yeah all the streaming services have gotten so bad and they are adding ads and they are lowering quality and they are getting too expensive. Arghgg I say
I will add to the list that for some weird reason in my country original language is not always available for all movies, and the subtitle experience in genenal is lacking.
I am in the french-speaking part of Canada.
In some Netflix shows, they say words in the english audio that are translated in French with different words with a similar meaning, and with english close-caption words that are also different from the original english audio.
Quite amazing.
> But you'd have no idea because they somehow completely deleted the neighbour's dialogue from the audio
This sounds pretty unlikely. It's more likely that there's an issue with your surround system, and that audio "should" be coming from your rear speakers but for some reason it's not.
It wasn't a surround sound system, we were watching on the built-in app on a Fire TV from the TV's speakers.
Also just Google "malcolm in the middle missing audio" and you'll find a ton of people with the issue
https://www.reddit.com/r/malcolminthemiddle/comments/1kggg7d...
This also reminded me of another issue - the show was filmed to be broadcast in 4:3 but apparently someone along the line decided 16:9 is inherently better, so they put out the show in widescreen and now there's a ton of shots where you can see things you're not supposed to see. Someone else standing in for an actor that wasn't there when they filmed, or a toy doll in place of a real baby because they filmed on a day the baby actor wasn't there.
this wouldn't be HN if there wasn't someone with zero knowledge confidently telling you you're wrong
Yup. That’s your issue. Disney+ outputting Dolby 5.1 and your speakers are stereo.
Well it's still their fault for not making sure their audio works on a normal, non-surround setup
Also worth noting that we switched the audio track to Spanish and you can hear it just fine.
That's not what the link says. In fact it is specifically saying it should be working in stereo but tdolby surround has missing channels.
Disney+ is truly unmitigated dogshit. It constantly chokes and stutters, seems to cause my NVIDIA Sheild to peg its CPU and/or page to disk, or something, to the point where it becomes unresponsive for multiple seconds at a time. I genuinely cannot understand how you could so utterly bungle software that's been a solved problem for over a decade.
> Most recent example - I was watching Malcolm in the Middle on Disney+ with my girlfriend, and we found that there are entire audio tracks missing in multiple episodes.
The licenses for the song tracks have also expired; so they removed these too. The main noticeable difference is being the intro sequence originally sung by There Might be Giants which has been replaced with a less-impressive cover that ruins the vibe.
Why can't these tracks just forever live with the series? I went and bought the DVD box-set just because of such. A £2 purchase that I than ripped to my NAS.
I've not watched the latest remake because I don't want to ruin the original vibe of such a great show.
Real acting, real filming; the last of it's kind.
> That's because the license for the tracks expired
They're talking about pieces of dialogue in the show, not licensed music.
I know. And I am commenting on that the licensed music within the series has been replaced due to expired licensing for which that itself is ridiculous.
Re-licensing music is a two-fold challenge. Sometimes it's much more efficient to use substitute music, instead of negotiating for new rights.
First, licensing arrangements for "all marketing channels" only account for the channels that exist at the time. When a new market channel opens up, such as streaming, music labels will require new licensing terms for that channel. If they don't, they might not get paid. (TV & movie studios are just as ruthless as music labels).
Second, in turn, the labels often have to get new permission from artists for the new channel. Tracking down all artists can be a challenge and require resources that they can't recoup.
And all that just strengthens the case for piracy: you actually get the original thing.
Hah! How soon 'till some MBA comes up with a scheme to start licensing movies one word at a time?
I have never seen an episode that had a cover of the theme song.
Maybe that was a thing with the new reboot? I don't know because I heard nothing that made me want to watch it.
This is a good point. Another problem with streaming services, specifically for music streaming services, is that they can change the track of a previously released album with no user choice to hear the original. Example: Track 4 of Elephunk by the Black Eyed Peas. It was universally replaced with the “clean” version of the song. I’m not a fan of rewriting history.
> Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata
A friend once pointed that out. He pays a lot and gets low quality. That was what changed his mind. That was also almost twenty years ago.
Most people changed. US corporations trying to raid people in foreign countries is, in my opinion, no longer acceptable at all. The swedish government should be ashamed for acting as US proxies here (nowadays with Trump this is more clear, but even 20 years ago or 25 years ago, it should have been a no-brainer).
It's very strange to think about this in the current context. Anything P2P used to be the Anti Christ of the Software Industry. The lengths Microsoft and game vendors went to prevent copying is insane. Installing Windows as well as various Higher End software is a huge pain because of this.
On the other hand Microsoft is very much leading with OpenAI in vacuuming any content, stripping effectively copyright claims.
That being said, nowadays the only use case for me to use Pirate Bay is when I cannot get a movie elsewhere. I'd pay for it but it's not possible - because of copyright...
The software industry mostly gave up when they saw it wasn't working.
Even the music industry (of all of them!) mostly gave up.
Only Hollywood and the wider film/TV industry is so stubborn.
The software industry certainly didn't give up. Most smaller game studios outsource their copy protection to Steam. Larger studios use Denuvo which works better than ever. Some Denuvo games stay uncracked for years. Non-entertainment software mostly moved to SaaS with a subscription model which is essentially uncrackable or, where that was not feasible (CAD and video editing), use extremely invasive copy protection measures. For example, Dassault can catch your Solidworks cracks even on an airgapped computer. They taint every file you create as pirated and when you give that file to a licensed user, their legitimate copy will phone home and have their lawyers force the legitimate user to betray you.
Oh wow that's really smart of them, now you have a reason to send your hacked version along the cad file so the user on the other side can escape from their spyware :D
They're organizations run by people who may or may not have something that could be described as narcissistic personality disorder.
It's not particularly strange; the rationale for organizations like Microsoft and OpenAI is to be immune to any and all rules that could possibly foreseeably impact shareholder value. If you're not paying for their wares, you're impacting shareholder value. If you're asking them to actually license out content that they're training an AI on, you're impacting shareholder value.
Rules for thee, not for me, especially when it makes me - the special person who charitably graces society with my presence - a rich person.
I haven't visited a torrent site since I found out I could search for them from within qBittorrent.
I don't think I'd prefer this, tbh. I would want to see the whole topic information when choosing what exact torrent to download. Is it marked "verified" or "questionable"? If it's "questionable", is it for some arbitrary formality, or something like "the audio is desynced"? Are there many different dubs (because I'd rather prefer not to have them, as they're bloating the files?)...
After a certain point, you get a sense of which release groups to trust or not.
Not to mention you can just open the download page from within qBittorrent.
I had no idea! As much as I appreciate TPB, their ads are cursed.
You browse torrent sites without uBlock Origin?
You use anything on the web without uBlock Origin?
They are cursed even with it.
I've never seen a torrent site that had things marked.
Not those exact markings, but TPB does have user-markings displayed that can serve as a vouch for credibility.
- Normal User, no special status (No Skull) - Trusted (Pink Skull) - VIP (Green Skull) - Helper (Blue Skull, Legacy) - Moderator (Black MOD Tag) - Super Moderator (Red MOD Tag) - Administrator (Black ADMIN Tag)
https://pirates-forum.org/Thread-ThePirateBay-Want-Trusted-V...
Weird, I don't think I have ever seen that. Granted, I'm not a frequent user of TPB.
Perhaps you could try visiting the famous one mentioned in the headline.
What he is describing is how Rutracker does things.
You can? Tell me how
When it comes to films, I torrent exclusively remuxes or whole Blu-Ray images. TPB hasn't been relevant for me for the last 15 years or more, since it never had a culture of such large file sizes, just small re-encodes. I wonder why, because obviously that data doesn't have to pass through TPB's own servers.
Are you sure what you're looking for isn't on TPB as well? Just lower down the list.
I torrent TPB because it's what people know. I don't care for private trackers, I just want to support the common torrenters.
> it never had a culture of such large file sizes, just small re-encodes. I wonder why, because obviously that data doesn't have to pass through TPB's own servers.
We (the users) have to concern ourselves with how big the file is. And TPB tends to surface the most popular stuff first.
Usually a 1080p re-encode is good enough quality for me. And a lot of the time if I'm looking for a movie to watch right away I'd rather just get it fast so I can start watching.
Where do you find those? I use 1337 and dht search engines. Can't be bothered to fiddle with private trackers. Wondering if you found something better.
E.g. ext.to aggregates torrents from a lot of public trackers, very often you can find good releases there.
RARBG used to be the way to go, until they shut down. I'm not aware of a good public replacement.
thepiratebay is fine they just don’t run indexes often so searches often fail for stuff just uploaded within last hour or two. Limetorrents updates indices frequently but uses ad providers that try to hijack your clicks and presses so it takes three or four clicks to get one click that isn’t hijacked. There is a bit of non overlap between those two sites.
I honestly wouldn’t bother with public trackers. They work great for debrid services with something like kodi or stremio but if you want to “own” or build your collection you have much better options 1. Private trackers - people seed, they have rules on uploads and actually moderate
2. Usenet is still alive and thriving for this.
3. Libraries still exist and you can rent and rip media there
4.Internet Archive is a great resource for old stuff
5. Just buy physical copies and rip em. Can check eBay etc.
How do you join private trackers from scratch?
I used to do this kind of things decades ago, but there was also still a few things not ripped and uploaded you had _some_ chance of participating.
Nowadays I imagine ~everything under the sun is already ripped, so how can you contribute to seed ratio? (or is that not even a thing anymore?)
Generally a lot of them you can get an invite from someone on Reddit or discord. A lot also open up for a week or so allowing people to register every year or whenever a major tracker goes down so the refuges can join. you can check places like Reddit /r/opensignups.
A lot of mainstream stuff is ripped already, the “ratio” on some is more if you download a torrent, they want you to seed it for x amount of time or seed it back x amount to the community. I don’t know of any that expect you to be ripping and uploading that way, it’s recommended but a lot have groups for mainstream content.
There are a few “elitist” private trackers that require “interviews” and stuff, but don’t let that scare you off 99% of them are all just grab and invite or sign up and seed back to community for the week or so minimum (preferably longer) and your good to go!
>> How do you join private trackers from scratch?
https://old.reddit.com/r/trackers/wiki/how_to_get_started
Regarding seed ratio, generally by perma seeding. Many private sites either use seed time requirements instead of ratio or offer bonus points for seed time which can be exchanged for ratio. But also as new editions and formats are released, the library has a bit more turnaround than your music sites of yesteryear.
I was looking for this european movie from 10 years ago only last month, could not find it anywhere on line, streaming or torrent. I'm pretty confident there is still a lot of stuff missing.
hey there's a project idea: a "todo list" for rippers that scrapes imdb and checks what's not in pirate bay (and then looks for dvd's on ebay / libraries)
Public trackers like the piratebay face a lot of issues with retention. If it’s not mainstream or recent people often don’t seed or maintain it. If you join a private tracker there’s ones dedicated to keeping older sources like that a live!
For really obscure content, internet archive, your library, usenet or even eBay are the go to!
Out of curiosity, what movie?
> hey there's a project idea: a "todo list" for rippers that scrapes imdb and checks what's not in pirate ba
Private sites do things like this, archival efforts and have request systems.
Piracy is and always has been the only way for more obscure stuff.
Personally I do not feel guilty pirating a decades old TV show or movie. And I really doubt the industry cares much either.
How can anyone sit through a length of a film, especially a European one, and not have a cigarette?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VzSiilYSKs
use their RSS feed + a seed box to automatically grab stuff as it’s posted some sites have ratio free for large files to get them seeded faster. at least that’s what I did a decade plus ago.
Sometimes feel like I'm the only one still using it around me, but the service is still great and functional
Ya I still have mad love for TPB. My ISP was blocking my private tracker recently and while I would usually just run things through a seedbox it made me happy I could still turn to my trusty ol' friend.
It's kind of cool but also kind of spooky: A legally targeted site just staying online for 20 years, not because of obscurity, but simply because it can't be taken down.
Are our institutions this incapable?
I don't know who's included in your "our", but I rather strongly like that American/Swedish/EU/whoever institutions don't have the capability to control the entire world and would prefer it stay that way. That's the beauty of the internet, and it's concerning that many people regard that lack of complete global control as an "incapability". Your laws don't, and shouldn't, apply to me.
I'm astounded that they've been able to keep that domain name.
Great documentary on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6qcJt2NPY8
From "The Pirate Bay down, forever?" (2014)
> TPB has become an institution that people just expected to be there. Noone willing to take the technology further. The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design. It never changed except for one thing – the ads. More and more ads was filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful they somehow ended up even worse.
> As a big fan of the KLF I once learned that it’s great to burn great things up. At least then you can quit while you’re on top. I think I left TPB just a little bit after that top, and not when it’s as shitty as it was when it was closed today. It feels good that it might have closed down forever, just a real shame the way it did that. A planned retirement would have given the community time and a way to kick off something new, something better, something faster, something more reliable and with no chance of corrupting itself. Something that had a soul and could retain it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160712155638/http://blog.broke...
> As a big fan of the KLF I once learned that it’s great to burn great things up.
For anyone who doesn't know, the KLF took a million pounds in cash, and set it on fire. For no obvious reason.
It works great with a nice stremio setup for live streaming. No subscriptions necessary anymore.
The pirate bay raid is a good example of the kind of soft power the US has lost with their recent behavior. Hard to imagine Stockholm police being as receptive nowadays.
edit: I'm very sorry for making a relevant comment that extrapolate on the content of the shared article.
Paradoxically, it's also a good example of the kind of soft power the US still has: we're all watching their movies.
Are we though?
People I know watch less and less each year. I don't think it's because they're getting older, as the reasons they cite usually revolves around how the source material has been butchered.
And if subscriber numbers were still going up, I sincerely doubt that the producers kept increasing the subscription cost over the last few years.
Honestly, I think that soft power has been massively damaged too, with people looking for less virtue signalling and less asinine gender swaps along with contrived homosexuality in their media
U.S. population pyramid graph is sobering enough.
Speak for yourself.
You've not seen Dune?
I have not seen Dune.
American troops have been granted full immunity against Swedish law when they are in Sweden, according to the most recent military treaties. I don't know if you consider such a deal to be soft power or hard power. But it is a lot more than any server room raid.
Yes! thank fuck!
If its not on their top 100/48 hr list then its not worth watching.
This has been my go-to for discovering new things to watch for 15 years. If something doesn't show up in the top-100 list, I'm generally unaware of it.
We need to raid those lobbyists. How much money did the get from the USA?
So the real pirates was the swedish government. It's time to completely change the whole government. Back in 2006 they thought they targeted only few individuals. I am sure there are many more people who don't support what the swedish government did. Did they ever apologize for serving US corporations here? How much financial kickback did they get there?
All the best stuff doesn’t get licensed by streaming services at all
Entire generations of people have no idea something exists
For some reason I thought the pirate bay was like fake/scam urls now. Is that or was that not the case? I thought I was remember the URL constantly changing and it was hard to keep up.
In non free countries it wont show up since the ISP will block the domain (eg. Oz). Free countries show it …
It's been thepiratebay.org for ages now (or so I heard, not that I'd ever go there ever, of course).
<3 Still a great public tracker. We absolutely need people who will run sites like this and crack and bypass stiff like Denuvo and so on. We really do need to keep these sort of skills, tools, and communities alive to be able to resist digital oppression and techno-fascists. Sounds corny as hell but it's true imo.
agreed. the walls are closing in so skills need to remain sharp.
So not to hijack this thread or anything but there's one good metric (if nothing else... the fact FB overwrote your email while Google seems to believe in data liberation, and fewer breaches) to tell apart the difference between those two companies
Google had been asked to remove Pirate Bay in results. They didn't. On Google, and I don't really know how it changed over the years, but there'd be a notice about links removed due to DMCA, if it came to that, basically. (Okay, Youtube, which they own, has always been a bit aggressive, and that isn't nothing)
Facebook? Facebook wouldn't let you SEND a link to PB in private messages. It still deletes your post now if you link Anna's Archive. This after apparently heavily scraping LibGen
I don't love Google for a lot of reasons but I damn well feel better using it compared to Mr. "Dumb Fucks"
> For now, the site remains online, twenty years after Hollywood thought it had seen the last of it. And whoever is in charge today, will likely do everything possible to keep it that way.
I'm vaguely aware that other people than the original group are running it now.
Also, I don't torrent much, but it seems pretty stagnant and dead. It's been occasionally useful to me to find older stuff that doesn't seem to be well represented on newer (public) sites.
I've never not found something that has been publicly released on it. Though, I don't typically stray too far from the mainstream path for the media I'm looking for.
For one, not every entry of the Stormlight Archives is on it.
I can absolutely find new stuff on there. It took Project Hail Mary a little while to get on there, presumably because it was a cinema release only for quite a while but a good quality version popped up after a couple of weeks, and a bad quality "guy holding a camcorder in the cinema" version showed up after about 1 week, IIRC
once it hit streaming services the webrip was on it within hours.
I don't recall exactly when it went onto streaming, but I'm pretty sure I got a good quality version before that. It may have been released for streaming in other regions earlier than I thought though, I don't keep super up to date with that sort of thing, as I generally don't watch movies super soon after they're released
I find the stream rips to be really shitty quality.. The original source is very low bitrate, compressed tae fuck. I find for stream rips from netflix for example I need to download a 4k rip in order to watch in 1080, and that's acceptable.
/top/48hall seems pretty fresh and healthy. What do you mean by stagnant?
Torrenting is alive and well… for recent releases and new stuff. All the old stuff is pretty hard to find now. When demonoid was around you could find just about everything. The worst part is for a lot of it there isn’t a legal way to get them either.
That's the tragedy of the MAFIAA death throes period imo.. With all their lawsuits and bullshit they never even slowed down the big public trackers and torrents of the popular stuff they were trying to stop being shared.. Instead they killed loads of small private trackers which housed exquisitely curated collections of stuff that wasn't available anywhere else for neither love nor money.
> on newer (public) sites
Example of said sites?
rutracker, 1337x, nyaa are the first that come to mind.
newer? my rutracker account is an adult, I'm pretty sure.
It's marginally newer than TPB
ext in tonga
I use Stremio with pirate bay torrents. There literally isn’t anything that came out and isn’t on there.
Tons of Japanese shows and movies are not there at all.
Not a single Utaban episode is there, even though there's many on youtube.
I think the site has been hosted by the police since them. They probably use it as a honeypot or something - except the site is so poorly managed that no one really comes :D
References for this claim?
This is not a claim, it is common sense - check it out.
And being downvoted by you because you pissed your pants a little, was worth it :D