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This is a great example of why I still prefer torrenting films and TV shows as opposed to using my wife’s Netflix sub: the pirated media is better! Netflix and

This is a great example of why I still prefer torrenting films and TV shows as opposed to using my wife’s Netflix sub: the pirated media is better! Netflix and Hulu and competing with easier to use and more flexible pirated media, whether they like it or not. The consistency and flexibility of the VLC interface (or whatever media player you choose) is vastly better than whatever features a Netflix PM is trying to push to juice their metrics. (I won’t even get into unskippable screens on Blu-Ray discs which are removed on the pirate version.)

matheusmoreira 6y ago
Yeah, piracy is almost always the better service. How the hell can a bunch of enthusiasts come up with a better service than multi-billion dollar companies? They seriously need to stop and rethink their industry. When I use my Netflix I get a horribly compressed "high definition" picture, annoying autoplaying ads for shows I don't care about and a constantly decreasing amount of content. Piracy offers the opposite of all that: high quality encodes, no bullshit ads anywhere and complete collections of everything.
- corin_ 6y ago
  They become multi billion companies by having different incentives (making profit) than the enthusiasts.
- tartoran 6y ago
  I think all creators should have a pirates donations box so pirated content doesn’t impact the creators that much.
  - sundvor 6y ago
    Does watching hq torrents of content I have legal access to count? :) My 960 GPU in the htpc doesn't quite have the bit depth that Netflix wants, therefore it disables 4k entirely. Bought the GPU at the time as it was the first with hardware HECV, has zero issues playing back a 4k encoding by someone else..
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      Wait, can you not play SDR 4K on Netflix? What happens if you play the first season of Stranger Things, which was produced in 4K but not in HDR?
      - jasomill 6y ago
        SDR? Sure. But unless something has changed recently, 4K Netflix on PC requires a particular flavor of Windows DRM that is only supported by NVIDIA GPUs starting with Pascal and Intel integrated graphics starting with Kaby Lake‡. On a more technical related note, I'd imagine 4K SDR variants of all Netflix HDR productions are generated on the back-end as an output of the same post-production process used to produce SDR prints at lower resolutions for reasons of both creative control an delivery efficiency; HEVC is just a compression algorithm, after all, and mostly orthogonal to matters of colorspace conversion and tone mapping. See, e.g., https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000588548-Color-Pipeline https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360... and observe that the example Dolby Vision workflow yields three distinct masters, 1. Dolby Vision (HDR + SDR tone mapping metadata) 2. SDR (generated automatically from the Dolby Vision source) 3. DCI-P3 (for potential theatrical exhibition) I therefore assume the requirements for 4K SDR playback of SDR and HDR titles are identical. ‡ If and only if said Kaby Lake iGPU is connected to a video output. I mention this because I can only watch 4K Netflix on my Hades Canyon NUC with the help of a Pascal eGPU, because, while the Kaby Lake iGPU is present and fully functional, all video outputs connect to the NUC's discrete AMD Polaris GPU, which Netflix doesn't support. DRM sucks.
        sundvor 6y ago
        Excellent reply, thanks very much. My HTPC is ageing, but I like to push the life of my computers to the most. So needing an even better GPU or CPU when it should have been able to downgrade a tad is annoying.
  - rhino369 6y ago
    Nothing is really stopping you from paying for the content and pirating it to get the quality you want. But lets be honest, essentially all pirates just want the content for free.
    - tartoran 6y ago
      I'd like to bypass the whole system (the middleman army) and give a donation directly to the creator if possible and I do sometimes when I'm awestruck with something. But that is not always possible and rare to matter in the grand scheme of things.
      - rhino369 6y ago
        That doesn't really make sense in the context of movies and tv shows. The creators are thousands of people.
    - lrem 6y ago
      Meh? A couple years back, I bought myself a box set of a season of Doctor Who. A taxpayer-funded series. It refused to play on any of my devices, because they were not to the DRM's liking. Torrenting took a fraction of the time I spent trying to debug why I can't watch the content I have actually paid for.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
  > constantly decreasing amount of content Frankly, this matters less and less if 98% of your offering is "Netflix originals" pulp. After 10 minutes of watching I have a feeling they should pay me for watching this. In anyone asked me, I'd prefer quality over perceived quantity. Quality needs time, thought, talent.
- rhino369 6y ago
  First, I dispute that piracy is really better. Amazon and netflix generally work easier than piracy. My, um friend, has radarr + usenet + plex, and its work pretty well 80%. But subtitles are often a problem. Unpacking/par checking sometimes takes forever. Sometimes the decoder in plex doesn't really work. Sometimes the movie has been DMCA'd off the use net servers. Private trackers involve sucking up to to 15 year old polish kids who run their service like the Stazi. You can usually find everything you want, but sometimes it requires some time. I don't have a large 4k tv, so maybe I'm not appreciating how bad the streaming movies look. But Netflix, Amazon, itunes, Vudo, etc. are all way easier services to use. Second, they are targeting the masses, who probably like a 30 second preview for another show and don't care how 4k is encoded. In my experience, about 50% of people with high def TV's didn't even set up high def cable packages.
  - skulk 6y ago
    The reason piracy is perceived to be better is agency. With Netflix/whatever, you have zero agency if something you want isn't there, other than signing up for some other streaming service. Even if it's hard to find something on public trackers with the right dubs/subtitles, it's rarely impossible for popular content. And if the subtitles are bad, you can, for example, download a different lower quality rip and pull the subtitles off that. The point is, in this system the user has control over the data they are consuming. This is infinitely preferable to some people than the chains of DRM.
  - machello13 6y ago
    Agreed. I use and love Plex (subtitles are less of an issue since they added the ability to automatically find subtitles for shows/movies), but people who say the experience is better are forgetting the amount of time and effort you need to find a reliable torrent site, manage the torrents, and set up the plex server. It's not a huge amount of work by any means, but for many people it's probably insurmountable. Let alone when you compare it to the work involved to use a streaming service: 1. Sign up 2. Enter CC info 3. Done
    - encom 6y ago
novok 6y ago
Really? Nowadays ive found it hard to get good 4k hdr downloads of things with seeders. Piracy seems to top out at 1080p at least it bittorrent land
- ndiscussion 6y ago
  A lot of it is probably caused by demographics - torrents are pretty popular in countries where 4k is not the norm and may not be accessible. FWIW I have 20/10 vision (twice as sharp as "perfect normal") and have never seen the appeal of retina screens or 4k. edit: Also the file sizes are vastly larger for 4k for an incremental benefit.
  - novok 6y ago
    You should see a 1080p vs 4k HDR video of the same thing on an OLED and see the difference. I see the difference all the time. The mandolorian is a good one for that.
    - ndiscussion 6y ago
      I don't have a 4k screen currently but it looks like most TVs support 4k nowadays, so if my TV ever dies, I'll be sure to try this. Thanks for the viewpoint.
- tomc1985 6y ago
  Depends on where you're downloading. 4K isn't as prevalent but it's usually out there.
permo-w 6y ago
If VLC had a slightly prettier interface, a better logo, and more intuitive queueing/playlists, it would be perfect Okay, I’m sure the logo has meaning to the devs, so they don’t mind it looking like an error message. That’s fair. They aren’t Instagram, they’re not going for the lowest common denominator. And, okay, the UI works, so why fuck with it? But why doesn’t it play the next video in a directory when you’ve finished the first? Why is the playlist option so hard to find and oddly implemented? Why can’t they update the UI to look like it was at least made for win7? This sounds like a major gripe, but really it’s not. Everything else is amazing in that app, it’s one of the best, most complete user experiences around, especially for a free app, but it just seems like it has some really obvious problems with fairly minor fixes
- manigandham 6y ago
  Just drag an entire folder or multiple files into VLC and it'll play everything in order automatically. I use MPV which has a much more minimal UI and better performance: https://mpv.io/ https://mpv.io/
manigandham 6y ago
Agreed. Also there are in-between services like Put.IO that provide better UX while handling most of the technical bits: https://put.io/ https://put.io/

matheusmoreira 6y ago

Yeah, piracy is almost always the better service. How the hell can a bunch of enthusiasts come up with a better service than multi-billion dollar companies? They seriously need to stop and rethink their industry. When I use my Netflix I get a horribly compressed "high definition" picture, annoying autoplaying ads for shows I don't care about and a constantly decreasing amount of content. Piracy offers the opposite of all that: high quality encodes, no bullshit ads anywhere and complete collections of everything.

corin_ 6y ago
They become multi billion companies by having different incentives (making profit) than the enthusiasts.
tartoran 6y ago
I think all creators should have a pirates donations box so pirated content doesn’t impact the creators that much.
- sundvor 6y ago
  Does watching hq torrents of content I have legal access to count? :) My 960 GPU in the htpc doesn't quite have the bit depth that Netflix wants, therefore it disables 4k entirely. Bought the GPU at the time as it was the first with hardware HECV, has zero issues playing back a 4k encoding by someone else..
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    Wait, can you not play SDR 4K on Netflix? What happens if you play the first season of Stranger Things, which was produced in 4K but not in HDR?
    - jasomill 6y ago
      SDR? Sure. But unless something has changed recently, 4K Netflix on PC requires a particular flavor of Windows DRM that is only supported by NVIDIA GPUs starting with Pascal and Intel integrated graphics starting with Kaby Lake‡. On a more technical related note, I'd imagine 4K SDR variants of all Netflix HDR productions are generated on the back-end as an output of the same post-production process used to produce SDR prints at lower resolutions for reasons of both creative control an delivery efficiency; HEVC is just a compression algorithm, after all, and mostly orthogonal to matters of colorspace conversion and tone mapping. See, e.g., https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000588548-Color-Pipeline https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360... and observe that the example Dolby Vision workflow yields three distinct masters, 1. Dolby Vision (HDR + SDR tone mapping metadata) 2. SDR (generated automatically from the Dolby Vision source) 3. DCI-P3 (for potential theatrical exhibition) I therefore assume the requirements for 4K SDR playback of SDR and HDR titles are identical. ‡ If and only if said Kaby Lake iGPU is connected to a video output. I mention this because I can only watch 4K Netflix on my Hades Canyon NUC with the help of a Pascal eGPU, because, while the Kaby Lake iGPU is present and fully functional, all video outputs connect to the NUC's discrete AMD Polaris GPU, which Netflix doesn't support. DRM sucks.
      - sundvor 6y ago
        Excellent reply, thanks very much. My HTPC is ageing, but I like to push the life of my computers to the most. So needing an even better GPU or CPU when it should have been able to downgrade a tad is annoying.
- rhino369 6y ago
  Nothing is really stopping you from paying for the content and pirating it to get the quality you want. But lets be honest, essentially all pirates just want the content for free.
  - tartoran 6y ago
    I'd like to bypass the whole system (the middleman army) and give a donation directly to the creator if possible and I do sometimes when I'm awestruck with something. But that is not always possible and rare to matter in the grand scheme of things.
    - rhino369 6y ago
      That doesn't really make sense in the context of movies and tv shows. The creators are thousands of people.
  - lrem 6y ago
    Meh? A couple years back, I bought myself a box set of a season of Doctor Who. A taxpayer-funded series. It refused to play on any of my devices, because they were not to the DRM's liking. Torrenting took a fraction of the time I spent trying to debug why I can't watch the content I have actually paid for.
dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
> constantly decreasing amount of content Frankly, this matters less and less if 98% of your offering is "Netflix originals" pulp. After 10 minutes of watching I have a feeling they should pay me for watching this. In anyone asked me, I'd prefer quality over perceived quantity. Quality needs time, thought, talent.
rhino369 6y ago
First, I dispute that piracy is really better. Amazon and netflix generally work easier than piracy. My, um friend, has radarr + usenet + plex, and its work pretty well 80%. But subtitles are often a problem. Unpacking/par checking sometimes takes forever. Sometimes the decoder in plex doesn't really work. Sometimes the movie has been DMCA'd off the use net servers. Private trackers involve sucking up to to 15 year old polish kids who run their service like the Stazi. You can usually find everything you want, but sometimes it requires some time. I don't have a large 4k tv, so maybe I'm not appreciating how bad the streaming movies look. But Netflix, Amazon, itunes, Vudo, etc. are all way easier services to use. Second, they are targeting the masses, who probably like a 30 second preview for another show and don't care how 4k is encoded. In my experience, about 50% of people with high def TV's didn't even set up high def cable packages.
- skulk 6y ago
  The reason piracy is perceived to be better is agency. With Netflix/whatever, you have zero agency if something you want isn't there, other than signing up for some other streaming service. Even if it's hard to find something on public trackers with the right dubs/subtitles, it's rarely impossible for popular content. And if the subtitles are bad, you can, for example, download a different lower quality rip and pull the subtitles off that. The point is, in this system the user has control over the data they are consuming. This is infinitely preferable to some people than the chains of DRM.
- machello13 6y ago
  Agreed. I use and love Plex (subtitles are less of an issue since they added the ability to automatically find subtitles for shows/movies), but people who say the experience is better are forgetting the amount of time and effort you need to find a reliable torrent site, manage the torrents, and set up the plex server. It's not a huge amount of work by any means, but for many people it's probably insurmountable. Let alone when you compare it to the work involved to use a streaming service: 1. Sign up 2. Enter CC info 3. Done
  - encom 6y ago

novok 6y ago

Really? Nowadays ive found it hard to get good 4k hdr downloads of things with seeders. Piracy seems to top out at 1080p at least it bittorrent land

ndiscussion 6y ago
A lot of it is probably caused by demographics - torrents are pretty popular in countries where 4k is not the norm and may not be accessible. FWIW I have 20/10 vision (twice as sharp as "perfect normal") and have never seen the appeal of retina screens or 4k. edit: Also the file sizes are vastly larger for 4k for an incremental benefit.
- novok 6y ago
  You should see a 1080p vs 4k HDR video of the same thing on an OLED and see the difference. I see the difference all the time. The mandolorian is a good one for that.
  - ndiscussion 6y ago
    I don't have a 4k screen currently but it looks like most TVs support 4k nowadays, so if my TV ever dies, I'll be sure to try this. Thanks for the viewpoint.
tomc1985 6y ago
Depends on where you're downloading. 4K isn't as prevalent but it's usually out there.

permo-w 6y ago

If VLC had a slightly prettier interface, a better logo, and more intuitive queueing/playlists, it would be perfect Okay, I’m sure the logo has meaning to the devs, so they don’t mind it looking like an error message. That’s fair. They aren’t Instagram, they’re not going for the lowest common denominator. And, okay, the UI works, so why fuck with it? But why doesn’t it play the next video in a directory when you’ve finished the first? Why is the playlist option so hard to find and oddly implemented? Why can’t they update the UI to look like it was at least made for win7? This sounds like a major gripe, but really it’s not. Everything else is amazing in that app, it’s one of the best, most complete user experiences around, especially for a free app, but it just seems like it has some really obvious problems with fairly minor fixes

manigandham 6y ago
Just drag an entire folder or multiple files into VLC and it'll play everything in order automatically. I use MPV which has a much more minimal UI and better performance: https://mpv.io/ https://mpv.io/

manigandham 6y ago

Agreed. Also there are in-between services like Put.IO that provide better UX while handling most of the technical bits: https://put.io/ https://put.io/