TL;DR at the bottom.
I started getting into torrents about 2 years ago, at the time I started out with downloading YIFY rips and x265 RARBG encodes. I didn't care about the quality at the time, I was just happy to get movies. But I also wanted stuff like Special Features, and while Tigole and the QxR team occasionally added them for some of their movies, it felt like something was missing.
Eventually I grew dissatisfied with encodes, and wanted to watch movies in the highest quality possible. I would have downloaded BDMVs, but no one seemed to be seeding them, or in the case of less-mainstream/obscure movies, they weren't on public trackers at all. (I tried downloading REMUXes from FGT, but they always replaced the PGS subtitles with UTF text subtitles, which I didn't appreciate.) So in early 2022 I bought myself a Blu-ray optical drive, set up MakeMKV, and bought the Blu-ray of the movie I wanted to rip. After that, I bought some more BDs to rip, and I started making my own REMUXes. Some time after that, I flashed my drive with the LibreDrive firmware so I could rip my 4K UHD discs too.
So anyway, my point is that the arguments that piracy is "bad for business" and causes companies to "lose money" are full of hot air. If anything, piracy is good for them and increases sales. There have been numerous occasions where I have wanted to download a REMUX and there were no seeders, and decided it would be easier for me to buy the disc and rip it myself.
So, the main takeaways are:
- Piracy isn't nearly as bad as the authorities say it is, and may actually increase sales.
- Create good-quality encodes.
- Seed all your torrents.
TL;DR: Started buying and ripping my own Blu-rays due to dissatisfaction with low-quality encodes and lack of seeders.
I used to have a lot of Blu-ray Disc movie resources, but I wanted to play Blu-ray Disc on different devices, or convert Blu-ray Disc into different formats, such as MP4, so I wanna know how to rip blu-ray. My friend recommended Handbrake to me. Although it is a free software, I have to install libdvdcss specially, and there are still a series of problems, so I finally bought a paid software, DVDFab, which is a one-time payment for permanent use, and it is still available at present.
Handbrake only converts an existing Blu-ray rip to a video format, it doesn't rip DVDs and Blu-rays on its' own.
You can install MakeMKV to rip your discs, then convert them to video files in HandBrake.
Many others have said before people who pirate spend more on media than those who don’t.
I pay for cable tv (get off my lawn) in addition to several other streaming services.
And sometimes I still can’t get the thing I want. You think I’m going to spend even more when my half dozen existing subscriptions don’t cover this one thing? I don’t think so.
Same for music for me. Only difference now, I get to choose where my money goes. Instead of some streaming company giving next to nothing to the bands I listen to and everything else going to some super popular stuff I don't enjoy.
I started pirating around 2000. Early days of bittorrent, before that Napster and others. Maybe I'm out of touch and/or old. But YT premium/music has be very convenient and cost effective for me. As far as movies, paying for a couple of streaming services is way easier than delving through scummy torrent sites waiting for movies to download.
I'm fairly tech savvy but I've been off the high seas for awhile. If anyone knows a way to get movies/music with the same ease of use as the paid stuff I'd love to know about it.
qBittorrent + Plex makes it pretty easy; you can search for torrents from within qBittorrent, so no scummy sites
Are there any good services like bandcamp, but for video? Even if it doesn't have blockbuster/popular movies I'd be interested. I spend a lot of money on bandcamp because it's easy and simple: I give them money and in return get bits that I do what I want with.
If you're looking for DRM-free digital distribution, the best I can think of is Vimeo on Demand. You pay one-time for a movie, and in return you get the option to download the movie as a MP4. There's mainly arthouse films and documentaries, but you may be able to find a few gems.
