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Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

theguardian.com

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Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#571

Post by smacke »

wjholden wrote: post #564
presentation wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have another problem, which is that my wife is Japanese and I’m American, and if we watch a French movie then I want the English subs and she wants the Japanese subs. Making that work with streaming services is very painful.

I had never thought of this before. What is the solution? Can any video software show two subtitles at once?

I developed a tool (https://github.com/smacke/ffsubsync) which can sync subtitles against each other (or even against an audio track), and this can be used in conjunction with other tools such as https://pypi.org/project/srt/ to combine multiple subtitle streams into a single stream. I've used this strategy to good effect to get both English and Chinese subtitles up at once.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#572

Post by oguz-ismail »

joules77 wrote: post #472
ryandrake wrote: post #153

Piracy offers: 1. Unrestricted access to an absolutely huge library of movies, music and TV shows, nearly unlimited. Certainly not limited by opaque "licensing deals" between various companies. 2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release. 3. No arbitrary device/OS limitations. 4. Can watch/listen/download from any location on earth with sufficient bandwidth. I d…

Use the right browser (not built/funded by ad tech companies) and all Ads can be blocked in 2025.

Those companies own half the internet and they make sure the right browser is always slower and shittier than theirs

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#573

Post by cess11 »

SilverElfin wrote: post #503
ryandrake wrote: post #153

Piracy offers: 1. Unrestricted access to an absolutely huge library of movies, music and TV shows, nearly unlimited. Certainly not limited by opaque "licensing deals" between various companies. 2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release. 3. No arbitrary device/OS limitations. 4. Can watch/listen/download from any location on earth with sufficient bandwidth. I d…

Where does one safely pirate these days to avoid authorities

I'm not going to name any names but depending on your budget and jurisdiction you can probably figure out a setup where you either torrent, possibly through a reputable VPN, from an invite based tracker, or you pay to play with one or two Usenet accounts.

If you are willing to spend a bit of money you can get what's called a seedbox in a suitable jurisdiction and do rather innocous seeming tunneling between your home network and there.

Torrenting is a bit messy, usually it's not 'one tracker fits all', instead you'd likely want one for movies and one for music or something like that. Perhaps Limewire is a good fit for your needs, or perhaps you're more of a power user willing to endure weeks or months of research and interviews with tracker admins.

Usenet is a bit more involved, and you pay for access and bandwidth. The network traffic doesn't look as suspicious as torrenting, however, and if something turns up in a search it's yours, you don't have to beg for people to seed and so on.

With a bit of effort and technical savvy you can automate a lot of piracy these days, with tools like Sonarr and Radarr tracking releases and automatically pushing them into your self-hosted streaming service.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#574

Post by schiffern »

wjholden wrote: post #564
presentation wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have another problem, which is that my wife is Japanese and I’m American, and if we watch a French movie then I want the English subs and she wants the Japanese subs. Making that work with streaming services is very painful.

I had never thought of this before. What is the solution? Can any video software show two subtitles at once?

VLC, mpv, and SMPlayer all support dual subtitles, with varying amounts of fiddling.

https://old.reddit.com/r/VLC/comments/hnle2o/dual_subtitles/

https://superuser.com/questions/1255487/how-to-get-vlc-to-di...

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#575

Post by hereme888 »

SilverElfin wrote: post #503
ryandrake wrote: post #153

Piracy offers: 1. Unrestricted access to an absolutely huge library of movies, music and TV shows, nearly unlimited. Certainly not limited by opaque "licensing deals" between various companies. 2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release. 3. No arbitrary device/OS limitations. 4. Can watch/listen/download from any location on earth with sufficient bandwidth. I d…

Where does one safely pirate these days to avoid authorities

pay for a vpn, get an open-source client like qbittorrent, and go to sites like yts.mx and 1337x.to.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#576

Post by dylan604 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #447
dylan604 wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How sure of that perfectly reasonable model are you? Are you willing to find a movie that you think this would be a solid bet, contact the content owner with the money to finance the necessary steps to get the content streaming platform ready? Would you put your money where your mouth is on this? Edit to add more food for thought. Let's take a non-premium feature film as an example. Let's assume that the title you've…

Well this is how the "unofficial" streaming services make money, basically. They don't have the production costs, obviously, so there are some numbers to crunch there. And I don't have answers to any of your questions, because I am not in the industry. I suspect these are a whole bunch of trade-offs, as in most technical questions, and there is a version of these trade-offs that are economically viable. But people ar…

I am in the industry, and I'm giving you a simplified formula which answers why more titles are not available. You just don't want to accept the reality of it from the content owner's perspective and only see if from the "I deserve to see anything I want anytime I want" perspective.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#577

Post by fluoridation »

tootie wrote: post #526
bagol wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads for a paying member? That is just... evil?

It's like nobody has ever watched cable TV.

Fun fact: cable TV also started out ad-free. The sell was you'd pay a monthly subscription and got just the content you wanted to watch. Then came the ads. Enshittification as a phenomenon didn't start in Silicon Valley.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#578

Post by hereme888 »

ryandrake wrote: post #153

Piracy offers: 1. Unrestricted access to an absolutely huge library of movies, music and TV shows, nearly unlimited. Certainly not limited by opaque "licensing deals" between various companies. 2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release. 3. No arbitrary device/OS limitations. 4. Can watch/listen/download from any location on earth with sufficient bandwidth. I d…

It also offers:

- Watch movie before deciding if it's worth paying, or if it was propaganda for a particular ideology.

- Watch original movie. Companies like Disney often change content to match a trending ideology.

- Avoid subscription services.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#579

Post by dotancohen »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #550
dotancohen wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not TV show editing, rather a satire magazine, but a now-deleted reply mentioned that Charlie Hebdo was pressured to censor and would not. They had staff members murdered because they would not censor.

That is a thing that happened. But if it's what socalgal2 was talking about, then their comment was a non-sequitur. They saw the word censorship and rambled something almost entirely unrelated to the topic at hand. That's why it's worth asking what they're talking about.

They were responding to a comment about piracy not self-centering extant works. I could see where the comment does sequitur, just barely. Perhaps he is pushing an agenda, perhaps he was making conversation. I can see far further OT comments all up and down this post.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#580

Post by bhaney »

artdigital wrote: post #299
bhaney wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not always. Now I just flip mindlessly through endless amounts of readily available garbage on my jellyfin server instead.

Then don’t be a hoarder and only get what you want to watch I have my watchlist hooked up to *arr so it pulls that stuff automatically. Once I watched it and it’s not something I want to show to others, I delete it.

> Then don’t be a hoarder

Of course. Why didn't I think of that?

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