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Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content

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Re: Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content

#321

Post by pirate-Loo6uoDu »

nickthegreek wrote: post #31

Interested in how much content you have on those drives. Are you storing full bluray backups (40-100gb each), or are you doing like 10-15gb movies or the 2-6gb versions?

Depends on the content. For popular crap that I'm probably going to delete later I generally go for the 10-15GB option as finding a decent rip at a lower file size can be annoying (Latest marvel movies, etc). If something is sufficiently obscure or visually stunning I'll normally keep it at 10-15GB rips depending on the source material (Obscure horror movies, Dune). For regular stuff that I still want to have a copy of but that is popular enough I'm not worried it's going to disappear I go for the smaller versions (The expanse, adventure time).

Right now one of the biggest things on disk are a bunch of Boston Legal episodes. I have family that enjoy it, and I'm too lazy to find a good small release so it's taking up more space than it needs to.

I try to get HEVC encoded video where possible, and when I know there's a particular release group that produces high-quality I'll set up tags to prefer them.

Re: Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content

#322

Post by pirate-Loo6uoDu »

klibertp wrote: post #174

Stop with all the watching (and to a lesser extent listening) and start reading and hoarding books instead. 99% of downloaded content you will never read, but at 0.5~4.0Mb per book just two cheap, but RAIDed with ZFS for safety, 1Tb 3.5" HDDs will last you a lifetime. And that's before turning any kind of compression on!

I've already downloaded all the books. Now the challenge is indexing and sorting them.

Re: Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content

#323

Post by oneoff786 »

I don’t get the pirating mentality I see on HN. People say Netflix was good but the catalog is the problem, then point to alternatives in piracy that are not streaming sites. Why is this? Put locker and solar movie and sflix seem like the best available option. What’s up with that?

Re: Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content

#324

Post by mlyle »

hotpotamus wrote: post #100
strken wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody lets me pay for content. They're all tying themselves in contractual knots trying to find the most lucrative deal, and meanwhile it's impossible to just buy a movie or a TV show without shipping a physical disc. I go to e.g. the South Park website, and I'm greeted by an error message saying they're "working hard to resolve [their] pre-existing contractual obligations," which is the same message they've shown f…

When I see all the justifications I wonder who are they for? If you feel the need to justify it to semi-anonymous people on the internet, then you're probably trying to justify it to yourself which means you think what you're doing is wrong.

Man-- I don't steal content, because I've made a lot of money from IP and I think other people deserve for their work to be rewarded.

But I'm so jealous of the user experience for people who buy into a $5/mo plex and get better service than I'm paying for. IMO, that's broken.

So much time wasted, figuring out what service to watch something on, dealing with content ads, bad user interfaces... having content vanish and become unavailable, etc.

I don't even watch much video, but it's still way too much of a sink on my time.

Re: Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content

#325

Post by oneoff786 »

colechristensen wrote: post #284

US vs. Paramount (1948) prevented movie production companies from owning theaters or entering into exclusivity arrangements for exhibition. I think we need to go back to this, codify it into law, and make it apply to streaming services. i.e. companies that offer streaming services and companies that produce content should not be allowed to be owned by the same entity. Beyond that I think there should be forced syndic…

That’s a great pitch

Re: Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content

#326

Post by aidenn0 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #319
birdyrooster wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They used to be the only bidder now they are bidding against dozens of streaming services competing in different niches. Their DVD business has no competition.

You'd think that with all that competition, NetFlix's streaming service would be much better in order to compete with other companies (which have a far better selection). But somehow they get away with having a crappy selection, despite having lots of competitors. Conversely, since NetFlix's DVD service doesn't have any competitors they could get away with having a crappy selection, but they have a great selection, a…

Cost of adding a niche title to NF DVD service is probably less than $1000, since they won't need many copies. I doubt they can get streaming rights for any feature length film still in copyright for under $1000.

Re: Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content

#327

Post by pirate-Loo6uoDu »

Mo3 wrote: post #313
pirate-Loo6uoDu wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My copy of wikipedia is less than 100GB at the moment.

Okay? And how is that relevant to the core issue at hand... hoarding all of this data is your own personal decision and has nothing to do with piracy in itself. That's the issue. You are obviously free to do whatever you want, but hoarding data and then associating the cost of the hoarding with the source of the data is totally illogical. Trying to one-up me on some stupid explanatory comparison makes me wonder if yo…

I'm not complaining about the costs associated with this. I'm living well within my means. If I was concerned about the money I could probably spend more of my time to find the content on sketchy streaming sites like putlocker.

I'm not sure why so many of the replies in this article are trying to interpret my post as some kind of call for help.

My point was that piracy is a service problem.

Re: Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content

#328

Post by wollsmoth »

kgwxd wrote: post #298
wollsmoth wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you have a lot of concerns about this that all kind of conveniently put you in a place to pirate whatever you want. Most of the time I watch things once, so I rent it if it's not on a platform I subscribe to. Generally then I can watch it on my tv, ps4, phone, computer, whatever. Consider that money spent on these products are an indication to studios about what people like. Movie studios, production c…

I don't need any excuses to download whatever I want. It doesn't cost anyone anything, and no suffering of any kind is introduced into the world for anyone. Most, if not all, things I've downloaded, which isn't much, I've either rented before, seen on TV or in a theater, or have been on one of the streaming services I pay for at some point. Does that cover me ethically? Some people seem to think so. I personally don'…

Yeah sure, it doesn't really matter. But no need to pretend like it's a service issue at this point. My experience with renting/buying content has been that they're pretty convenient and there aren't many service issues I've run into.

Actually it's kind of easier than torrenting and copying files around to various devices I want to watch it on.

Re: Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content

#329

Post by lobocinza »

jafo wrote: post #293
lobocinza wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes sense but on practical terms it's expensive and uncovenient to buy MP3s.

Long ago, computing was about freedom. "I can organize a music collection the way I want...AND take it with me wherever I go?" Somewhere along the line "convenience" displaced "freedom". "Why manage my own collection when I have Spotify or Apple Music?" I suspect the pendulum will swing back at some point.

Don't get me wrong, I gave up on streaming services a long time ago and started pirating again because streaming services started being incovenient. Buying things is the most incovenient choice because the industry in general give consumers only two choices: A- cheap streaming, B- expensive physical media.

Re: Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content

#330

Post by nunez »

philistine wrote: post #103

What you’re describing is data hoarding. I pirate a ton too, but you know what I do with a movie or TV show after I’ve watched it? I delete it. Poof, gone. But it’s still in the most important dataset I have. My memory. To help with the metadata of my own memory, I write down a list of the films I’ve seen. I only keep the movies I really love and want to rewatch (Robocop). That TV show I just finished that was great…

I am 100% against hoarding, but data hoarding makes a lot more sense to me.

I was looking for an album by a small punk band called Straighten Things Out called "Dawn Of A New Hope". Loved this album; listened to it all of the time on Apple Music (where I discovered it). Went on a walk one day and tried to load it...and it was gone.

I can't even find this album on eBay, and you can find everything there!

"Milo Goes To College" by The Descendants, a more well-known pop punk band, was removed as well. Randomly, without warning. The Descendants are often credited as the "fathers" of Pop Punk; basically any mainstream pop punk band you've heard of cites them as an influence. This album basically started this genre...and it's gone.

Fortunately there are enough vinyls of this record that make it easy to find when I one day build my epic vinyl collection.

Had I saved these to my iTunes Library or ripped them to a NAS of some kind, I'd still have it. (Fun fact: Milo Goes To College _was_ in my Google Play Music Locker, which Google sunsetted when they launched YouTube Music, so I lost that "copy". I'm also going to guess that it was in my iTunes Music Library as well, which still exists as cloud storage, but albums that you add to your iCloud Music Library from Apple Music are pointers to tracks in the streaming service which can go away at any time.)

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