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.
I started pirating around 2000. Early days of bittorrent, before that Napster and others. Maybe I’m out of touch and/or old. But YT premium/music has be very convenient and cost effective for me. As far as movies, paying for a couple of streaming services is way easier than delving through scummy torrent sites waiting for movies to download.
I’m fairly tech savvy but I’ve been off the high seas for awhile. If anyone knows a way to get movies/music with the same ease of use as the paid stuff I’d love to know about it.
qBittorrent + Plex makes it pretty easy; you can search for torrents from within qBittorrent, so no scummy sites
Super cool that you can search for torrents with in qBittorrent. I’ll check it out.
It takes a little bit of dicking around, you have to add the torrent sites you want to search, but it’s not hard.
This is the guide I followed
Thanks. Trying to use my steam deck for media so this is very helpful.
Fair. I use YouTube almost exclusively on PC and my phone, and setting up an ad-free environment on both was fairly easy for me. But if I were to switch to a TV, I just might have bought yt premium. It’s not that expensive, after all.
Also, I still pay for netflix. It just has the right amount of convenience that I am ok with to pay money for.
Bflix.gg or some other similar site, in a browser with ublock. That’s what I do for 90% of what my girlfriend and i watch, then we torrent some things that were really excited about, or like a season at a time of a tv show.
That’s all well and good until you basically start google searching whatever you want to watch to see which subscription it’s on. Super Mario Movie? Not HBO or Netflix, it’s on Peacock. Snowpiercer (show)? Not streaming on any service anymore.
At a certain point having it available is more convenient than paying 5 different subscriptions to see which has what.
Also it can be very easy to automate this so you don’t even have to search anymore. You just put in the name and it does it for ya!
Using the *arrs is pretty convenient if you know how to use docker (or even if you dont) and then you can connect them to Plex or jellyfin to view, it won’t be instant like Netflix and co but at least its free/cheaper (cost of VPN or seedbox). You can even setup overseerr or jellyseerr to simplify the movie/show requests.