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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

#71

Post by honkdaddy »

leonhard wrote: post #34
honkdaddy wrote: post #11

Why not just pay $5/mo for a Plex share with tens of thousands of the most popular movies and TV shows? I haven't torrented or paid for content in years. If I want to watch something and it's not on the server, I message the admin in Bangalore and he adds it. Sure I don't "have" the content in the sense it's not sitting on spinning disks, but I don't care. Life is too short to try to collect widely available digital…

Never heard of this. Where would one find such a service?

/r/PlexShares! Lots of options, they all have largely the same stuff. There are also more specialized ones if you want anime, Bollywood, K-dramas, etc.

Just shop around and find one with a free trial. It's not very automated, so you'll have to chat with them over Discord, but once it's set up it's completely hands-off. Good luck!

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

#72

Post by cuttysnark »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #41

Funniest thing: I've got a home cinema projector and somehow when I stream from Netflix (which I pay), it looks like shit. So I paid for an enhanced subscription, supposedly with better quality. Fiber optic at home: problem is not on my side. Still looks like shit. So I sail the high seas and pirate the very movie I was about to watch: 600 Mbit/s symmetric fiber, download using torrents takes a few minutes tops. Now…

> Now I don't get it: how do the pirates who "webrip" those have access to the quality stream

The front-end players (sometimes) have a UI element that allows you to explicitly set which bitrate is streamed. Otherwise, the player is beholden to what the connection speed deems appropriate. Regardless, if the original file was transcoded to include 1080p, 4k stream, they exist even if your player is downgrading based on a poor connection. This can feel like a loss of control, because it is. "But it's for our the user's own good."

When using tools like ffmpeg or similar, you can simply target the highest bitrate available.

If you ever try to download a ".m3u8" file you'll see it's more or less a manifest that lists all available bitrates.

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

#73

Post by honkdaddy »

sshagent wrote: post #37
honkdaddy wrote: post #11

Why not just pay $5/mo for a Plex share with tens of thousands of the most popular movies and TV shows? I haven't torrented or paid for content in years. If I want to watch something and it's not on the server, I message the admin in Bangalore and he adds it. Sure I don't "have" the content in the sense it's not sitting on spinning disks, but I don't care. Life is too short to try to collect widely available digital…

what is this plex share?

I answered above - but the tl;dr is to check out /r/PlexShares.

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

#74

Post by cmeacham98 »

lostmsu wrote: post #47
snmx999 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we assume the computer consumes 200 Watt in average, the electricity price would be something like 0,32 USD per kWh. So probably Germany, Denmark or Belgium.

That's a very pessimistic estimate for idling PC-based storage box. The story looks faked all over the place. 30 TB? I have as much, and the storage price was maybe $600 last year.

The rest of the computer costs money too. They maybe overpaid a bit, but it's not totally unreasonable.

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

#75

Post by gonzo41 »

dhosek wrote: post #57
BatteryMountain wrote: post #9

Piracy and data-hoarding are two different hobbies. One cost next to nothing, the cost of the other one you are quite familiar with.. Jokes aside, would you consider deleting your entire collection and then also cancel subscriptions and possibly give away or sell any tech equipment you do not use for work? And then find something else to do with the newly-freed time? Can you do it for 6 or 12 months? If not, why not?…

I remember getting together with a high school friend in the 90s and him talking about a similar setup (modulo 90s technology including dial-up internet access) for downloading pirated software. He never actually used the software, he just collected it. The plus side of digital hoarding is that the hoarder is less likely to die alone after being trapped by a falling pile of stuff.

I bet in we'll see a hoarder who dies alone under a pile of high density 8TB sandisk magnetic tapes. Full of something important like pirated twitch streams.

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

#76

Post by Sakos »

lostmsu wrote: post #47
snmx999 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we assume the computer consumes 200 Watt in average, the electricity price would be something like 0,32 USD per kWh. So probably Germany, Denmark or Belgium.

That's a very pessimistic estimate for idling PC-based storage box. The story looks faked all over the place. 30 TB? I have as much, and the storage price was maybe $600 last year.

I have no idea what HDD prices were like the past few years. I recently bought an 18TB HDD for 280 Euros. Much of it is for pirated stuff. Thing is ... there are benefits to having the content locally that aren't priced into paying for streaming sites. There are things I can't watch on Netflix/Amazon, for example, and I have a consistent level of quality. I would need the storage one way or another, so I don't really count it towards pirating. Electricity? I pay for that either way, whether I'm pirating or not. I'll pay for a seedbox or usenet, but that's still only 50-80 Euros total. If I paid for everything I pirate, that would be hundreds every month on top of electricity and storage.

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

#77

Post by gonzo41 »

istjohn wrote: post #59
sshagent wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine anyone at 'Amazon Video' actually uses the service, else they'd realise that the UI is horrific...and whole service is terrible. I only have it as its "free" with my delivery options.

IMO, Amazon is awful at UI design across the board--including the core shopping experience.

It's a feature not a bug, familiarity is the feature. It never massively changes on purpose.

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

#78

Post by antifa »

OK but most of us probably get away with just the 1TB drive we might not have otherwise added to our current computer. I'm a life long pirate and honestly never knew about "indexer subscriptions" or that usenet was something you could pay for.

Your fiscal problem is data hoarding, not piracy.

Your commitment to making sure your favorite TV shows never disappear into the void of indefinitely buffering cloud rentals is commendable.

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

#79

Post by bedast »

I think there should be a distinction between data hoarding and piracy. One can consume pirated content without keeping it around, effectively looking a bit like just paying for a streaming service, since that's effectively what you get. One could also buy blurays and rip them, keeping the result around, and having the same cost to "hoard" that content on top of paying for the content itself.

For a while, I was in the camp of purchasing my content with the intent to hoard it. So I had the same problem with what it cost to do so. I ended up getting a dedicated NAS appliance specifically for this, and paying for better hardware to do the encoding I wanted faster.

You could look at your usenet and indexer subscriptions as your "streaming service" counterpart.

But I think the point you wanted to make is you do this because the preferred legitimate method of consuming media is onerous because licensing causes content to be kept from you, but piracy doesn't care. The idea being you're willing to pay for it if the legitimate means made it easier, or in some cases, made the content you want available at all.

But none of that matters in the case of hoarding. And hoarding will always have a much higher cost.

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

#80

Post by Sakos »

bombcar wrote: post #48
Hamuko wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes you can't even buy (or rent) the content because of georestrictions. At least I often encounter TV shows and movies that are available in some US streaming service, but are not available in our version of the same service, or the entire service is not available.

I usually get the DVDs in that case, if possible. Some of the newest content isn’t available on DVD but most of the older stuff is.

If you're buying secondhand DVD's, and I don't see how you aren't because who's still producing DVD's (or even, who's producing Blurays for older content), then you're on the same level as people who pirate from the eyes of publishers and media conglomerates. You might feel better about yourself, but it's a quirk of history that they haven't been able to make secondhand sales illegal.
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