Every once in a while I'll try to watch something through the Intended Method™ and it always proves itself to be a worse experience.

Most recent example - I was watching Malcolm in the Middle on Disney+ with my girlfriend, and we found that there are entire audio tracks missing in multiple episodes. Usually some kind of ADR, like someone talking off camera. There's an episode where Reese rents an apartment and there's a recurring bit of him talking to his depressed neighbour through the wall. But you'd have no idea because they somehow completely deleted the neighbour's dialogue from the audio, so it's just Reese having a one-sided conversation with a wall. We saw multiple episodes where something like this happened, and when I looked online there were reports of it dating back years.

Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata, etc. No one providing official routes to this media seems to care. You have AI-upscaled "4k" movies where the actors don't even look like themselves and there are hallucinated artifacts and things that aren't there. Images cropped to widescreen, like the infamous Duff Beer joke being out of frame in The Simpsons. TV series with edits or entire episodes removed because they were deemed too offensive. Movies and shows randomly appearing and disappearing so you have to endlessly manage subscriptions and switch between different apps with better or worse players just to watch a single series. Just a nightmare.

I haven't visited a torrent site since I found out I could search for them from within qBittorrent.

I don't think I'd prefer this, tbh. I would want to see the whole topic information when choosing what exact torrent to download. Is it marked "verified" or "questionable"? If it's "questionable", is it for some arbitrary formality, or something like "the audio is desynced"? Are there many different dubs (because I'd rather prefer not to have them, as they're bloating the files?)...

When it comes to films, I torrent exclusively remuxes or whole Blu-Ray images. TPB hasn't been relevant for me for the last 15 years or more, since it never had a culture of such large file sizes, just small re-encodes. I wonder why, because obviously that data doesn't have to pass through TPB's own servers.

Where do you find those? I use 1337 and dht search engines. Can't be bothered to fiddle with private trackers. Wondering if you found something better.

I honestly wouldn’t bother with public trackers. They work great for debrid services with something like kodi or stremio but if you want to “own” or build your collection you have much better options 1. Private trackers - people seed, they have rules on uploads and actually moderate

2. Usenet is still alive and thriving for this.

3. Libraries still exist and you can rent and rip media there

4.Internet Archive is a great resource for old stuff

5. Just buy physical copies and rip em. Can check eBay etc.

RARBG used to be the way to go, until they shut down. I'm not aware of a good public replacement.

E.g. ext.to aggregates torrents from a lot of public trackers, very often you can find good releases there.

If its not on their top 100/48 hr list then its not worth watching.

The pirate bay raid is a good example of the kind of soft power the US has lost with their recent behavior. Hard to imagine Stockholm police being as receptive nowadays.

edit: I'm very sorry for making a relevant comment that extrapolate on the content of the shared article.

Paradoxically, it's also a good example of the kind of soft power the US still has: we're all watching their movies.

Are we though?

People I know watch less and less each year. I don't think it's because they're getting older, as the reasons they cite usually revolves around how the source material has been butchered.

And if subscriber numbers were still going up, I sincerely doubt that the producers kept increasing the subscription cost over the last few years.

Honestly, I think that soft power has been massively damaged too, with people looking for less virtue signalling and less asinine gender swaps along with contrived homosexuality in their media

Yes! thank fuck!

<3 Still a great public tracker. We absolutely need people who will run sites like this and crack and bypass stiff like Denuvo and so on. We really do need to keep these sort of skills, tools, and communities alive to be able to resist digital oppression and techno-fascists. Sounds corny as hell but it's true imo.

So not to hijack this thread or anything but there's one good metric (if nothing else... the fact FB overwrote your email while Google seems to believe in data liberation, and fewer breaches) to tell apart the difference between those two companies

Google had been asked to remove Pirate Bay in results. They didn't. On Google, and I don't really know how it changed over the years, but there'd be a notice about links removed due to DMCA, if it came to that, basically. (Okay, Youtube, which they own, has always been a bit aggressive, and that isn't nothing)

Facebook? Facebook wouldn't let you SEND a link to PB in private messages. It still deletes your post now if you link Anna's Archive. This after apparently heavily scraping LibGen

I don't love Google for a lot of reasons but I damn well feel better using it compared to Mr. "Dumb Fucks"

> For now, the site remains online, twenty years after Hollywood thought it had seen the last of it. And whoever is in charge today, will likely do everything possible to keep it that way.

I'm vaguely aware that other people than the original group are running it now.

Also, I don't torrent much, but it seems pretty stagnant and dead. It's been occasionally useful to me to find older stuff that doesn't seem to be well represented on newer (public) sites.

I've never not found something that has been publicly released on it. Though, I don't typically stray too far from the mainstream path for the media I'm looking for.

I can absolutely find new stuff on there. It took Project Hail Mary a little while to get on there, presumably because it was a cinema release only for quite a while but a good quality version popped up after a couple of weeks, and a bad quality "guy holding a camcorder in the cinema" version showed up after about 1 week, IIRC

once it hit streaming services the webrip was on it within hours.

I don't recall exactly when it went onto streaming, but I'm pretty sure I got a good quality version before that. It may have been released for streaming in other regions earlier than I thought though, I don't keep super up to date with that sort of thing, as I generally don't watch movies super soon after they're released

I find the stream rips to be really shitty quality.. The original source is very low bitrate, compressed tae fuck. I find for stream rips from netflix for example I need to download a 4k rip in order to watch in 1080, and that's acceptable.

/top/48hall seems pretty fresh and healthy. What do you mean by stagnant?

Torrenting is alive and well… for recent releases and new stuff. All the old stuff is pretty hard to find now. When demonoid was around you could find just about everything. The worst part is for a lot of it there isn’t a legal way to get them either.

That's the tragedy of the MAFIAA death throes period imo.. With all their lawsuits and bullshit they never even slowed down the big public trackers and torrents of the popular stuff they were trying to stop being shared.. Instead they killed loads of small private trackers which housed exquisitely curated collections of stuff that wasn't available anywhere else for neither love nor money.

I use Stremio with pirate bay torrents. There literally isn’t anything that came out and isn’t on there.

> on newer (public) sites

Example of said sites?

rutracker, 1337x, nyaa are the first that come to mind.

ext in tonga