Your friendly neighbourhood torrent merchant, I guess

For me that’s a last resort. As someone whose career involves producing intellectual property (like most programmers) I prefer to pay for it whenever possible.

I’ll torrent things if they aren’t available any other way, but I hope that isn’t the case.

I know that exact feeling.

While I'd also pay what producers deserve, in some cases it's not possible. You could pirate the content, and buy something (e.g. Merch or something similar where the funds go roughly to the same place as if you've obtained a legal copy of the actual content) other than the actual media from them.

If buying a 4K Blu-Ray copy of a movie is 20 dollars, but I'd prefer an MP4 on my computer (and don't have a disc player anyway): I can simply pirate a BRRip torrent, but get for example a T-shirt of a similar price, or perhaps even directly donate money to them if possible.

I believe its fair play.

Me too. I subscribe to Netflix, HBO and Amazon though. There are shows companies will not offer in my locale at any price. I could either take a stand and hope that whoever is in charge picks up the signal somehow then wait … or I could just download a few episodes and move on.

The problem there is once big releases start going digital only, the torrent sites will only be able to provide you webrips with the same quality limits as the streaming sources.

Unless there are theater or even production company leaks.

You can still buy DVDs, or rent them from Redbox, or if you're lucky enough to have a local library with a DVD collection you can borrow them.

I'm not expecting RedBox to last much longer, personally.

It's a shame too for those that live in more rural areas where broadband services / streaming really aren't a solution.

I meant "preferably without having to collect a huge collection of physical stuff in my house". Vinyl records already take up all the space I want to allocate to media collections ...

Redbox and the library are great suggestions, thank you!

I borrow a lot from my local library but often they are unplayable somewhere in the middle. It can happen with Netflix also but it seems much less frequent.

You can still buy them. And then later re-sell them, if you so choose.

Get 4k streaming? Depends on the app, but on my LG OLED and Netflix 4k and Amazon Prime shows are incredible with the right content.

I can often see compression though and there's no way to tell the player to "just pause for awhile and buffer instead of downgrading the bitrate".

This is on a 5Gbps/5Gbps fiber connection.

A whole DVD only stores 4.7 gb, so a 5 gbps network is well fast enough. Maybe depends on your hardware. Netflix you need the top plan to get 4k streaming though.

A 4K blu-ray film is usually over 80 GB in disc quality.

It's not whether Gbps is fast enough, it's that the egress traffic for the streaming provider costs a lot of money, and they do everything they can to serve 1080p or 4k content that is actually much lower in quality than what we expect.

A lot of scenes look very impressive until you start seeing artifacts and hearing poor sound.

So how can you deal with Bluerays, let alone DVDs

Netflix has up to 16Mbps bitrate for its 4k video streams. Bluray is up to 128Mbps. That's a ton more space for avoiding compression artifacts, even though Bluray is lossless. Netflix compresses its video to shit so that it can save money on network costs. (https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=...)

My subjective opinion is that Netflix has the worst video quality, though I've had some really bad experiences with Amazon Prime too. But Netflix is worse for me because some shows on Netflix can never get to the max bitrate they offer. For example, the last season of Peaky Blinders on 1080p Netflix had a ton of very noticeable compression artifacts, but that's not always the case for 1080p content. They just encoded it very poorly on the backend.

Apple TV+ has the best bitrate (up to 40Mbps), and Disney+ and HBO Max are decent as well.

Bluray is not lossless. Uncompressed 4k video streams are way over 10gbit range (it's a right pain)

I consistently have issues with Prime failing to stream at 4k quality. Netflix works great typically.

Netflix 4k compression is pretty bad. Lots of aggressive banding, blocking, and other compression artifacts. If you don't notice them, good - don't try to start looking for them.

Including Netflix content or just 3rd party? I always thought Netflix content looked better.

You can get a bluray drive for under $100 and libraries do bluray disks now.

Honestly? Pirate them? Passthepopcorn and Piratebay are still going strong. Easy enough to get "remuxes" which are uncompressed. Though usually on the private trackers, some light compression is truly not noticeable -- the people doing the compression on private trackers really, really care about visual quality.

Isn’t passthepopcorn pretty much impossible to get into?

I'm pretty much regretting not keeping up with the private trackers I was a member of as certain spots started to fall apart users were sharing invites to newer sites and I didn't participate because streaming was going fine lol

Oops.

They started recruiting on RED and GGn. If you don't know either of them then indeed it's impossible.

I'm on GGn. Where do I go to look for invites?

Its in the Legendary Invites forum, so obviously you'll need to rank up to Legendary Gamer if not already.

EDIT: The thread also states you need to be a Master Gamer, and an account older than 1 year. So very tough requirements, although you can get to MG without uploading anything.

TBH it’s just too much work. Maybe once you have a system up and working that might be easy but getting there seems annoying at best. Not to mention having to pay for vpn because I’m not risking a letter in the mail.

Kaleidescape (just don't ask the price)

Don't you still have to buy each movie individually? That's how it used to work at least.

Rent from your local library. Most movies are free, newer ones $1 or $1.50 for week. You can request movies from any of your county's library branches and it'll be shipped to your local branch.

> dubious 24Hz->60Hz conversion

Does that still happen? I set up my AppleTV device to tell my TV to use the frame rate of the media and it almost always goes into 24Hz mode when watching anything on streaming. I thought all services were using 24Hz video these days, unless they’re showing something that was broadcast over-the-air originally.

Where do you live? My California county library system has something like a 20 item limit on checkout and has large set of USA and foreign DVDs and video games in addition to the expected books.

many libraries also have access to apps like libby that allow you to checkout e-books, a streaming service for films, and access to digital newspapers, language learning apps, etc etc

local library, pawn shops, craiglist, piratebay...