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Typical home movie night experience with my family: - Pay to "rent" movie from service A, paying full price. - Find out service A decides we are not allow

Typical home movie night experience with my family: - Pay to "rent" movie from service A, paying full price. - Find out service A decides we are not allowed to have HD on our device even though it's 2023 and we have plenty of bandwidth and pixels - Try renting on service B. Find out that our ISP is throttling service B to 2.5 mbps and we only can watch in stuttering potato quality. - Give up and search for magnet link. Wait about 30 seconds and we can start watching the high bitrate blu ray rip that looks and runs better than anything we paid for. And so we research how to set up jellyfin and the *arr suite and use that from then on, plus we can share wuth with the extended family to spare them this negative experience.

PaulHoule 3y ago
To be fair, if you download pirate torrents you frequently get corrupted files that don't play quite right, not to mention you might download some Chinese movie called "Nezha" and really get some other movie called "Ne Zha", on the other hand I am used to buying physical copies of Chinese movies that allegedly have English subtitles and don't (... I want to watch Investiture of the Gods so badly) or the Chinese movies that come from China that were made with DVD+R, printed on with inkjet, and have subtitles that barely make sense.
- slau 3y ago
  You might want to check the RAM or disk on your seedbox. My friend tells me that in a decade of seedbox usage, my friend has had maybe 3-5 lemons with data corruption. Edit: Clarified that it’s my friend who has a seedbox.
  - BLKNSLVR 3y ago
    Definitely. All my friends with eye-patches (a small and dwindling crew) say they just need to be picky (through experience) to know how to sidestep the bad and fake torrents.
    - ngc248 3y ago
      After The Pirate Bay and other famous public sites went down, there has been a proliferation of private trackers. These private trackers have high quality stuff. To get an invite, some of the trackers need references and also do personal interviews etc.
      - Melting_Harps 3y ago
        > After The Pirate Bay and other famous public sites went down, there has been a proliferation of private trackers. These private trackers have high quality stuff. To get an invite, some of the trackers need references and also do personal interviews etc. Or alternatively pay, ideally in Bitcoin... after nearly 2 decades of watching Japanese Kickboxing/MMA etc... I found a spot that delivers most of those events (plus way more than I care to watch) and its everything I ever wanted out of a service and gladly renew every year--though I'm incentivized to seed as long as possible in order to decrease membership costs, but I'm usually the last to DL so my ratio suffers since it's pretty niche. It's like these promotions don't want our money, and go out of their way to make it difficult for non-Japanese platforms tpo show them legally in other markets, so instead we pay a team to curate the recording in various formats (720/1080) and upload it next day or two. When I was younger half the fun was staying up late, chatting with people from all corners of the World on forums PBP and reacting to a knockout or decision and seeing the sun come up with fights still on the card left and deciding if I can make it to school/work etc... but sadly those days are over and my version of convenience(s) comes from watching something at my leisure at sane hours days/weeks/months later in order to not mess up my sleep cycle these days (I pay a lot more for that by comparison). To quote one of these die-hards on the forums: > If I'm the only dude in the PBP on NYE I'm going to have a meltdown. Should be an interesting read when it happens, anyway.
  - ornornor 3y ago
    I also have a friend who gets movies this way, they told me they use the servarr suite of software and never have any issue. It accomodates usenet and/or torrents.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    I have checked the RAM on that machine. The problems I see never show up if I play with VLC (“plays for sure”) but they did show up on debugging videos played on the XBOX ONE which has was been finicky no matter if I was using Plex, Jellyfin and various client software on the XBOX. A few out-of-spec frames din’t bother most players but the XBOX freezes up for two minutes for the slightest anomaly. With Jellyfin and the new Jellyfin client playback is fine unless there is something wrong with the file that I can detect with other tools. Badly encoded videos are all over the pirate space, frequently they promise lossless audio but skimp on bits for video, for instance. With that XBOX all the legit video apps (BluRay player, Peacock) have the problem of trying some handshake that cuts off video with my old Samsung TV and pandemic special Denon receiver (decontented POS compared to my old one which has the video output burn out). Power cycling the receiver brings back the picture but it is one more humiliation I face in front of my tech skeptical family.
- postexitus 3y ago
  20th Century Studios, is that you?
- soylentcola 3y ago
  Really? I only download/stream via torrent occasionally, but I've not run into that in a very long time. Just this past weekend I wanted to watch the first episode of the new season of Loki. Fired up the Disney+ app on my Sony TV. Black screen, no response. Went into app settings and force closed the app, restarted app...black screen, no response. Rebooted TV and opened Disney+ app. Black screen, no response. Eventually just switched inputs to the laptop sitting under the TV stand. Clicked Popcorn Time icon (I leave VPN always on for this laptop). Clicked Loki. Clicked episode. Within 1 minute the show was playing. This is one reason why I keep this as an option. Other times I admit I just can't be arsed to subscribe to yet another service to check out a show I heard about. Not claiming any moral high ground. I just don't want to pay for another streaming service when I already have paid access to 3 (at least until they offer something I know I want to watch for a month's subscription at minimum.)
- justinclift 3y ago
  > if you download pirate torrents you frequently get corrupted files that don't play quite right Doesn't that sound like you're doing it very wrongly?
htrp 3y ago
Movie industry is still massively out of touch. In order to combat piracy, you need to out innovate them in terms of convenience and features. Music piracy is almost a non-issue because it is way more convenient to get music via Spotify and streaming.
- Melting_Harps 3y ago
  > In order to combat piracy, you need to out innovate them in terms of convenience and features. To be entirely fair, I think we ahvae reached a parody with Hollywood and Streaming services in terms of content: sure, some comic book movies requires 500 million to make and require studios to pump things up and a bloated marketing tour, but A26 is a perfect example of something being made for low budget, word to mouth and often quickly on streaming services that rivals most stuff in the theaters. After this year, I've been to the movies more times since I was a teenager, I really don't feel like I missed much during that time: I'm still incredibly out of touch with what comes out and other than Oppenheimer I don't think I watched anything that had much of a budget. As for piracy, it'll never go away, some of us just refuse to comply with these norms and find ways around geo-restrictions and IP bans half the fun, hence why these communities still thrive before Netflix started to self-canobolize itself. PS: Last season of Black Mirror made me regret being in the loop, after COVID there was so much more to work with than it's entire existence, but this was perhaps the sign that Charlie Brooker needs to reach for fan-art scripts and should help get them green-lit.
  - andelink 3y ago
    > A26 Do you mean A24?
    - Melting_Harps 3y ago
      Err, yeah...
- postexitus 3y ago
  And it is only Spotify making money in that arrangement. Music industry long ago came to terms with not making money from album/song sales, but use them as promotion platforms for Live Events, Merch and whatnot. Not saying your statement about Movie industry is inaccurate - yes, one (or few) super convenient platform(s) to contain all movies to rent/buy with high quality and reliable delivery would be amazing - but one flat price for streaming everything ala Spotify is not going to work for movies.
BLKNSLVR 3y ago
Obligatory Oatmeal: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones https://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
edgyquant 3y ago
I don’t know of anyone who has such a negative experience as this. But also I don’t know many people who are such snobs about the bitrate of the movies they watch. With that said I imagine you skip all but the last step and are just trying to rationalize why you do so.
sidewndr46 3y ago
You forgot "have thousands of independent nodes deliver the content to me at a bandwidth rate so high it'd constitute a DDOS attack if the protocol didn't have a way to manage data requests"
JTbane 3y ago
It's more like: 1. Look up which of the five streaming services have the film. 2. Give up as I'm not subscribing for one movie.
- lotsoweiners 3y ago
  I subscribe to just about every streaming service there is and the problem I encounter is the movie I want to watch isn’t on any platform. Hell a few of the movies I’ve wanted to watch recently weren’t even available to rent or purchase on any platform.
aidenn0 3y ago
Indeed; we had promotional credits from Amazon so tried it out on a movie my son wanted to watch. If there was colorbanding and macroblocking as bad as what we watched in an encode from the IRC release group I used to participate in, the release would have not passed QC. Though to be fair, the details in low-motion scenes were far better because there's only so much you can do with a 480P TS.

PaulHoule 3y ago

To be fair, if you download pirate torrents you frequently get corrupted files that don't play quite right, not to mention you might download some Chinese movie called "Nezha" and really get some other movie called "Ne Zha", on the other hand I am used to buying physical copies of Chinese movies that allegedly have English subtitles and don't (... I want to watch Investiture of the Gods so badly) or the Chinese movies that come from China that were made with DVD+R, printed on with inkjet, and have subtitles that barely make sense.

slau 3y ago
You might want to check the RAM or disk on your seedbox. My friend tells me that in a decade of seedbox usage, my friend has had maybe 3-5 lemons with data corruption. Edit: Clarified that it’s my friend who has a seedbox.
- BLKNSLVR 3y ago
  Definitely. All my friends with eye-patches (a small and dwindling crew) say they just need to be picky (through experience) to know how to sidestep the bad and fake torrents.
  - ngc248 3y ago
    After The Pirate Bay and other famous public sites went down, there has been a proliferation of private trackers. These private trackers have high quality stuff. To get an invite, some of the trackers need references and also do personal interviews etc.
    - Melting_Harps 3y ago
      > After The Pirate Bay and other famous public sites went down, there has been a proliferation of private trackers. These private trackers have high quality stuff. To get an invite, some of the trackers need references and also do personal interviews etc. Or alternatively pay, ideally in Bitcoin... after nearly 2 decades of watching Japanese Kickboxing/MMA etc... I found a spot that delivers most of those events (plus way more than I care to watch) and its everything I ever wanted out of a service and gladly renew every year--though I'm incentivized to seed as long as possible in order to decrease membership costs, but I'm usually the last to DL so my ratio suffers since it's pretty niche. It's like these promotions don't want our money, and go out of their way to make it difficult for non-Japanese platforms tpo show them legally in other markets, so instead we pay a team to curate the recording in various formats (720/1080) and upload it next day or two. When I was younger half the fun was staying up late, chatting with people from all corners of the World on forums PBP and reacting to a knockout or decision and seeing the sun come up with fights still on the card left and deciding if I can make it to school/work etc... but sadly those days are over and my version of convenience(s) comes from watching something at my leisure at sane hours days/weeks/months later in order to not mess up my sleep cycle these days (I pay a lot more for that by comparison). To quote one of these die-hards on the forums: > If I'm the only dude in the PBP on NYE I'm going to have a meltdown. Should be an interesting read when it happens, anyway.
- ornornor 3y ago
  I also have a friend who gets movies this way, they told me they use the servarr suite of software and never have any issue. It accomodates usenet and/or torrents.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  I have checked the RAM on that machine. The problems I see never show up if I play with VLC (“plays for sure”) but they did show up on debugging videos played on the XBOX ONE which has was been finicky no matter if I was using Plex, Jellyfin and various client software on the XBOX. A few out-of-spec frames din’t bother most players but the XBOX freezes up for two minutes for the slightest anomaly. With Jellyfin and the new Jellyfin client playback is fine unless there is something wrong with the file that I can detect with other tools. Badly encoded videos are all over the pirate space, frequently they promise lossless audio but skimp on bits for video, for instance. With that XBOX all the legit video apps (BluRay player, Peacock) have the problem of trying some handshake that cuts off video with my old Samsung TV and pandemic special Denon receiver (decontented POS compared to my old one which has the video output burn out). Power cycling the receiver brings back the picture but it is one more humiliation I face in front of my tech skeptical family.
postexitus 3y ago
20th Century Studios, is that you?
soylentcola 3y ago
Really? I only download/stream via torrent occasionally, but I've not run into that in a very long time. Just this past weekend I wanted to watch the first episode of the new season of Loki. Fired up the Disney+ app on my Sony TV. Black screen, no response. Went into app settings and force closed the app, restarted app...black screen, no response. Rebooted TV and opened Disney+ app. Black screen, no response. Eventually just switched inputs to the laptop sitting under the TV stand. Clicked Popcorn Time icon (I leave VPN always on for this laptop). Clicked Loki. Clicked episode. Within 1 minute the show was playing. This is one reason why I keep this as an option. Other times I admit I just can't be arsed to subscribe to yet another service to check out a show I heard about. Not claiming any moral high ground. I just don't want to pay for another streaming service when I already have paid access to 3 (at least until they offer something I know I want to watch for a month's subscription at minimum.)
justinclift 3y ago
> if you download pirate torrents you frequently get corrupted files that don't play quite right Doesn't that sound like you're doing it very wrongly?

htrp 3y ago

Movie industry is still massively out of touch. In order to combat piracy, you need to out innovate them in terms of convenience and features. Music piracy is almost a non-issue because it is way more convenient to get music via Spotify and streaming.

Melting_Harps 3y ago
> In order to combat piracy, you need to out innovate them in terms of convenience and features. To be entirely fair, I think we ahvae reached a parody with Hollywood and Streaming services in terms of content: sure, some comic book movies requires 500 million to make and require studios to pump things up and a bloated marketing tour, but A26 is a perfect example of something being made for low budget, word to mouth and often quickly on streaming services that rivals most stuff in the theaters. After this year, I've been to the movies more times since I was a teenager, I really don't feel like I missed much during that time: I'm still incredibly out of touch with what comes out and other than Oppenheimer I don't think I watched anything that had much of a budget. As for piracy, it'll never go away, some of us just refuse to comply with these norms and find ways around geo-restrictions and IP bans half the fun, hence why these communities still thrive before Netflix started to self-canobolize itself. PS: Last season of Black Mirror made me regret being in the loop, after COVID there was so much more to work with than it's entire existence, but this was perhaps the sign that Charlie Brooker needs to reach for fan-art scripts and should help get them green-lit.
- andelink 3y ago
  > A26 Do you mean A24?
  - Melting_Harps 3y ago
    Err, yeah...
postexitus 3y ago
And it is only Spotify making money in that arrangement. Music industry long ago came to terms with not making money from album/song sales, but use them as promotion platforms for Live Events, Merch and whatnot. Not saying your statement about Movie industry is inaccurate - yes, one (or few) super convenient platform(s) to contain all movies to rent/buy with high quality and reliable delivery would be amazing - but one flat price for streaming everything ala Spotify is not going to work for movies.

BLKNSLVR 3y ago

Obligatory Oatmeal: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones https://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

edgyquant 3y ago

I don’t know of anyone who has such a negative experience as this. But also I don’t know many people who are such snobs about the bitrate of the movies they watch. With that said I imagine you skip all but the last step and are just trying to rationalize why you do so.

sidewndr46 3y ago

You forgot "have thousands of independent nodes deliver the content to me at a bandwidth rate so high it'd constitute a DDOS attack if the protocol didn't have a way to manage data requests"

JTbane 3y ago

It's more like: 1. Look up which of the five streaming services have the film. 2. Give up as I'm not subscribing for one movie.

lotsoweiners 3y ago
I subscribe to just about every streaming service there is and the problem I encounter is the movie I want to watch isn’t on any platform. Hell a few of the movies I’ve wanted to watch recently weren’t even available to rent or purchase on any platform.

aidenn0 3y ago

Indeed; we had promotional credits from Amazon so tried it out on a movie my son wanted to watch. If there was colorbanding and macroblocking as bad as what we watched in an encode from the IRC release group I used to participate in, the release would have not passed QC. Though to be fair, the details in low-motion scenes were far better because there's only so much you can do with a 480P TS.