Is there an exhaustive list of methods people use in 2025? Stremio, classic torrents? What’s the current state of PopcorTime / successors?
Look up free media heck yeah.
Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy
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Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy
#612Earlier quoted context omitted.
The collapse being the collapse of the DDR? The Lives of Others must have been made way further beyond that than 7 years. Closer to 20, I'd figure.
TLOO came out in 2006, 16 years after the DDR collapsed. I wondered if GP was thinking of another movie so I asked ChatGPT, which told me: "The German film you’re thinking of is "Good Bye, Lenin!" — released in 2003, exactly seven years after the formal end of the DDR in 1990. " (My emphasis.) So much for GPT-5.
That's hilarious. Imagine going back two years and showing someone GPT-5? They might think the Pause AI movement had won. It makes you ponder an alternate timeline where the OpenAI brain trust wasn't dismantled
Which version did you use, though? GPT-5, GPT-5-Thinking, GPT-5 Pro, GPT-5-Mini, GPT-5 with Thinking (reasoning effort=high) or one of the other 18 options? Did you tell it to think harder? Maybe you are just holding it wrong?
Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy
#613Piracy 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…
Also in any language. I am so tired of reading a list of audio/subtitles languages available, only to find out that they don’t work after purchase. Am all platforms. Good lord. Just tired of that bs
Apple is the most egregious of them all. The times I wanted to watch a foreign language film only to discover the subtitles are not available in English!
Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy
#614Piracy 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…
I think the key thing it misses though (usually) is that you usually have to go grab things. I'm not willing to go download something in order to view it. Not even spending a few minutes time grabbing a whole season of a series and then storing it somewhere, even if viewing it takes many hours.
Spotify's convenience killed the mp3, and Netflix is hyper convenient compared to most piracy. No one (to a rounding error, but let's say no one) is _really_ interested in file organizing, bitrates, buffering, whether a show disappears in 5 years etc. Everyone (again, to a rounding error) just wants to watch that latest season of that latest show and then forget it.
What's now making old-school piracy return is that while Netflix is convenient, having 7 streaming services is really _inconvenient_. Not to mention expensive. But the inconvenience is horrible.
I wish just 1-3 of the large streaming services would cooperate on some standard which lets me see and manage all my content in one place. Then devices could natively support browsing that "rss for streaming" instead of having N different services. Once a few do, the pressure on others to join the standard would increase.
Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy
#615Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plus the idea that if you pay someone to "purchase" and "own" (their terms!!) content, then it's yours forever. Unless, of course, they renegotiate something upstream and subsequently remove the content from your "library" or your device. Or perhaps they lock you out of those things altogether. This means it wasn't ownership, it was subscription. So as they say, “if buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing.” http…
Stealing is when you take something from him, and he no longer has the thing you took. Piracy is when you see something for free that everyone else paid money for. You watching doesn't prevent anyone else from watching. Piracy isn't stealing: piracy only deals in intangibles. Stealing is for finite goods. There's a whole "how do we pay to make stuff if people can watch for free" problem around piracy, but it's fundam…
> Stealing is when you take something from him, and he no longer has the thing you took.
People commonly use "steal" to refer to someone making a copy of data they are not authorized to have. Even you have used it that way: "I know my credit card company allows me to set a password to prevent unauthorized access from someone who might have stolen this kind of data" [1].
Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy
#616Earlier quoted context omitted.
"You wouldn't download a car!" Wait, I absolutely would download a car if I could... or food... or clothing... I'd download the shit out of physical goods if the technology existed. Who wouldn't? You could solve scarcity. If we had Star Trek Replicators, we'd be living in a literal utopia.
The “download” catchphrase is a joke, it was originally “You wouldn’t steal a car”, which I’d argue is true for most people.
> it was originally “You wouldn’t steal a car”, which I’d argue is true for most people.
Sure, but it's only true if you stretch the definition of what's occuring. If we stretched it in the other way, in that "stealing" a car in fact left the perfectly fine original right where you found it, the vast majority wouldnt think twice.
Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy
#617I'm just training LLMs with datasets retrieved over multiple peer-to-peer protocols.
Your LLMs must be great at regurgitating full linux distro images :)
Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy
#618Earlier quoted context omitted.
The DVD releases of the original theatrical versions of Star Wars were encoded in 480i non-anamorphic, drawn from analog video masters intended for Laserdisc, which employed an early version of DNR that created a bunch of ugly temporal ghosting artifacts. Blown up onto a modern display it looks really bad.
I watched the PAL edition and I don't remember those artifacts, but it was a million years ago so my memory could be wrong xD
The PAL release was an NTSC>PAL conversion, so throw upscaling artifacts onto the pile as well. e: Actually thinking back on it, it may not even have been PAL at all, but 480i/60hz Region 2/4.
There's a good chance you watched it on a CRT given that even on a flat panel LCD fom the late 2000s the low vertical resolution was quite noticeable (effectively ~272p, not counting deinterlacing artifacts from it being sourced from a video master). It looked somewhat acceptable in that context but aged very quickly once CRTs started becoming obsolete.
Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy
#619Piracy 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…
Piracy also offers: 0. Ability to watch offline! 1. Ability to fix subtitle issues with minimal tweeks like change size or moving location. 1.2 Ability to get subtitles if they aren't offered (or offered in your language) 2. Ability to normalize audio. 3. Ability to buffer videos when on a poor connection. 4. Ability to create collections, organize, and track your movie as you wish 5. Arbitrary number of user account…
Offline watching is a thing with streaming services, too.
Also, there is no reason for a paid streaming service not to implement 1 (but not 1.2), 2, 3 and 4. It's not like these features will affect their bottom line. They just don't see value in implementing and supporting them.
Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy
#620Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until recently, 3. (poor connection) has been a huge issue for me and streaming services. When there is a download/watch later, I sigh with relief. 7. is only sort-of an issue, IMHO. Anything that is pirated is usually fairly benign content and I don't care if someone knows how many times I've watched Idiocracy. I just wish I could know how many times I've watched it too. I would add: Piracy offers the ability to rem…
> Tell me, does the original cast get any of that or is it just adding pocket change to Google's coffers? Google will have negotiated with the “owner” (in this case I think Disney) for a wholesale price and then adds its retail markup (eg 20%). Disney pay the industry standard SAG/DGA union negotiated residual agreements to cast, writers and directors
I find myself wishing for a lower-overhead approach to this. 20% already gets the price from $14.99 to $12.49. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the cast gets less than 50% and lawyers get more than 40% of that. If true, that's less than $6.25 to the folks that actually made the movie and $8.75 (or more) of pure, unadulterated overhead. Finally, clicking on "where to watch" shows prices within $0.20 of each other. It's not ... not price-fixing, but it kinda is.
Also, "wholesale" is such a strange way to look at this. There is no way the digital asset is sent to them more than once. It's some kind of strange fiction for me to imagine, "here are X downloads of movie Y at a discounted rate. If you want more, you need to come back and purchase another X downloads." It's as if a download itself is a consumable that Disney provides.