29 ms·

The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

399 points by uptown 9y ago

KindOne 9y ago
I'm not really a fan of torrents anymore, got a two DMCA's a few years back. Now I just xdcc stuff from various IRC networks or I just search via Google with "index of movie_name_here 720p mkv".
IntronExon 9y ago
1,2,5 strike me as by far the most impactful. Legal alternatives are much more prevalent and convenient than ever before. By the same token, people used to streaming from YouTube or Netflix look for the same experience in their piracy, and pirate streams offer that. For people who want a collection of files to pore over, a VPN is a cheap and reasonable service most in that demo will be familiar with. Finally, a lot of piracy around the world took the form of downloading files and burning them onto discs form physical distro, which has also changed for the most part.
- losteric 9y ago
  I think it's important to separate: * People who just want to watch "something", often while multitasking * People who like a show / movie, and want to own it for future re-watching "Watch something" has vastly improved. There are huge collections of content available online, TV/movies from all eras, Youtube's "amateur" video content, Twitch streams, and of course social media as a passive entertaining time-sink. But the experience for fans, in my opinion, hasn't improved much. The choices are: buy disks, or pay for multiple subscriptions to content owners (eg HBO Go for Game of Thrones). Otherwise you depend on a subscription that may drop content in the future, or a purchased stream (eg Amazon instant video) with variable performance and online-only availability. I'd argue we regressed - disks and disk players are more expensive, while streams are added costs if you want to buy the disk. It's also getting harder to rip disks for personal archival. I still regularly pirate movies, even after purchasing the movie - stealing is sadly the easiest way to get a non-DRM digital copy.
monksy 9y ago
Putting Kodi under "Streaming Piracy" is pretty inflamitory. Kodi isn't there to enable streaming piracy. (There are non-offical plugins that do that, but they've made many announcements about Kodi's stance on Piracy)
- jjeaff 9y ago
  But let's be honest, 99.99% of Kodi and Plex use is purely for pirated content. Otherwise, I'm not sure where everyone is getting all these non DRM digital downloads. And most aren't using special plugins with Kodi, they just use Kodi to play their content they get from torrents and Usenet.
  - empthought 9y ago
    I can't speak for anyone else, but I only use Plex for format-shifting DVDs I've purchased. While this may be a violation of the DMCA's prohibition against breaking copy protection, it is not piracy or even actionable copyright infringement.
    - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
      In UK this is tortuous again, having been made specifically allowed. Apparently people watching DVDs they've purchased somehow harms the public good. Yay, go Tories!
    - twothamendment 9y ago
      I knew I wasn't the only one. Once I have a disc in hand I'm going to handle it once, get it on the NAS and watch it on any device in my house without thinking about the media that it was purchased on. Throw an old laptop SSD, a raspberry pi and a USB wifi into the mix and you can stream your collection while driving across the country.
      - empthought 9y ago
        I have little kids who can't be trusted to keep physical media from being damaged. :-D
Quarrelsome 9y ago
do we have a mirror? Its down for me.
- fenwick67 9y ago
  How coincidental that a website about the decline of a P2P technology went down under heavy load
- Klasiaster 9y ago
  Google text-only is a start: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NEG32gTTt4AJ:https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2017/06/01/the-long-slow-decline-of-bittorrent/&num=1&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NEG32gT...
asymmetric 9y ago
Seems to be down. Their CDN (distil[0]), which bills itself as a "Bot mitigation" company, shows a CAPTCHA to the Wayback Machine archiver[1], effectively making it useless. [0]: https://www.distilnetworks.com/ https://www.distilnetworks.com/ [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180212161645/https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2017/06/01/the-long-slow-decline-of-bittorrent/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180212161645/https://www.plagi...
- Robotbeat 9y ago
  Yeah, it's almost like they should use some sort of peer-to-peer distribution system to allow scalable distribution of their content...
  - AckSyn 9y ago
    You jest, but there's hardly a desire to run websites from bittorrent "seeders", and it severely limits the ability of an author to make changes or remove the content entirely.
  - zingmars 9y ago
    Reminded me of the Coral CDN [1] project. Shame it's dead now. [1] http://www.coralcdn.org/ http://www.coralcdn.org/
    - pmarreck 9y ago
      Wow, I had no idea this went away (although that would explain why I never see that style of link anymore)
blt 9y ago
Saving movies to disk doesn't make much sense. The files are huge, and rewatching is not that common. BitTorrent is great for music, sadly we lost what.cd to law enforcement.
- AznHisoka 9y ago
  The majority of people use Bittorrent to download movies/shows to watch once, and only once.
  - usrusr 9y ago
    From what I overhear from discussions between download enthusiasts, a large fraction will even remain unwatched, just feeding a collector habit.
    - cortesoft 9y ago
      I mean it kinda makes sense; when you decide you want to watch a movie, you want to have multiple movies you haven't watched to choose from. This kinda requires that you download a lot of movies that you don't watch.
- dharmab 9y ago
  The major BitTorrent clients have an option to prioritize files pieces in-order, which works well for streaming with a player such as VLC or MPV.
- ryanlol 9y ago
  >sadly we lost what.cd to law enforcement Not really. The admins called it quits because they didn't feel like continuing.
- sotojuan 9y ago
  Saving movies to disk makes a lot of sense - I like not having to rely on either a big company's services or library nor some sketchy, slow illegal streaming site. Not to mention a vast number of movies are not available for streaming illegally or legally in a convenient way. If I download a movie I know it will always be available and work 100% of the time regardless of internet connection or money. If I delete it after watching, BitTorrent gives me a similar guarantee provided I can be online.
nfRfqX5n 9y ago
more interested in seeing what the younger demographic is doing. the legal alternatives are good, but with monthly services being offered by everything and everyone, i wonder if there will be some eventual pullback
- arbitrage 9y ago
  The legal alternatives are a start. I wouldn't say they are good. Outages, exclusive availability, time-delayed availability, poor quality transcodes and poor overall quality, and literally every damn service decided that $10/month is a good price. Which it might be, for any one service. I don't want to start paying $10/month (or equivalant) for Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, HBO, Disney, Sportify, etc.
- Tharkun 9y ago
  The legal alternatives are good? What a joke. That might be partially true in some parts of the world, but is plain wrong in most of the world.
bdz 9y ago
At least where I live, Hungary, torrenting was decriminalized some years ago as long as someone isn't doing it for profit. It's still illegal but they stopped going after end users. The biggest private tracker has 770k users atm with an exceptional 1452% seed to leech ratio. Basically almost everyone (ie daily internet users) is using it in the country. Also they introduced a "blank media" tax on everything (CD, DVD, SSD, HDD, USB flash drive etc.) as a compensation for the presumed losses.
- thinkling 9y ago
  When I briefly was a subscriber to FREE internet in France, I was amused to see that their cable box came with a Bittorrent client enabled by default, despite some strong anti-piracy laws on the books in France.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    Free (aka Online.net, aka Scaleway) also offers a uTorrent with web ui in their distro installer for their servers, out of the box.
- mattmanser 9y ago
  Until the EU want to do a new trade deal with the US, and the US decides it wants to co-opt your legal framework to enforce its commercial appropriation of European culture, history and stories through Disney and Hollywood. And then you'll be getting lots of enforcement. The whole copyright thing is just a US export thing, as soon as it becomes a problem for them, they'll force the EU to make it a problem for you too.
  - mtgx 9y ago
    Obama has already tried doing that with ACTA (remember that one?) and also with the newer TTIP. He failed.
  - SauciestGNU 9y ago
    With the EU in accession and the US in decline on the global stage, I suspect the US will have less ability to force these issues in future negotiations with the EU.
Robotbeat 9y ago
What's more interesting to me is using BitTorrent not for pirated movies but as a content distribution system enabling more free services like Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a super heavily visited website, so must pay a lot for hosting. They manage to pay for it all with donations, but other sites can't. For example: What if Open Access journals used peer to peer for nearly-free content distribution? That'd allow the open access publication fee to be basically eliminated, and what costs are left could be handled by donations.
- Retric 9y ago
  Advertising generally scales linearly with distribution and bandwidth is cheap. You can make money serving 100 Megabyte files files with a few banner ads, so I don't think bit torrent really enables much in that context.
  - Robotbeat 9y ago
    You're right that bandwidth is cheap, so in some ways BitTorrent was made (partially) obsolete simply by availability of cheap bandwidth. But ads are not necessarily desirable for something like Open Access. And generally speaking, I think we should encourage empowered decentralization wherever possible. One thing a peer-to-peer architecture for Open Access distribution could enable would be the ability to put a whole bunch of experiment data and supporting documentation online for cheap/free as part of the journal article. Part of the reason it's difficult to replicate some scientific results is lack of access to the data and poor documentation. A series of photos and video of the experiment, access to the full experimental data set was never practical for traditional journals, is expensive to do with traditional Open Access as the researchers would have to pay the hosting fees (indirectly as part of the publication fee), but would be trivial with a peer-to-peer distribution model for the data. It'd also allow a really easy and cheap way for enthusiasts to contribute to science by acting as seeds for non-profit open access journals. From personal experience, I produce tens of gigabytes of supporting data, photos, and video for each experiment that never gets published, in part because justifying the hosting fee is difficult. Peer-to-peer distribution of this data as part of an open access journal article would make it a lot easier.
muyuu 9y ago
BitTorrent is going nowhere. Some uses are being - temporarily or not, we'll see - less popular. It remains critical.
sotojuan 9y ago
I hope torrents stay strong. No way I could've cultivated my love for films and music without Karagarga and What/Redacted, respectively.
- whywhywhywhy 9y ago
  I have a theory that the current generation growing up with their young artists only working through streaming platforms are going to have a tough time in 20 years reliving songs they loved of their youth because the streaming platforms they listened to them on will be long dead and no one bothered pirating it and sharing it. Case in point it's super easy for me to find discogs of even unusual artists I grew up with on torrent sites. But if I search for artists mentioned a lot in the indie music press today I really struggle to find anything on the torrent sites. I don't trust corporations to look after their own cultural artefacts. Karagarga is a beautiful example, passionate individuals will mash together video from one movie release, audio from another and subtitles from another to create a competent release of a film because no perfect copy exists. They'll do it purely for their love of the source material.
  - sedachv 9y ago
    > I have a theory that the current generation growing up with their young artists only working through streaming platforms are going to have a tough time in 20 years reliving songs they loved of their youth because the streaming platforms they listened to them on will be long dead and no one bothered pirating it and sharing it. This is what happened to a lot of the songs by amateur musicians on mp3.com when it shut down in 2001, and that was all downloadable. I still have a few songs I downloaded from mp3.com that I have not seen hosted anywhere else. For streaming this has been an ongoing problem with SoundCloud for a long time. A lot of musicians delete their accounts or get blocked, move on with their life, and there is not a download option so all that is left are "check out this cool track" dead links. This is ironic when you consider that a lot of mp3 blogs of the 2008-2011 era were about "rediscovering" amateur cassette and little known vinyl releases from the 1970s and 1980s.
- boopk 9y ago
  oh boy RIP what </3
upofadown 9y ago
So show actual decline the article would have to use some metric based on absolute bitorrent bandwidth. Instead it uses percentages of total traffic. So it could just be showing that Nefix has gotten popular, not anything about bitorrent.
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
  Especially since we know that Netflix has grown to be a ridiculous percentage of all traffic
  - TremendousJudge 9y ago
    yeah I take issue with the way the stats are presented in this article, and I hoped that more people would be saying it in the comments. a smaller share doesn't directly mean smaller usage, it might as well mean bigger usage of services (which we know increased) while p2p remained constant. the fact that it hasn't grown with the rest of the internet doesn't mean that it isn't as big as it used to be
- djsumdog 9y ago
  Most of the hard core bittorrent users have just switched to using seedboxes. They briefly mention VPNs at the bottom.
pooya13 9y ago
It's interesting to me that all these people who don't use BitTorrent themselves are commenting on how they've "over heard" how it is mostly being used for this or that. It is easy to say people should pay for content when you live in a high GDP country. When you earn 200-300$ per month you can't afford to pay 10$ for a movie or thousands of dollars for software.
- jotm 9y ago
  You're getting downvoted because HN. I'd pay for entertainment, if it was quick (streamed) and maybe per episode. Seems really easy to do. But no, it's either a whole season on outdated media in English (that includes foreign movies, it's always dubbed) or nothing. If it's geographically limited, I can't get it. So, no, fuck you all, I'll torrent and more importantly, seed, as much as I can. Even with the government cracking down on the Internet, torrents are still seemingly unscathed, so that's one good thing. And if you can't afford it, well I'm of the opinion that you should still get it. This is how Windows and Word became the most used software in the world. Ultimately, brought more users than it lost.
rjvir 9y ago
This strikes me as an area where distributed apps on a blockchain could have a big impact. Currently, top piracy options like torrent websites and Kodi addons constantly get taken down by the government (through methods described in this article). But what happens if a distributed YouTube exists with every movie in pristine 1080p quality, that lives on a blockchain so the government can't shut it down or issue DMCA takedown requests?
- justrobert 9y ago
  The blockchain itself would be too expensive to store a large amount of data, so they would only be storing magnet links much like most tracker sites currently do.
  - toomanybeersies 9y ago
    Is anyone currently storing magnet links in a blockchain? It seems like one of the more appropriate types of data to be storing on blockchains.
- lev99 9y ago
  Why can't goverment DMCA requests work for blockchains? How is your suggestion much different than bittorrent? The goverment could just as easily take down links to the blockchain as they could takedown links to a torrent. Exchanging trackers for pow isn't a real advantage. Especially for large datasets (Youtube) where a third party will have to index the blockchain for reasonable to access it.
- DonHopkins 9y ago
  Even more CO2 is released into the atmosphere and even more global warming happens.
- ihuman 9y ago
  Bittorrent is already a distributed method of file sharing. How would a blockchain work any differently? You would still need people to run software on their computers that host the file.
- 9y ago
allthenews 9y ago
Site is down, but I noticed recently that the bit torrent client is looking more and more like 90s malware every time I download it. It has been streaming commercials for a while now. Ive decided to look for an alternative client next time I need to install one
- jerkstate 9y ago
  qbittorrent is pretty good
- tonmoy 9y ago
  Transmission is pretty good. Lightweight and looks same on Linux/Windows
- atomashpolskiy 9y ago
  There are quite a few open source clients, which you may inspect before compiling and using
- RankingMember 9y ago
  I suspect you're referring to μTorrent, which has been descending into awful spam-infested garbage for a long time now. As another user suggested, give qbittorrent a go.
  - leetcrew 9y ago
    qbittorrent is the best out there for windows imo. my only complaint is that it seems to have no dpi awareness whatsoever.
    - floatboth 9y ago
      Check out PicoTorrent. It's very very lightweight and simple. And DPI aware. https://github.com/picotorrent/picotorrent https://github.com/picotorrent/picotorrent
      - leetcrew 9y ago
jimmies 9y ago
I can't read the article because the website is down. But I have something to say about torrenting movies. Late last year, my old parents who don't speak English came to visit me for a couple of months in the US. I'm just a graduate student with a limited budget, and my mom is car sick so we couldn't go out every night. I didn't want them to waste time on Facebook after dinner until we went to bed, so I had to think of something to do. We would spend time watching classic movies together every night with the little projector I have. I would have to download the Vietnamese subtitles from subscene and play the pirated movies with VLC. Sometimes the timings were a bit off but VLC allowed me to fix it easily. There was no streaming service offered at any price that allowed me to have native language subtitles with those movies. I'm very happy for the time we had together, it might have been the very last chance we had in our lives. I am very thankful because BitTorrent and VLC allowed me to do what would be otherwise impossible.
- chickenfries 9y ago
  Thank you for sharing this story. I hope you and your parents are able to connect again when you finish school.
- distances 9y ago
  This is a major issue with streaming services. Netflix usually doesn't offer even English subtitles to an English-speaking movie if you're in a non-English speaking country! At least with DVDs you could rip it and add subtitles yourself if needed.
  - jedberg 9y ago
    > Netflix usually doesn't offer even English subtitles to an English-speaking movie if you're in a non-English speaking country! Sadly, this has nothing to do with streaming and everything to do with rightsholders (aka "Hollywood"). The rights on the subtitles are held by the company that makes them, are then sold to the company that distributes the movie, which are then resold to regional distributors, separately from the rights to show the movie. This means that if you want to show, say Transformers, you have to negotiate with one company to show the picture, another company to license the sound, and yet another company for each set of subtitles. It just isn't worth the effort in most cases to negotiate the Transformers English titles in France, for example. Movie industry licensing and asset packaging are stuck in a time when you had to move physical reels of tape and film around, and still haven't caught up to digital technology.
utellme 9y ago
They do not understand that it's just protocol and service. It's useful while it's handy in solving problems. Waiting for articles about HTTP declining in favour of HTTPs and TCP over UDP.
azangru 9y ago
The article concludes that: > The internet is now dominated by legitimate choices for video streaming. I really, really would love that to be the case, so that copyright holders stop freaking out about their presumed losses due to pirated content, and would just leave the pirates be.
- falcor84 9y ago
  I absolutely agree. I personally really love the patron model (e.g. Patreon) where people who have the money and care about something can promote it for all of humanity. As a (relatively) poor kid I pirated a lot because I didn't have a good alternative. But now that I'm better off, I'm really happy to pay and support content creators while allowing others who are not as lucky as me to get it for free.
  - zanny 9y ago
    Patreon has been getting worse over time as people have explored what it is capable of (both on the corporate and user side). At first, it was just a recurring paypal where subscription got you access to a private forum. Then creators started putting development materials and bloopers on it. Then extras and previews. Now a lot of patreons are just turning into paysites. All the content is on patreon, all of it behind tiered paywalls. Its no different than technology we had in abundance in 2004. The difference is that with paysites the owners of the site handled the payment processor. Now those creators have forfeited their autonomy for the (probably worthwhile as web centralization has shown) increased exposure and convenience of being on THE recurring payments site. Now one corporate entity can arbitrarily kill someones business on their own whims while taking a cut of all their fans contributions.
Semaphor 9y ago
The reason why for me, someone with a netflix and amazon prime account in Germany, bittorrent is neither dead nor declining (for movies and TV shows): a) Being on time. If you want to take part in the online discussion about tv shows, you have to watch them on time. For a ton of shows I can't even buy episodes on the day they come out. Torrenting is still the far superior choice. b) Languages. Yes netflix, I know that I live in Germany. That does not mean that I don't want to have the option of watching anime in Japanese with English subtitles. And Amazon, it's great that I found out you are now showing advertisements before every episode, but it's also in German. While everything else on amazon.de is in English for me. c) Quality. I don't care that your algorithm thinks my network is not fast enough for HD. Just let me tell it that it's wrong. Or I could torrent and download something in actual HD within just a few minutes. The worst thing is that all of those are completely artificial. There is no technological reason for any of those problems to exist. And ignoring if I want to or not, in most cases I don't even have the option of throwing absurd amounts of money at them to make them go away. Because of greed, laziness and/or stupidity, torrenting is still the superior option in most cases. For me. PS: Mostly thanks to Bandcamp.com music torrenting is completely dead for me.
- k__ 9y ago
  I mostly use streaming sites instead of BT these days. Got burned once when my flatmate downloaded family guy and we got "mail" by an attorney of 20th century fox... But yes, I got Netflix and Amazon Prime too. They simply don't have everything in every language.
  - Semaphor 9y ago
    > I mostly use streaming sites instead of BT these days. Why? You have to get through tons of ads, have to hope they are of decent quality, etc. With BT I download, and in about 5 minutes I have the whole thing in HD.
    - jimminy 9y ago
      Netflix and Amazon rarely show ads, normally just a short 30 second recommendation at that. All streaming in HD in about 5 seconds.
Feniks 9y ago
Bittorrent is declining because the big mainstream stuff that people want is now after years available for convenient streaming. The industry has finally adapted. If you want to read Ever17 bittorrent will aways be there keeping it available to mankind. Since I DO believe creators should be payed when possible I see this a win. Piracy for me was always about being a library of Alexandria. Not a way to steal the latest Hollywood trash.
gumby 9y ago
Always wanted to augment http to use BT as a transport, but with the rise of https I’m not sure that would even be possible any more.
amriksohata 9y ago
Decline? I don't know about bittorrent as a client, but torrent use in general is very widespread and probably one the biggest sources of piracy
Karrot_Kream 9y ago
I pay for access to these services but they all require in browser DRM to watch. My media PC doesn't have any non-free stuff on it so I basically have to torrent the stuff I already pay for. It's super annoying but oh well...
remir 9y ago
P2P forced the industry to adapt and now we have good streaming services, but the content selection is nowhere as good as what you can find on torrent sites. What the Popcorn Time devs did was simply amazing. It had a Netflix-like interface plus a huge selection of content that you could watch right away. The industry should learn from these guys. Just make your content available, easy to obtain and people will pay for it. It's that simple. There's no reason, in 2018, that I cannot go online and legally stream/download any movie/TV show I want. Classics, old movies, 90s movies, whatever. Just make it available at a reasonable price, in a easy to use UI and people will pay. How is that hard to understand?
- disappearance 9y ago
  > Just make your content available Agree. Regional licensing restrictions (music & video) and timed availability (video) seem to be lingering issues for legal streaming services and until they're solved/ forgotten the Popcorn Times will always have a place.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    It is lawyers all the way down, sadly. And old old old contracts...
- softawre 9y ago
  Netflix is trying and they are a huge business. If it was easy they would have been disrupted by now.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    They had things going for a time, but then they switched to their own branded content (supposedly because the big guys wanted more of the pie and so set up their own services).
- wpietri 9y ago
  > Just make your content available, easy to obtain and people will pay for it. It's that simple. No, that's just easy from a consumer perspective. But it's not simple at all from the business perspective. Making movies and TV is expensive and complicated. Getting them to break even means a lot of careful work to maximize revenue and profit from a variety of revenue streams. It means dealing with a lot of players that are trying to maximize their own revenue and profit. Things can and will get better. But not by ignoring the essential complexity of the domain.
albedoa 9y ago
This piece and its sources focus on the share of p2p and BitTorrent traffic as a percentage of the whole, which doesn't tell us anything about its absolute rise or decline. Of course its share is going to fall as other intensive types of traffic become popular.
stuaxo 9y ago
The fact that companies can connect and see the IP of all downloaders is an issue. A newer iteration needs better anonymity to become ubiquitous again.
- sandov 9y ago
  It's only a problem in countries that enforce copyright laws fiercely, e.g. USA.
- jjrh 9y ago
  It's only a issue when there aren't laws preventing ISP's from handing over your information without a court order along with sane limits on how much a copyright holder can go after you for.
allpratik 9y ago
Claiming about BitTorrent usage just on declining bandwidth doesn't makes a lot of sense. Since, now ISP has started caching things and using solutions like Torbox to enable their customers to enjoy torrents on high speed. This might be affecting overall bandwidth numbers of bitTorrent. But from usage point of view, I absolutely do not see any decline. Programs like Popcorn time are actually phenomenal in terms of their UI/UX, thus it's getting adopted crazily.
pmarreck 9y ago
As long as channels like The CW will play 5 minutes of ads (half of them being for The CW) for every 10 minutes of "The Flash," torrenting will never die. Sorry, but that's fucking ridiculous. As long as I learn that a show I wanted to watch today on Netflix was taken away by Netflix yesterday, torrenting will never die. Especially if you use a neat service like https://bitport.io/ https://bitport.io/ and/or a VPN like https://speedify.com/ https://speedify.com/
whyage 9y ago
P2P is alive and well on enterprise networks, with Kollective leading the pack.
sandov 9y ago
I'd gladly pay for a "Better Legitimate alternative" if there was one. Executing proprietary software and DRM are deal-breakers for me.
agumonkey 9y ago
I still enjoy the integrated verification of bittorrent very much. No need for post download md5 check and retries.. just coast along comfortably.
zzzeek 9y ago
the answer is, #1 and #5. the "enforcement" and "demographics" reasons are bullshit. I've never heard of a "streaming pirate" site but keeping a long term connection open to a pirate entity's site seems like a crazy thing to do just from a browser exploit point of view.
ArlenBales 9y ago
It's still popular for anime. Sites like HorribleSubs or Nyaa make it a breeze to download and watch anime, without having to deal with crappy Flash players of anime streaming sites or having buffering hell because the site is having traffic problems. cough Crunchy Roll cough
koonsolo 9y ago
I think the main takeway is that people not necessarily want it for free, they just want it convenient. Why would I buy a game in the store when I can just illegally download it? Why would I pirate games when I can easily get them on Steam? Why would I download a series when I can watch it on Netflix? Why would I try hard to pay for my non-netflix series when I can just download it? Why would I go out and buy a CD when I can just illegally download it. Why would I download MP3's when all is available on Spotify anyway. From this reasoning, I think the future might hold: why would I open a bank account and do slow wire transfers when I can just use cryptocurrency?
- atomical 9y ago
  Because if someone steals your money from a bank or you lose your PIN there is still a way to get your money back. If you lose your private key or someone steals it you can't get your money back with crypto.
dbg31415 9y ago
Kim Dotcom on Twitter: "How to stop piracy: 1. Create great content 2. Make it easy to buy 3. Same day global release 4. Works on any device 5. Fair price" || https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/380757105298268160 https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/380757105298268160
samfriedman 9y ago
While it's true that BitTorrent as a protocol has significantly fallen out of favor as the go-to technology for John Q. Pirate's needs, there are still many niche torrent sites that stay alive by differentiating on quality and community. Most of these sites are invite-only, and each tend to specialize in a specific type of media. One site might accept only movies, another TV shows, a third comic book scans, and a fourth might be the go-to repository for textbooks and e-learning materials. Not all that into blockbuster movies? Just join a tracker that specializes in older and more obscure films. On many of these sites, the material uploaded often includes many more choices in format and quality than is commercially available. A movie, for instance, might offer the option to download a 1080p encode in various video and container formats, or even a full bit-for-bit rip of the BluRay disc. This level of detail and dedication to the pirate media also tends to spin up a community within the site. After all, the people who dig through bargain bins of comic books to scan and upload them (or who scan the big Marvel/DC releases each week) are probably a lot more interested in sticking around and discussing their favorite comics than the drive-by downloader who is only interested in getting his hands on the latest Walking Dead issue. It's an interesting ecosystem, and while commercial products have caught up greatly on the convenience side I think there is a way to go still on baking in quality, variety, and community.
- cheeze 9y ago
  These communities are my favorite on the internet. One of the most insane things is how active the userbase is (granted, inactives are pruned.) But on my favorite trackers, it's common to see 33% of users logged in within 24h, something like 50-60% in the past week, and ~75% in the past month.
- tvanantwerp 9y ago
  > BitTorrent as a protocol has significantly fallen out of favor as the go-to technology for John Q. Pirate's needs... Out of curiosity, what would you say is the go-to technology for pirates now?
  - drdeadringer 9y ago
    For me, at least, I still use torrent//magnet technology on The High Seas. I'm not sure if this is because I am yet again unaware of What's Next until it's too late, or yet again Simply Stubborn on what tech I use, or whatever Option Three is this time.
shrimp_emoji 9y ago
>Cause 5: VPN Usage >The real problem here is that there’s no way to know just how much of VPN traffic is growing or how much of it is BitTorrent. Though different traffic studies look at the internet from different vantage points, some simply would not be able to see VPN-obscured BitTorrent traffic. I'm on a VPN all the time, and torrenting without a VPN, to me, is living on the edge. I'd constantly wonder: how long before I receive a stern letter? Every day would be a desperate roll of the dice. I'd turn to alcoholism to dull my anxiety. That kind of life's not for me. So the hundreds of gigs in shows and movies I torrent (can't purchase those anywhere without DRM, can you? And paying for them indefinitely to get them [if the licensing doesn't run out] with streaming compression seems silly instead of just downloading them once) is obfuscated! Yay!
- jjrh 9y ago
  > I'm on a VPN all the time, and torrenting without a VPN, to me, is living on the edge. I'd constantly wonder: how long before I receive a stern letter? That's really a USA thing.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - kqr 9y ago
    Yeah, I suspect something like that. I'd be much more worried about a (relatively cheap) VPN provider ratting me out than my ISP.
  - carlmr 9y ago
    Or most of Europe (France, Germany, ...).
- vbezhenar 9y ago
  At least sometimes I'm grateful that I'm living in 3-rd world country, where most of the people including police don't realize that copyright even exists (every Windows XP in police I saw seemed to be pirated, LoL). I can use torrents at 1 GB/s without any fear. I don't have much choice anyway, legal services usually completely out of touch with their insane prices and provide very limited selection, so they don't even close to compete. I don't know anyone who would pay $10 for album, it's ridiculous pricing. Make it $0.01 for song and someone might pay that for easy of use.
hipaulshi 9y ago
I am learning Japanese. Ever since d-addict took down their torrent section. It was almost to impossible to find quality content with Japanese subtitles. I now rely on Netflix Japan, but the content is still very limited.
eximius 9y ago
Does anyone know if there exists an updateable torrent which lists other torrents? That is, a torrent using http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html to keep an up to date archive of magnet links or something? If not, does anyone if any of the major trackers offer an API to scrape all magnet links + tags? I don't want to take on the liability of publishing said tracker-torrent, but I can certainly write the software to make it easy.
chabes 9y ago
This article fails to see the difference between streaming services and p2p downloading. If I want to watch content more than once, I contribute to increased traffic every time I stream that content. In other words: Streaming = certain amount of traffic, every time content is viewed. P2p downloaded content is usually downloaded once, but can be watched infinitely without touching the internet. The article also fails to touch on the fact that the internet itself is now much more mainstream (especially globally) than it was in 2006. Of course there's less torrent traffic today than there was in 2006. Streaming services are big for mainstream content that is being consumed by the mainstream. The non-mainstream continue to fill their increasingly cheaper storage devices with downloads. The difference being: they don't contribute to internet traffic every time they consume media. Kind of renders the article moot for me..
PricelessValue 9y ago
I hope bittorrent doesn't decline too much. A lot of open source software offloads their downloads to torrents to save space/bandwidth/etc and lower costs.
crimsonalucard 9y ago
Stremio with a popcorn time plugin is the new way to pirate movies. Convenience and performance is roughly on par with legal services like netflix. It's typically used under a vpn, so I'm curious about how popular it is... who uses/ or knows about people who use it?
snissn 9y ago
Movies and TV shows are a lot less watchable now. I'm not really as excited about the new block buster as I used to be. Maybe this is the perennial "I'm getting old and don't realize it" but I also understand box office and movie revenue to be down. Definitely steaming is a big source as well
anonu 9y ago
The article claims that p2p traffic is dropping and quotes percentage numbers which appear to be a percent of total web traffic. This doesn't actually tell me if p2p traffic is dropping. It only tells me that its not growing with - what I would expect is a growing pie of internet traffic. Furthermore, I would consider the source (plagiarismtoday.com) when choosing to trust some of the items in this article. I've never heard of them - but my initial inclination is to believe they have an agenda.
ponco 9y ago
That is one of the most poorly written articles I've ever read. Aside from the jarring punctuation marks littered throughout, why is there a Kodi logo next to "Streaming Piracy?"
jdlyga 9y ago
I tried looking for the Olympics Opening Ceremonies, something I was 100% certain would be up on torrent sites. Couldn't find a single one. Ended up logging into the NBC Sports app and streaming it that way.
foxfired 9y ago
To me, torrenting has become the new SMS. When Hangout, whatsapp, imo, and whatnot fail, I always resort to SMS which simply work. I have access to netflix, amazon, and Youtube, but when they fail, in the most ridiculous ways, there is always the guarantee of torrents in the highest possible quality.
Digital-Citizen 9y ago
From the article: > The real problem here is that there’s no way to know just how much of VPN traffic is growing or how much of it is BitTorrent. That's a show-stopper problem for the entire article. All of the claims made in the article hinge on the idea that BitTorrent use is undergoing a "Long, Slow Decline". But the author provides no way to back up that claim and buries the lede suggesting why: they don't have the data to back up the claim in their chosen title. The article is largely a joke, a collection of baseless speculation, propaganda (including uncritical use of "piracy", "Legitimate Alternatives")[1], no awareness of why people share data via BitTorrent, and nothing that indicates an awareness of how laws differ around the world (an American bias is unacceptable since the Internet, BitTorrent use, and alleged activity are all global). Sadly some of the feedback on this group echoes the same sentiment: claims about what most people do without posting any sources to back up the claims. On top of all that, the article is hosted on a service that could use a more resilient underlying infrastructure. As one poster here pointed out, it's as if the article should have been hosted on a service that lets people pass around verbatim copies of the article. [1] See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html on how these and other terms are unwise to use without explaining what you mean. One of the giant risks is conveying an undisclosed viewpoint that colors your take on everything else: "unauthorized copying" or "prohibited copying" could have been used instead of "piracy", for example. I'd add "legitimate" to that list of words for the same reason: the word implies that such copying is illegitimate where it is illegal. But as that gnu.org article also points out, "[L]aws don't define right and wrong. Laws, at their best, attempt to implement justice. If the laws (the implementation) don't fit our ideas of right and wrong (the spec), the laws are what should change.". If we're to have a reasonable discussion of this, we ought to admit to our views and speak of them clearly, not hide behind propaganda without ever explicitly coming to terms with their implications.
krisives 9y ago
Netflix stopped serving It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and now those torrents are really really popular =)
IkmoIkmo 9y ago
That having been said, torrenting in some ways seems healthier than ever. On a median retail connection I can download an entire season in 30 minutes while I'm getting ready some food, or the first episode in 5 minutes and get started watching. When I was a kid and still used torrents regularly, it wasn't like that. Much of that has to do with better connections and cheap bandwidth, but it's a fact of use nonetheless. In short, I'd have killed 5 or 10 or 15 years ago for the torrent speed/quality/content that's available today. That says something.
kuon 9y ago
I have a netflix subscription, but I download all movies from bittorrent, for three reasons: 1. Quality, especially audio, on many netflix movie I just cannot hear the voices. VLC is much better at mixing 5.1 to stereo for my speakers (not mentioning having multichannel when I watch on TV) 2. Being able to apply filters. I don't use many filters, but when I watch movie on my computers, I like to change the gamma of VLC, as my monitor is calibrated for color accuracy. In the browser, the color balance is wrong, I can adjust that in VLC without changing my monitor calibration. 3. Subtitles, I want subtitles on the black borders when possible. What I often do is applying a crop filter to have only one black border at the bottom and I place the subtitles in it.
- lbenes 9y ago
  Do you do this with VLC or another media player? I have a 16:10 monitor that often has space in the letterboxes for subtitles. I took the time to do this in VLC for a foreign TV series, but the next time I went to use subtitles it was broken and I didn't bother to tweak it. This really ought to be a built-in feature that just works™ without fiddling.
  - kuon 9y ago
    Actually, for subtitles, I use mpv.io with --video-align=-1 which is smart enough to place the subtitles at the right place.
qwerty456127 9y ago
> Better Legitimate Alternatives By no way can a vendor-locked, regionally-policied, DRMed thing be considered a "better alternative", IMHO. I would rather pay twice (or even more) the price of the legitimate alternatives to just legalize the usage of unlimited, no-nonsence, DRM-free standard-format files exchange if only this was legally possible.
ggg9990 9y ago
BitTorrent serves a purpose even when unused, like nuclear weapons. All media companies know that if they put ridiculous hurdles in front of content consumption, piracy will pick back up.
white-flame 9y ago
The most obvious is that people are more on phones today than on full-featured computers. You're not going to run p2p uploading on such a device. You're going to be streaming.
jadedhacker 9y ago
It would be nice if we had substantial public funding of the arts and the results were free to copy.
cup-of-tea 9y ago
For most people, convenience is king. Netflix etc. didn't have to compete on quality or catalogue size, only covenience. And they won. With that we lost some of the greatest collections of human culture ever assembled. Those were only available with BitTorrent.
minibobxx 9y ago
maybe because IDM? www.idmcrack.ml
minibobxx 9y ago
fuck i can;t spamm
kazinator 9y ago
In order to have torrents, someone has to buy the DVD or BluRay. If fewer people are buying that stuff, there are fewer torrents. Could be a factor? Only takes one person though for a given movie. There is a trend now that the encodings are larger. A 110 minute movie can be anywhere from 5 to 10 gigabytes or more in full high def. Sometimes you can find newer movies in smaller sizes; sometimes not. Downloading and storing that is inconvenient compared to streaming. It takes longer; less powerful mobile devices don't decode the large stuff very well; you may get skipping if you happen to view these huge downloads over shitty Wi-Fi in a crammed airspace. An 0.8 to 1.5 gig download is still a reasonable alternative to streaming. I was traveling back in January and crammed 16 movies into as many gigs of free space on the 32 gig SD card on my tablet for watching on planes and in hotel rooms. I did that by running almost each one of them through ffmpeg to get the bitrate down. In some cases I tweaked the resolution. In one or two of them, I re-coded the audio to a lower bit rate (256 kbps to 128: it wasn't a musical movie, WTF!) Almost no perceptible loss of quality; all perfectly watchable. Pain in the butt to do that, though! Basically, I have this theorem that two hours of a perfectly watchable movie with good sound do not require more than around 1.5 gigs of H265+AAC data. When I see larger sizes, I tend to become kind of reluctant to pull the download trigger.

399 points by uptown 9y ago

I'm not really a fan of torrents anymore, got a two DMCA's a few years back. Now I just xdcc stuff from various IRC networks or I just search via Google with "index of movie_name_here 720p mkv".

IntronExon 9y ago

1,2,5 strike me as by far the most impactful. Legal alternatives are much more prevalent and convenient than ever before. By the same token, people used to streaming from YouTube or Netflix look for the same experience in their piracy, and pirate streams offer that. For people who want a collection of files to pore over, a VPN is a cheap and reasonable service most in that demo will be familiar with. Finally, a lot of piracy around the world took the form of downloading files and burning them onto discs form physical distro, which has also changed for the most part.

losteric 9y ago
I think it's important to separate: * People who just want to watch "something", often while multitasking * People who like a show / movie, and want to own it for future re-watching "Watch something" has vastly improved. There are huge collections of content available online, TV/movies from all eras, Youtube's "amateur" video content, Twitch streams, and of course social media as a passive entertaining time-sink. But the experience for fans, in my opinion, hasn't improved much. The choices are: buy disks, or pay for multiple subscriptions to content owners (eg HBO Go for Game of Thrones). Otherwise you depend on a subscription that may drop content in the future, or a purchased stream (eg Amazon instant video) with variable performance and online-only availability. I'd argue we regressed - disks and disk players are more expensive, while streams are added costs if you want to buy the disk. It's also getting harder to rip disks for personal archival. I still regularly pirate movies, even after purchasing the movie - stealing is sadly the easiest way to get a non-DRM digital copy.

monksy 9y ago

Putting Kodi under "Streaming Piracy" is pretty inflamitory. Kodi isn't there to enable streaming piracy. (There are non-offical plugins that do that, but they've made many announcements about Kodi's stance on Piracy)

jjeaff 9y ago
But let's be honest, 99.99% of Kodi and Plex use is purely for pirated content. Otherwise, I'm not sure where everyone is getting all these non DRM digital downloads. And most aren't using special plugins with Kodi, they just use Kodi to play their content they get from torrents and Usenet.
- empthought 9y ago
  I can't speak for anyone else, but I only use Plex for format-shifting DVDs I've purchased. While this may be a violation of the DMCA's prohibition against breaking copy protection, it is not piracy or even actionable copyright infringement.
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    In UK this is tortuous again, having been made specifically allowed. Apparently people watching DVDs they've purchased somehow harms the public good. Yay, go Tories!
  - twothamendment 9y ago
    I knew I wasn't the only one. Once I have a disc in hand I'm going to handle it once, get it on the NAS and watch it on any device in my house without thinking about the media that it was purchased on. Throw an old laptop SSD, a raspberry pi and a USB wifi into the mix and you can stream your collection while driving across the country.
    - empthought 9y ago
      I have little kids who can't be trusted to keep physical media from being damaged. :-D

Quarrelsome 9y ago

do we have a mirror? Its down for me.

fenwick67 9y ago
How coincidental that a website about the decline of a P2P technology went down under heavy load
Klasiaster 9y ago
Google text-only is a start: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NEG32gTTt4AJ:https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2017/06/01/the-long-slow-decline-of-bittorrent/&num=1&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NEG32gT...

asymmetric 9y ago

Seems to be down. Their CDN (distil[0]), which bills itself as a "Bot mitigation" company, shows a CAPTCHA to the Wayback Machine archiver[1], effectively making it useless. [0]: https://www.distilnetworks.com/ https://www.distilnetworks.com/ [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180212161645/https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2017/06/01/the-long-slow-decline-of-bittorrent/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180212161645/https://www.plagi...

Robotbeat 9y ago
Yeah, it's almost like they should use some sort of peer-to-peer distribution system to allow scalable distribution of their content...
- AckSyn 9y ago
  You jest, but there's hardly a desire to run websites from bittorrent "seeders", and it severely limits the ability of an author to make changes or remove the content entirely.
- zingmars 9y ago
  Reminded me of the Coral CDN [1] project. Shame it's dead now. [1] http://www.coralcdn.org/ http://www.coralcdn.org/
  - pmarreck 9y ago
    Wow, I had no idea this went away (although that would explain why I never see that style of link anymore)

blt 9y ago

Saving movies to disk doesn't make much sense. The files are huge, and rewatching is not that common. BitTorrent is great for music, sadly we lost what.cd to law enforcement.

AznHisoka 9y ago
The majority of people use Bittorrent to download movies/shows to watch once, and only once.
- usrusr 9y ago
  From what I overhear from discussions between download enthusiasts, a large fraction will even remain unwatched, just feeding a collector habit.
  - cortesoft 9y ago
    I mean it kinda makes sense; when you decide you want to watch a movie, you want to have multiple movies you haven't watched to choose from. This kinda requires that you download a lot of movies that you don't watch.
dharmab 9y ago
The major BitTorrent clients have an option to prioritize files pieces in-order, which works well for streaming with a player such as VLC or MPV.
ryanlol 9y ago
>sadly we lost what.cd to law enforcement Not really. The admins called it quits because they didn't feel like continuing.
sotojuan 9y ago
Saving movies to disk makes a lot of sense - I like not having to rely on either a big company's services or library nor some sketchy, slow illegal streaming site. Not to mention a vast number of movies are not available for streaming illegally or legally in a convenient way. If I download a movie I know it will always be available and work 100% of the time regardless of internet connection or money. If I delete it after watching, BitTorrent gives me a similar guarantee provided I can be online.

nfRfqX5n 9y ago

more interested in seeing what the younger demographic is doing. the legal alternatives are good, but with monthly services being offered by everything and everyone, i wonder if there will be some eventual pullback

arbitrage 9y ago
The legal alternatives are a start. I wouldn't say they are good. Outages, exclusive availability, time-delayed availability, poor quality transcodes and poor overall quality, and literally every damn service decided that $10/month is a good price. Which it might be, for any one service. I don't want to start paying $10/month (or equivalant) for Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, HBO, Disney, Sportify, etc.
Tharkun 9y ago
The legal alternatives are good? What a joke. That might be partially true in some parts of the world, but is plain wrong in most of the world.

bdz 9y ago

At least where I live, Hungary, torrenting was decriminalized some years ago as long as someone isn't doing it for profit. It's still illegal but they stopped going after end users. The biggest private tracker has 770k users atm with an exceptional 1452% seed to leech ratio. Basically almost everyone (ie daily internet users) is using it in the country. Also they introduced a "blank media" tax on everything (CD, DVD, SSD, HDD, USB flash drive etc.) as a compensation for the presumed losses.

thinkling 9y ago
When I briefly was a subscriber to FREE internet in France, I was amused to see that their cable box came with a Bittorrent client enabled by default, despite some strong anti-piracy laws on the books in France.
- kuschku 9y ago
  Free (aka Online.net, aka Scaleway) also offers a uTorrent with web ui in their distro installer for their servers, out of the box.
mattmanser 9y ago
Until the EU want to do a new trade deal with the US, and the US decides it wants to co-opt your legal framework to enforce its commercial appropriation of European culture, history and stories through Disney and Hollywood. And then you'll be getting lots of enforcement. The whole copyright thing is just a US export thing, as soon as it becomes a problem for them, they'll force the EU to make it a problem for you too.
- mtgx 9y ago
  Obama has already tried doing that with ACTA (remember that one?) and also with the newer TTIP. He failed.
- SauciestGNU 9y ago
  With the EU in accession and the US in decline on the global stage, I suspect the US will have less ability to force these issues in future negotiations with the EU.

Robotbeat 9y ago

What's more interesting to me is using BitTorrent not for pirated movies but as a content distribution system enabling more free services like Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a super heavily visited website, so must pay a lot for hosting. They manage to pay for it all with donations, but other sites can't. For example: What if Open Access journals used peer to peer for nearly-free content distribution? That'd allow the open access publication fee to be basically eliminated, and what costs are left could be handled by donations.

Retric 9y ago
Advertising generally scales linearly with distribution and bandwidth is cheap. You can make money serving 100 Megabyte files files with a few banner ads, so I don't think bit torrent really enables much in that context.
- Robotbeat 9y ago
  You're right that bandwidth is cheap, so in some ways BitTorrent was made (partially) obsolete simply by availability of cheap bandwidth. But ads are not necessarily desirable for something like Open Access. And generally speaking, I think we should encourage empowered decentralization wherever possible. One thing a peer-to-peer architecture for Open Access distribution could enable would be the ability to put a whole bunch of experiment data and supporting documentation online for cheap/free as part of the journal article. Part of the reason it's difficult to replicate some scientific results is lack of access to the data and poor documentation. A series of photos and video of the experiment, access to the full experimental data set was never practical for traditional journals, is expensive to do with traditional Open Access as the researchers would have to pay the hosting fees (indirectly as part of the publication fee), but would be trivial with a peer-to-peer distribution model for the data. It'd also allow a really easy and cheap way for enthusiasts to contribute to science by acting as seeds for non-profit open access journals. From personal experience, I produce tens of gigabytes of supporting data, photos, and video for each experiment that never gets published, in part because justifying the hosting fee is difficult. Peer-to-peer distribution of this data as part of an open access journal article would make it a lot easier.

muyuu 9y ago

BitTorrent is going nowhere. Some uses are being - temporarily or not, we'll see - less popular. It remains critical.

sotojuan 9y ago

I hope torrents stay strong. No way I could've cultivated my love for films and music without Karagarga and What/Redacted, respectively.

whywhywhywhy 9y ago
I have a theory that the current generation growing up with their young artists only working through streaming platforms are going to have a tough time in 20 years reliving songs they loved of their youth because the streaming platforms they listened to them on will be long dead and no one bothered pirating it and sharing it. Case in point it's super easy for me to find discogs of even unusual artists I grew up with on torrent sites. But if I search for artists mentioned a lot in the indie music press today I really struggle to find anything on the torrent sites. I don't trust corporations to look after their own cultural artefacts. Karagarga is a beautiful example, passionate individuals will mash together video from one movie release, audio from another and subtitles from another to create a competent release of a film because no perfect copy exists. They'll do it purely for their love of the source material.
- sedachv 9y ago
  > I have a theory that the current generation growing up with their young artists only working through streaming platforms are going to have a tough time in 20 years reliving songs they loved of their youth because the streaming platforms they listened to them on will be long dead and no one bothered pirating it and sharing it. This is what happened to a lot of the songs by amateur musicians on mp3.com when it shut down in 2001, and that was all downloadable. I still have a few songs I downloaded from mp3.com that I have not seen hosted anywhere else. For streaming this has been an ongoing problem with SoundCloud for a long time. A lot of musicians delete their accounts or get blocked, move on with their life, and there is not a download option so all that is left are "check out this cool track" dead links. This is ironic when you consider that a lot of mp3 blogs of the 2008-2011 era were about "rediscovering" amateur cassette and little known vinyl releases from the 1970s and 1980s.
boopk 9y ago
oh boy RIP what </3

upofadown 9y ago

So show actual decline the article would have to use some metric based on absolute bitorrent bandwidth. Instead it uses percentages of total traffic. So it could just be showing that Nefix has gotten popular, not anything about bitorrent.

yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
Especially since we know that Netflix has grown to be a ridiculous percentage of all traffic
- TremendousJudge 9y ago
  yeah I take issue with the way the stats are presented in this article, and I hoped that more people would be saying it in the comments. a smaller share doesn't directly mean smaller usage, it might as well mean bigger usage of services (which we know increased) while p2p remained constant. the fact that it hasn't grown with the rest of the internet doesn't mean that it isn't as big as it used to be
djsumdog 9y ago
Most of the hard core bittorrent users have just switched to using seedboxes. They briefly mention VPNs at the bottom.

pooya13 9y ago

It's interesting to me that all these people who don't use BitTorrent themselves are commenting on how they've "over heard" how it is mostly being used for this or that. It is easy to say people should pay for content when you live in a high GDP country. When you earn 200-300$ per month you can't afford to pay 10$ for a movie or thousands of dollars for software.

jotm 9y ago
You're getting downvoted because HN. I'd pay for entertainment, if it was quick (streamed) and maybe per episode. Seems really easy to do. But no, it's either a whole season on outdated media in English (that includes foreign movies, it's always dubbed) or nothing. If it's geographically limited, I can't get it. So, no, fuck you all, I'll torrent and more importantly, seed, as much as I can. Even with the government cracking down on the Internet, torrents are still seemingly unscathed, so that's one good thing. And if you can't afford it, well I'm of the opinion that you should still get it. This is how Windows and Word became the most used software in the world. Ultimately, brought more users than it lost.

rjvir 9y ago

This strikes me as an area where distributed apps on a blockchain could have a big impact. Currently, top piracy options like torrent websites and Kodi addons constantly get taken down by the government (through methods described in this article). But what happens if a distributed YouTube exists with every movie in pristine 1080p quality, that lives on a blockchain so the government can't shut it down or issue DMCA takedown requests?

justrobert 9y ago
The blockchain itself would be too expensive to store a large amount of data, so they would only be storing magnet links much like most tracker sites currently do.
- toomanybeersies 9y ago
  Is anyone currently storing magnet links in a blockchain? It seems like one of the more appropriate types of data to be storing on blockchains.
lev99 9y ago
Why can't goverment DMCA requests work for blockchains? How is your suggestion much different than bittorrent? The goverment could just as easily take down links to the blockchain as they could takedown links to a torrent. Exchanging trackers for pow isn't a real advantage. Especially for large datasets (Youtube) where a third party will have to index the blockchain for reasonable to access it.
DonHopkins 9y ago
Even more CO2 is released into the atmosphere and even more global warming happens.
ihuman 9y ago
Bittorrent is already a distributed method of file sharing. How would a blockchain work any differently? You would still need people to run software on their computers that host the file.
9y ago

allthenews 9y ago

Site is down, but I noticed recently that the bit torrent client is looking more and more like 90s malware every time I download it. It has been streaming commercials for a while now. Ive decided to look for an alternative client next time I need to install one

jerkstate 9y ago
qbittorrent is pretty good
tonmoy 9y ago
Transmission is pretty good. Lightweight and looks same on Linux/Windows
atomashpolskiy 9y ago
There are quite a few open source clients, which you may inspect before compiling and using
RankingMember 9y ago
I suspect you're referring to μTorrent, which has been descending into awful spam-infested garbage for a long time now. As another user suggested, give qbittorrent a go.
- leetcrew 9y ago
  qbittorrent is the best out there for windows imo. my only complaint is that it seems to have no dpi awareness whatsoever.
  - floatboth 9y ago
    Check out PicoTorrent. It's very very lightweight and simple. And DPI aware. https://github.com/picotorrent/picotorrent https://github.com/picotorrent/picotorrent
    - leetcrew 9y ago

jimmies 9y ago

I can't read the article because the website is down. But I have something to say about torrenting movies. Late last year, my old parents who don't speak English came to visit me for a couple of months in the US. I'm just a graduate student with a limited budget, and my mom is car sick so we couldn't go out every night. I didn't want them to waste time on Facebook after dinner until we went to bed, so I had to think of something to do. We would spend time watching classic movies together every night with the little projector I have. I would have to download the Vietnamese subtitles from subscene and play the pirated movies with VLC. Sometimes the timings were a bit off but VLC allowed me to fix it easily. There was no streaming service offered at any price that allowed me to have native language subtitles with those movies. I'm very happy for the time we had together, it might have been the very last chance we had in our lives. I am very thankful because BitTorrent and VLC allowed me to do what would be otherwise impossible.

chickenfries 9y ago
Thank you for sharing this story. I hope you and your parents are able to connect again when you finish school.
distances 9y ago
This is a major issue with streaming services. Netflix usually doesn't offer even English subtitles to an English-speaking movie if you're in a non-English speaking country! At least with DVDs you could rip it and add subtitles yourself if needed.
- jedberg 9y ago
  > Netflix usually doesn't offer even English subtitles to an English-speaking movie if you're in a non-English speaking country! Sadly, this has nothing to do with streaming and everything to do with rightsholders (aka "Hollywood"). The rights on the subtitles are held by the company that makes them, are then sold to the company that distributes the movie, which are then resold to regional distributors, separately from the rights to show the movie. This means that if you want to show, say Transformers, you have to negotiate with one company to show the picture, another company to license the sound, and yet another company for each set of subtitles. It just isn't worth the effort in most cases to negotiate the Transformers English titles in France, for example. Movie industry licensing and asset packaging are stuck in a time when you had to move physical reels of tape and film around, and still haven't caught up to digital technology.

utellme 9y ago

They do not understand that it's just protocol and service. It's useful while it's handy in solving problems. Waiting for articles about HTTP declining in favour of HTTPs and TCP over UDP.

azangru 9y ago

The article concludes that: > The internet is now dominated by legitimate choices for video streaming. I really, really would love that to be the case, so that copyright holders stop freaking out about their presumed losses due to pirated content, and would just leave the pirates be.

falcor84 9y ago
I absolutely agree. I personally really love the patron model (e.g. Patreon) where people who have the money and care about something can promote it for all of humanity. As a (relatively) poor kid I pirated a lot because I didn't have a good alternative. But now that I'm better off, I'm really happy to pay and support content creators while allowing others who are not as lucky as me to get it for free.
- zanny 9y ago
  Patreon has been getting worse over time as people have explored what it is capable of (both on the corporate and user side). At first, it was just a recurring paypal where subscription got you access to a private forum. Then creators started putting development materials and bloopers on it. Then extras and previews. Now a lot of patreons are just turning into paysites. All the content is on patreon, all of it behind tiered paywalls. Its no different than technology we had in abundance in 2004. The difference is that with paysites the owners of the site handled the payment processor. Now those creators have forfeited their autonomy for the (probably worthwhile as web centralization has shown) increased exposure and convenience of being on THE recurring payments site. Now one corporate entity can arbitrarily kill someones business on their own whims while taking a cut of all their fans contributions.

Semaphor 9y ago

The reason why for me, someone with a netflix and amazon prime account in Germany, bittorrent is neither dead nor declining (for movies and TV shows): a) Being on time. If you want to take part in the online discussion about tv shows, you have to watch them on time. For a ton of shows I can't even buy episodes on the day they come out. Torrenting is still the far superior choice. b) Languages. Yes netflix, I know that I live in Germany. That does not mean that I don't want to have the option of watching anime in Japanese with English subtitles. And Amazon, it's great that I found out you are now showing advertisements before every episode, but it's also in German. While everything else on amazon.de is in English for me. c) Quality. I don't care that your algorithm thinks my network is not fast enough for HD. Just let me tell it that it's wrong. Or I could torrent and download something in actual HD within just a few minutes. The worst thing is that all of those are completely artificial. There is no technological reason for any of those problems to exist. And ignoring if I want to or not, in most cases I don't even have the option of throwing absurd amounts of money at them to make them go away. Because of greed, laziness and/or stupidity, torrenting is still the superior option in most cases. For me. PS: Mostly thanks to Bandcamp.com music torrenting is completely dead for me.

k__ 9y ago
I mostly use streaming sites instead of BT these days. Got burned once when my flatmate downloaded family guy and we got "mail" by an attorney of 20th century fox... But yes, I got Netflix and Amazon Prime too. They simply don't have everything in every language.
- Semaphor 9y ago
  > I mostly use streaming sites instead of BT these days. Why? You have to get through tons of ads, have to hope they are of decent quality, etc. With BT I download, and in about 5 minutes I have the whole thing in HD.
  - jimminy 9y ago
    Netflix and Amazon rarely show ads, normally just a short 30 second recommendation at that. All streaming in HD in about 5 seconds.

Feniks 9y ago

Bittorrent is declining because the big mainstream stuff that people want is now after years available for convenient streaming. The industry has finally adapted. If you want to read Ever17 bittorrent will aways be there keeping it available to mankind. Since I DO believe creators should be payed when possible I see this a win. Piracy for me was always about being a library of Alexandria. Not a way to steal the latest Hollywood trash.

gumby 9y ago

Always wanted to augment http to use BT as a transport, but with the rise of https I’m not sure that would even be possible any more.

amriksohata 9y ago

Decline? I don't know about bittorrent as a client, but torrent use in general is very widespread and probably one the biggest sources of piracy

Karrot_Kream 9y ago

I pay for access to these services but they all require in browser DRM to watch. My media PC doesn't have any non-free stuff on it so I basically have to torrent the stuff I already pay for. It's super annoying but oh well...

remir 9y ago

P2P forced the industry to adapt and now we have good streaming services, but the content selection is nowhere as good as what you can find on torrent sites. What the Popcorn Time devs did was simply amazing. It had a Netflix-like interface plus a huge selection of content that you could watch right away. The industry should learn from these guys. Just make your content available, easy to obtain and people will pay for it. It's that simple. There's no reason, in 2018, that I cannot go online and legally stream/download any movie/TV show I want. Classics, old movies, 90s movies, whatever. Just make it available at a reasonable price, in a easy to use UI and people will pay. How is that hard to understand?

disappearance 9y ago
> Just make your content available Agree. Regional licensing restrictions (music & video) and timed availability (video) seem to be lingering issues for legal streaming services and until they're solved/ forgotten the Popcorn Times will always have a place.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  It is lawyers all the way down, sadly. And old old old contracts...
softawre 9y ago
Netflix is trying and they are a huge business. If it was easy they would have been disrupted by now.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  They had things going for a time, but then they switched to their own branded content (supposedly because the big guys wanted more of the pie and so set up their own services).
wpietri 9y ago
> Just make your content available, easy to obtain and people will pay for it. It's that simple. No, that's just easy from a consumer perspective. But it's not simple at all from the business perspective. Making movies and TV is expensive and complicated. Getting them to break even means a lot of careful work to maximize revenue and profit from a variety of revenue streams. It means dealing with a lot of players that are trying to maximize their own revenue and profit. Things can and will get better. But not by ignoring the essential complexity of the domain.

albedoa 9y ago

This piece and its sources focus on the share of p2p and BitTorrent traffic as a percentage of the whole, which doesn't tell us anything about its absolute rise or decline. Of course its share is going to fall as other intensive types of traffic become popular.

stuaxo 9y ago

The fact that companies can connect and see the IP of all downloaders is an issue. A newer iteration needs better anonymity to become ubiquitous again.

sandov 9y ago
It's only a problem in countries that enforce copyright laws fiercely, e.g. USA.
jjrh 9y ago
It's only a issue when there aren't laws preventing ISP's from handing over your information without a court order along with sane limits on how much a copyright holder can go after you for.

allpratik 9y ago

Claiming about BitTorrent usage just on declining bandwidth doesn't makes a lot of sense. Since, now ISP has started caching things and using solutions like Torbox to enable their customers to enjoy torrents on high speed. This might be affecting overall bandwidth numbers of bitTorrent. But from usage point of view, I absolutely do not see any decline. Programs like Popcorn time are actually phenomenal in terms of their UI/UX, thus it's getting adopted crazily.

pmarreck 9y ago

As long as channels like The CW will play 5 minutes of ads (half of them being for The CW) for every 10 minutes of "The Flash," torrenting will never die. Sorry, but that's fucking ridiculous. As long as I learn that a show I wanted to watch today on Netflix was taken away by Netflix yesterday, torrenting will never die. Especially if you use a neat service like https://bitport.io/ https://bitport.io/ and/or a VPN like https://speedify.com/ https://speedify.com/

whyage 9y ago

P2P is alive and well on enterprise networks, with Kollective leading the pack.

sandov 9y ago

I'd gladly pay for a "Better Legitimate alternative" if there was one. Executing proprietary software and DRM are deal-breakers for me.

agumonkey 9y ago

I still enjoy the integrated verification of bittorrent very much. No need for post download md5 check and retries.. just coast along comfortably.

zzzeek 9y ago

the answer is, #1 and #5. the "enforcement" and "demographics" reasons are bullshit. I've never heard of a "streaming pirate" site but keeping a long term connection open to a pirate entity's site seems like a crazy thing to do just from a browser exploit point of view.

ArlenBales 9y ago

It's still popular for anime. Sites like HorribleSubs or Nyaa make it a breeze to download and watch anime, without having to deal with crappy Flash players of anime streaming sites or having buffering hell because the site is having traffic problems. cough Crunchy Roll cough

koonsolo 9y ago

I think the main takeway is that people not necessarily want it for free, they just want it convenient. Why would I buy a game in the store when I can just illegally download it? Why would I pirate games when I can easily get them on Steam? Why would I download a series when I can watch it on Netflix? Why would I try hard to pay for my non-netflix series when I can just download it? Why would I go out and buy a CD when I can just illegally download it. Why would I download MP3's when all is available on Spotify anyway. From this reasoning, I think the future might hold: why would I open a bank account and do slow wire transfers when I can just use cryptocurrency?

atomical 9y ago
Because if someone steals your money from a bank or you lose your PIN there is still a way to get your money back. If you lose your private key or someone steals it you can't get your money back with crypto.

dbg31415 9y ago

Kim Dotcom on Twitter: "How to stop piracy: 1. Create great content 2. Make it easy to buy 3. Same day global release 4. Works on any device 5. Fair price" || https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/380757105298268160 https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/380757105298268160

samfriedman 9y ago

While it's true that BitTorrent as a protocol has significantly fallen out of favor as the go-to technology for John Q. Pirate's needs, there are still many niche torrent sites that stay alive by differentiating on quality and community. Most of these sites are invite-only, and each tend to specialize in a specific type of media. One site might accept only movies, another TV shows, a third comic book scans, and a fourth might be the go-to repository for textbooks and e-learning materials. Not all that into blockbuster movies? Just join a tracker that specializes in older and more obscure films. On many of these sites, the material uploaded often includes many more choices in format and quality than is commercially available. A movie, for instance, might offer the option to download a 1080p encode in various video and container formats, or even a full bit-for-bit rip of the BluRay disc. This level of detail and dedication to the pirate media also tends to spin up a community within the site. After all, the people who dig through bargain bins of comic books to scan and upload them (or who scan the big Marvel/DC releases each week) are probably a lot more interested in sticking around and discussing their favorite comics than the drive-by downloader who is only interested in getting his hands on the latest Walking Dead issue. It's an interesting ecosystem, and while commercial products have caught up greatly on the convenience side I think there is a way to go still on baking in quality, variety, and community.

cheeze 9y ago
These communities are my favorite on the internet. One of the most insane things is how active the userbase is (granted, inactives are pruned.) But on my favorite trackers, it's common to see 33% of users logged in within 24h, something like 50-60% in the past week, and ~75% in the past month.
tvanantwerp 9y ago
> BitTorrent as a protocol has significantly fallen out of favor as the go-to technology for John Q. Pirate's needs... Out of curiosity, what would you say is the go-to technology for pirates now?
- drdeadringer 9y ago
  For me, at least, I still use torrent//magnet technology on The High Seas. I'm not sure if this is because I am yet again unaware of What's Next until it's too late, or yet again Simply Stubborn on what tech I use, or whatever Option Three is this time.

shrimp_emoji 9y ago

>Cause 5: VPN Usage >The real problem here is that there’s no way to know just how much of VPN traffic is growing or how much of it is BitTorrent. Though different traffic studies look at the internet from different vantage points, some simply would not be able to see VPN-obscured BitTorrent traffic. I'm on a VPN all the time, and torrenting without a VPN, to me, is living on the edge. I'd constantly wonder: how long before I receive a stern letter? Every day would be a desperate roll of the dice. I'd turn to alcoholism to dull my anxiety. That kind of life's not for me. So the hundreds of gigs in shows and movies I torrent (can't purchase those anywhere without DRM, can you? And paying for them indefinitely to get them [if the licensing doesn't run out] with streaming compression seems silly instead of just downloading them once) is obfuscated! Yay!

jjrh 9y ago
> I'm on a VPN all the time, and torrenting without a VPN, to me, is living on the edge. I'd constantly wonder: how long before I receive a stern letter? That's really a USA thing.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- kqr 9y ago
  Yeah, I suspect something like that. I'd be much more worried about a (relatively cheap) VPN provider ratting me out than my ISP.
- carlmr 9y ago
  Or most of Europe (France, Germany, ...).
vbezhenar 9y ago
At least sometimes I'm grateful that I'm living in 3-rd world country, where most of the people including police don't realize that copyright even exists (every Windows XP in police I saw seemed to be pirated, LoL). I can use torrents at 1 GB/s without any fear. I don't have much choice anyway, legal services usually completely out of touch with their insane prices and provide very limited selection, so they don't even close to compete. I don't know anyone who would pay $10 for album, it's ridiculous pricing. Make it $0.01 for song and someone might pay that for easy of use.

hipaulshi 9y ago

I am learning Japanese. Ever since d-addict took down their torrent section. It was almost to impossible to find quality content with Japanese subtitles. I now rely on Netflix Japan, but the content is still very limited.

eximius 9y ago

Does anyone know if there exists an updateable torrent which lists other torrents? That is, a torrent using http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html to keep an up to date archive of magnet links or something? If not, does anyone if any of the major trackers offer an API to scrape all magnet links + tags? I don't want to take on the liability of publishing said tracker-torrent, but I can certainly write the software to make it easy.

chabes 9y ago

This article fails to see the difference between streaming services and p2p downloading. If I want to watch content more than once, I contribute to increased traffic every time I stream that content. In other words: Streaming = certain amount of traffic, every time content is viewed. P2p downloaded content is usually downloaded once, but can be watched infinitely without touching the internet. The article also fails to touch on the fact that the internet itself is now much more mainstream (especially globally) than it was in 2006. Of course there's less torrent traffic today than there was in 2006. Streaming services are big for mainstream content that is being consumed by the mainstream. The non-mainstream continue to fill their increasingly cheaper storage devices with downloads. The difference being: they don't contribute to internet traffic every time they consume media. Kind of renders the article moot for me..

PricelessValue 9y ago

I hope bittorrent doesn't decline too much. A lot of open source software offloads their downloads to torrents to save space/bandwidth/etc and lower costs.

crimsonalucard 9y ago

Stremio with a popcorn time plugin is the new way to pirate movies. Convenience and performance is roughly on par with legal services like netflix. It's typically used under a vpn, so I'm curious about how popular it is... who uses/ or knows about people who use it?

snissn 9y ago

Movies and TV shows are a lot less watchable now. I'm not really as excited about the new block buster as I used to be. Maybe this is the perennial "I'm getting old and don't realize it" but I also understand box office and movie revenue to be down. Definitely steaming is a big source as well

anonu 9y ago

The article claims that p2p traffic is dropping and quotes percentage numbers which appear to be a percent of total web traffic. This doesn't actually tell me if p2p traffic is dropping. It only tells me that its not growing with - what I would expect is a growing pie of internet traffic. Furthermore, I would consider the source (plagiarismtoday.com) when choosing to trust some of the items in this article. I've never heard of them - but my initial inclination is to believe they have an agenda.

ponco 9y ago

That is one of the most poorly written articles I've ever read. Aside from the jarring punctuation marks littered throughout, why is there a Kodi logo next to "Streaming Piracy?"

jdlyga 9y ago

I tried looking for the Olympics Opening Ceremonies, something I was 100% certain would be up on torrent sites. Couldn't find a single one. Ended up logging into the NBC Sports app and streaming it that way.

foxfired 9y ago

To me, torrenting has become the new SMS. When Hangout, whatsapp, imo, and whatnot fail, I always resort to SMS which simply work. I have access to netflix, amazon, and Youtube, but when they fail, in the most ridiculous ways, there is always the guarantee of torrents in the highest possible quality.

Digital-Citizen 9y ago

From the article: > The real problem here is that there’s no way to know just how much of VPN traffic is growing or how much of it is BitTorrent. That's a show-stopper problem for the entire article. All of the claims made in the article hinge on the idea that BitTorrent use is undergoing a "Long, Slow Decline". But the author provides no way to back up that claim and buries the lede suggesting why: they don't have the data to back up the claim in their chosen title. The article is largely a joke, a collection of baseless speculation, propaganda (including uncritical use of "piracy", "Legitimate Alternatives")[1], no awareness of why people share data via BitTorrent, and nothing that indicates an awareness of how laws differ around the world (an American bias is unacceptable since the Internet, BitTorrent use, and alleged activity are all global). Sadly some of the feedback on this group echoes the same sentiment: claims about what most people do without posting any sources to back up the claims. On top of all that, the article is hosted on a service that could use a more resilient underlying infrastructure. As one poster here pointed out, it's as if the article should have been hosted on a service that lets people pass around verbatim copies of the article. [1] See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html on how these and other terms are unwise to use without explaining what you mean. One of the giant risks is conveying an undisclosed viewpoint that colors your take on everything else: "unauthorized copying" or "prohibited copying" could have been used instead of "piracy", for example. I'd add "legitimate" to that list of words for the same reason: the word implies that such copying is illegitimate where it is illegal. But as that gnu.org article also points out, "[L]aws don't define right and wrong. Laws, at their best, attempt to implement justice. If the laws (the implementation) don't fit our ideas of right and wrong (the spec), the laws are what should change.". If we're to have a reasonable discussion of this, we ought to admit to our views and speak of them clearly, not hide behind propaganda without ever explicitly coming to terms with their implications.

krisives 9y ago

Netflix stopped serving It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and now those torrents are really really popular =)

IkmoIkmo 9y ago

That having been said, torrenting in some ways seems healthier than ever. On a median retail connection I can download an entire season in 30 minutes while I'm getting ready some food, or the first episode in 5 minutes and get started watching. When I was a kid and still used torrents regularly, it wasn't like that. Much of that has to do with better connections and cheap bandwidth, but it's a fact of use nonetheless. In short, I'd have killed 5 or 10 or 15 years ago for the torrent speed/quality/content that's available today. That says something.

kuon 9y ago

I have a netflix subscription, but I download all movies from bittorrent, for three reasons: 1. Quality, especially audio, on many netflix movie I just cannot hear the voices. VLC is much better at mixing 5.1 to stereo for my speakers (not mentioning having multichannel when I watch on TV) 2. Being able to apply filters. I don't use many filters, but when I watch movie on my computers, I like to change the gamma of VLC, as my monitor is calibrated for color accuracy. In the browser, the color balance is wrong, I can adjust that in VLC without changing my monitor calibration. 3. Subtitles, I want subtitles on the black borders when possible. What I often do is applying a crop filter to have only one black border at the bottom and I place the subtitles in it.

lbenes 9y ago
Do you do this with VLC or another media player? I have a 16:10 monitor that often has space in the letterboxes for subtitles. I took the time to do this in VLC for a foreign TV series, but the next time I went to use subtitles it was broken and I didn't bother to tweak it. This really ought to be a built-in feature that just works™ without fiddling.
- kuon 9y ago
  Actually, for subtitles, I use mpv.io with --video-align=-1 which is smart enough to place the subtitles at the right place.

qwerty456127 9y ago

> Better Legitimate Alternatives By no way can a vendor-locked, regionally-policied, DRMed thing be considered a "better alternative", IMHO. I would rather pay twice (or even more) the price of the legitimate alternatives to just legalize the usage of unlimited, no-nonsence, DRM-free standard-format files exchange if only this was legally possible.

ggg9990 9y ago

BitTorrent serves a purpose even when unused, like nuclear weapons. All media companies know that if they put ridiculous hurdles in front of content consumption, piracy will pick back up.

white-flame 9y ago

The most obvious is that people are more on phones today than on full-featured computers. You're not going to run p2p uploading on such a device. You're going to be streaming.

jadedhacker 9y ago

It would be nice if we had substantial public funding of the arts and the results were free to copy.

cup-of-tea 9y ago

For most people, convenience is king. Netflix etc. didn't have to compete on quality or catalogue size, only covenience. And they won. With that we lost some of the greatest collections of human culture ever assembled. Those were only available with BitTorrent.

minibobxx 9y ago

maybe because IDM? www.idmcrack.ml

minibobxx 9y ago

fuck i can;t spamm

kazinator 9y ago

In order to have torrents, someone has to buy the DVD or BluRay. If fewer people are buying that stuff, there are fewer torrents. Could be a factor? Only takes one person though for a given movie. There is a trend now that the encodings are larger. A 110 minute movie can be anywhere from 5 to 10 gigabytes or more in full high def. Sometimes you can find newer movies in smaller sizes; sometimes not. Downloading and storing that is inconvenient compared to streaming. It takes longer; less powerful mobile devices don't decode the large stuff very well; you may get skipping if you happen to view these huge downloads over shitty Wi-Fi in a crammed airspace. An 0.8 to 1.5 gig download is still a reasonable alternative to streaming. I was traveling back in January and crammed 16 movies into as many gigs of free space on the 32 gig SD card on my tablet for watching on planes and in hotel rooms. I did that by running almost each one of them through ffmpeg to get the bitrate down. In some cases I tweaked the resolution. In one or two of them, I re-coded the audio to a lower bit rate (256 kbps to 128: it wasn't a musical movie, WTF!) Almost no perceptible loss of quality; all perfectly watchable. Pain in the butt to do that, though! Basically, I have this theorem that two hours of a perfectly watchable movie with good sound do not require more than around 1.5 gigs of H265+AAC data. When I see larger sizes, I tend to become kind of reluctant to pull the download trigger.