Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

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> You have fly-by-nights and unethical operations abounding that make everything only a google search away, sometimes with a single click.

Somebody uploaded the entire The Queen's Corgi on YouTube in pristine 720p quality (they must have had access to a BluRay to get this quality) and it's not even out in the USA yet (I am not even sure it'll even be released at all). No tricks, no visual artefacts to hide it, nothing. It's been up since May 28 and apparently noone cares.

> The “us” of 20 years ago would wonder WTF were arguing about and pay out the nose for these capabilities.

Maybe 20 years ago but not for long. In 2001 we had the xvid codec and boy, did movie piracy take off with xvid compressing DVDs to CDs. A slower burner already was under 100 USD and you needed a CD player anyways http://ixbtlabs.com/articles/news01m08/index.html also some combined DVD - CD-RW units were below 180 USD: https://books.google.ca/books?id=3uyMhR-uNRwC&pg=PA179&lpg=P.... Blank disks were cheap -- 30 cents wholesale. Pirated movies and TV collections were not only on CD-R disks but hard disks as well, in 2002 we had 200GB disks https://www.storagereview.com/articles/200210/20021018WD2000...

Online P2P networking also skyrocketed at this time. In 2001 we had eDonkey2000 with ShareReactor and DC++ for the Direct Connect network. In 2003, Demonoid and Pirate Bay launches.

>The Queen's Corgi

Interesting rabbit hole, that one. Seems to be a movie to cash in on "The Secret Life of Pets" which itself was probably a movie made to cash in on whatever Pixar had at the time. Release dates are wonky - it's been out in Belgium for months, which is probably how it appeared online.

I hadn't heard about the movie before - but because someone pirated it maybe I'll watch it now.

You reminded me of "the scene" back in the old days where movie groups like Centropy and many others were releasing latest films on FTP servers which were typically running on 100Mbps dedicated connections, gigabit lines were quite rare back then and mostly reserved for the most elite groups like FLT (PC Games). Releases were usually "pre'd" on affiliated topsites before getting spread to other lower tier sites via FXP transferring method by individuals called "couriers" in exchange for download credits (usually at 1:3 ratios), and it would eventually reach other p2p outlets such as DC++. Most of those release groups had their own private channels on IRC where members were like family, and they were really just a bunch of geeks. Fun time!

You tell me... I was helping one of the admins of one of the largest second tier FTP sites in Central Europe because his English was not so great... so yeah, I remember this scene too quite well.

If you have time and are so inclined, would you mind sharing more of your experiences running that site? I may not be the only one interested in a little behind-the-scenes peak at how such an interesting part of internet history.

Oh and I forgot: even 20 years ago the infamous DivX ;-) codec was already out. It wasn't xvid, it was DivX that started the digital movie piracy big time.

The heydays, I’d like to add Suprnova!

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