Hacker News Reader

Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, piracy is almost always the better service. How the hell can a bunch of enthusiasts come up with a better service than multi-billion dollar companies? They seriously need to stop and rethink their industry. When I use my Netflix I get a horribly compressed "high definition" picture, annoying autoplaying ads for shows I don't care about and a constantly decreasing amount of content. Piracy offers the opposite of all that: high quality encodes, no bullshit ads anywhere and complete collections of everything.

View on HN

First, I dispute that piracy is really better. Amazon and netflix generally work easier than piracy. My, um friend, has radarr + usenet + plex, and its work pretty well 80%. But subtitles are often a problem. Unpacking/par checking sometimes takes forever. Sometimes the decoder in plex doesn't really work. Sometimes the movie has been DMCA'd off the use net servers. Private trackers involve sucking up to to 15 year old polish kids who run their service like the Stazi.

You can usually find everything you want, but sometimes it requires some time.

I don't have a large 4k tv, so maybe I'm not appreciating how bad the streaming movies look.

But Netflix, Amazon, itunes, Vudo, etc. are all way easier services to use.

Second, they are targeting the masses, who probably like a 30 second preview for another show and don't care how 4k is encoded. In my experience, about 50% of people with high def TV's didn't even set up high def cable packages.

The reason piracy is perceived to be better is agency. With Netflix/whatever, you have zero agency if something you want isn't there, other than signing up for some other streaming service.

Even if it's hard to find something on public trackers with the right dubs/subtitles, it's rarely impossible for popular content. And if the subtitles are bad, you can, for example, download a different lower quality rip and pull the subtitles off that. The point is, in this system the user has control over the data they are consuming. This is infinitely preferable to some people than the chains of DRM.

Agreed. I use and love Plex (subtitles are less of an issue since they added the ability to automatically find subtitles for shows/movies), but people who say the experience is better are forgetting the amount of time and effort you need to find a reliable torrent site, manage the torrents, and set up the plex server.

It's not a huge amount of work by any means, but for many people it's probably insurmountable. Let alone when you compare it to the work involved to use a streaming service:

1. Sign up 2. Enter CC info 3. Done

Ease of use depends on your computer literacy, I think. For me it involves pasting the IMDB ID into a fairly popular public torrent site (eg. tt0095560) and feed the magnet link to Transmission running on my storage server. When it's done, it gets picked up by LibreELEC and is ready to watch. Could my mother use this? No. But you don't need a computer science degree to do this either.

When Netflix launched in Denmark, I immedately jumped on it. It used to have endless amounts of great content, and was way more convenient than piracy. Now it's just filled with trash, and I can never find what I want to watch. Piracy has again become more convenient.

Exactly. 5 weeks ago I needed CBS All Access to watch an NFL game and I figured I'd watch ST Discovery and the Stand too. I had access in 3 clicks on Roku in the Amazon prime channel. I can cancel at anytime.

My wife wanted to watch the Borne Identity and my um friend had figure out why Radarr blacklisted a bunch of releases then wait for it to download and un-par (which took 5x longer than the download). I came back into the living room 15 minutes later and found my wife just watching it with commercials on Peacock.

During a break I convinced her to switch to plex since it didn't have commercials. But then we had to pause the movie and fumble with subtitles for the scenes in the swiss bank. First downloaded set didn't match the timestamps. Second did, but it was like 5 minutes. "Why couldn't you just let me watch in on NBC HONEY?"

When I said piracy was the better service, what I meant is it offered much higher quality, not that it was easier to use. Piracy actually takes a ton of work. Of course paying for a streaming subscription is the easiest solution: people just pay and enjoy what it offers. The problem is the fact they consistently offer the lowest quality product.

1. Horrible video compression to save bandwidth

When they offer users high definition content, they're actually talking about the resolution of the image. The quality and detail of the image will almost always be much worse if compared to another source such as Blu-Rays. Netflix somehow manages to add compression artifacts to nearly 100% black frames. Scenes with a lot of movement are actually painful to watch.

Compare that to the obssessive attention to detail you can often find in piracy communities and the winner is obvious.

2. Censorship

These services aren't afraid to cut content in order to broaden their audiences. They may even be required to do it by law. Pirates obviously don't have these problems.

3. Annoying copyright issues nobody cares about

Netflix once had Terminator 1 and 3 but not 2, as well as Spider Man 1 and 3 but not 2. Was the license for these movies too expensive for them? Who knows? Who cares?

Want to watch a classic film? An influential film? Chances are it's not on Netflix. Where is it then? Who knows... Maybe not actually available at all anywhere no matter where you look.

Piracy just ignores these issues. As a result it gives you access to almost everything humanity has ever created.

4. DRM

Netflix won't give you access to their precious 4k+ streams if it feels your device isn't locked down enough. Disney is even more aggressive with these measures. Even on my perfectly locked down PS4 system it won't let me download content ahead of time. Apparently they think network connections are reliable.

Pirates simply don't have these problems.

5. Superior technology

Netflix's video player is garbage compared to mpv. The video players of every other streaming service manage to be even worse. It's not just the basic-ness of it either: sometimes it stutters and falls out of sync with the audio, sometimes it screws up the rendering of subtitles...

The one area where streaming service technology wins is their ability to offer alternate audio streams.

Another point, cloud service is extremely unstable. The movie/anime/feature/etc would disappear somedays without any reason and no way to rebase.

For piracy, one just needs to backup. And, this is controlled by user not whatever COMPANY/POLICY.

There's a big range between generic streaming and setting up all those usenet (which is probably the most complicated of them all).

Something like https://put.io/ is far easier while still providing all the control you need over files and usually makes them available instantly.

Oh yes. Especially with the chill institute.

They become multi billion companies by having different incentives (making profit) than the enthusiasts.

I think all creators should have a pirates donations box so pirated content doesn’t impact the creators that much.

Does watching hq torrents of content I have legal access to count? :)

My 960 GPU in the htpc doesn't quite have the bit depth that Netflix wants, therefore it disables 4k entirely. Bought the GPU at the time as it was the first with hardware HECV, has zero issues playing back a 4k encoding by someone else..

Wait, can you not play SDR 4K on Netflix?

What happens if you play the first season of Stranger Things, which was produced in 4K but not in HDR?

SDR? Sure. But unless something has changed recently, 4K Netflix on PC requires a particular flavor of Windows DRM that is only supported by NVIDIA GPUs starting with Pascal and Intel integrated graphics starting with Kaby Lake‡.

On a more technical related note, I'd imagine 4K SDR variants of all Netflix HDR productions are generated on the back-end as an output of the same post-production process used to produce SDR prints at lower resolutions for reasons of both creative control an delivery efficiency; HEVC is just a compression algorithm, after all, and mostly orthogonal to matters of colorspace conversion and tone mapping.

See, e.g.,

https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360...

and observe that the example Dolby Vision workflow yields three distinct masters,

1. Dolby Vision (HDR + SDR tone mapping metadata)

2. SDR (generated automatically from the Dolby Vision source)

3. DCI-P3 (for potential theatrical exhibition)

I therefore assume the requirements for 4K SDR playback of SDR and HDR titles are identical.

‡ If and only if said Kaby Lake iGPU is connected to a video output.

I mention this because I can only watch 4K Netflix on my Hades Canyon NUC with the help of a Pascal eGPU, because, while the Kaby Lake iGPU is present and fully functional, all video outputs connect to the NUC's discrete AMD Polaris GPU, which Netflix doesn't support.

DRM sucks.

Excellent reply, thanks very much. My HTPC is ageing, but I like to push the life of my computers to the most. So needing an even better GPU or CPU when it should have been able to downgrade a tad is annoying.

Nothing is really stopping you from paying for the content and pirating it to get the quality you want.

But lets be honest, essentially all pirates just want the content for free.

Meh? A couple years back, I bought myself a box set of a season of Doctor Who. A taxpayer-funded series. It refused to play on any of my devices, because they were not to the DRM's liking. Torrenting took a fraction of the time I spent trying to debug why I can't watch the content I have actually paid for.

I'd like to bypass the whole system (the middleman army) and give a donation directly to the creator if possible and I do sometimes when I'm awestruck with something. But that is not always possible and rare to matter in the grand scheme of things.

That doesn't really make sense in the context of movies and tv shows. The creators are thousands of people.

> constantly decreasing amount of content

Frankly, this matters less and less if 98% of your offering is "Netflix originals" pulp. After 10 minutes of watching I have a feeling they should pay me for watching this.

In anyone asked me, I'd prefer quality over perceived quantity. Quality needs time, thought, talent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com