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.

    • neograymatter@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Yep. The video entertainment industry had a great solution to piracy in Netflix and it had moved piracy out of the mainstream… Then companies got competitive and content became fractured across a multitude of platforms.

      • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        “now that we finally solved one of the hardest problems we’ve ever faced, let scrap the solution!”

        • empireOfLove@lemmy.one
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          1 year ago

          No, it’s actually:
          “Now that we’ve gotten everyone locked into one service, let’s squeeze them for every single cent we can until they pop!”

          It’s literally capitalsim’s job and it will never change.

        • neograymatter@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          Heh, I actually had greedy when intially typing the comment and changed it after some thought.
          Greedy might be more apt, as from basic economics you would think price should come down as more players entered the market… But we’ve seen the opposite.
          The price of the subscription isnt what bother me personally though, I used to pay alot more for cable, its more the quanity of subscriptions/ accounts/apps that have to be used that drove me away.

          • Daisyifyoudo@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Yep, it was greed, pure and simple. After seeing how wildly successful Netflix and Hulu were, companies that owned ip weren’t content in just having a small piece of the pie. No, they needed the whole thing.

            I hope all of these late-coming streaming services burn to the ground. And I LOVE streaming their content for free.

      • Nailbar@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        My preferred solution is to only subscribe to one service at a time, and then switch, when I run out of things to watch.

        This also means the providers get less money when they have less content.

    • thepianistfroggollum@lemmynsfw.com
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      1 year ago

      And companies just don’t seem to get it. They saw Netflix boom in popularity and said, “Hey, I wanna do that,” without realizing that having all your content in one platform was what made it so successful.

    • JokeDeity@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Ehhhhh, sorta’. I’ve spent WAY more money thanks to Steam than I would have without it, but I’m still buying everything on sale and cheaper than anyone I know with a console. I think price is still a bit part of the equation for me. Some games that refuse to ever have a decent sale are making me consider the high seas again as they stagnate on my waitlist.