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Comment by sebzim4500 | Hacker News Reader

Pirate bay is that backup option, at least for me. To use your example of the X-Files, you can currently download a 75 GB torrent with every season + extras and it will only take a few hours.

I think people continue seeding torrents for longer than DVDs reliably last.

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Someone has to have it on DVD/BD first for it to get on the Pirate Bay.

That's not true, as the entire categories of releases titled WEB-DL and WEBRip demonstrate.

I've never understood the appeal of downloading pirate movies.

Feels dodgy, always a hassle trying to fight your way through all the scams and malware and porn and when you get the movie it's of questionable quality.

If I buy a DVD then I get perfect quality in a nice case in a day or two without having to visit the seedy red light district of the Internet only to get dud contraband.

The only reason you see scams, malware and porn is because you don't have an adblocker. Install uBlock Origin. It's mandatory not just for pirating, but even for normal browsing.

It does take a but of time to spot fakes, and you need to give the community time to aggregate good content and weed out the fakes, but it's definitely not the experience you describe. It sounds like you last tried a decade or two ago.

>I've never understood the appeal of downloading pirate movies.

Oh, that's easy! You want to see <movie>, so you search for "<movie> 1080p" (or better) and after a few minutes you have it on your PC and can watch it 1,000 of times if you want; even when offline (!). It's also free. This is why people like pirate movies.

>in a day or two ...

LOL

Or you live outside of USA and there is no store that has X files dvds. Also no streaming service offers that here. Also due to copyright and region locking, I cannot import them from USA.

But somehow if I pirate that, i cause them 'damage'.

Luckily on most sites, pirated videos have keywords in filename (720p, 1080p, 4k,... x264, x265,... ) so you can see the quality and choose what filetype you want/need.

None of those apply if you put a modicum of effort into it, and then you get access to almost all media in human history unencumbered by the copyright "people". Without having shelves filled with plastic crap.

Literally none of these things are true.

Private trackers solve all of those problems.

> Feels dodgy, always a hassle trying to fight your way through all the scams and malware and porn and when you get the movie it's of questionable quality.

Its actually really easy, it only takes seconds to get the right torrent going. I've never accidentally torrented anything I didn't intend to.

I'm not sure of what are you exactly picturing in your mind about how the experience is of downloading a pirated movie. But opening up the qBittorrent application in your PC or Mac, clicking on the "search" tab, and writing "Pirates of the Caribbean", doesn't feel at all as interesting and creepy as walking at night through the red lights district of amsterdam. That'd be awesome!

they do a great job at compressing and encoding.

I'll buy the bluray/dvd, then download the torrent for the movie to put into Plex. Like a backup, but MUCH better and easier on the size than I would be able to do myself.

Get a seedbox, set up sonarr [0] and radarr [1]. Use Plex, or even better, Jellyfin [2] for streaming.

Takes about 1.5 hours to set up - you now have a Netflix-like UI with an easy option of requesting TV Shows and Movies from a nice UX.

You can get any media in any quality you want, without ever stepping into any red light district.

[0] https://sonarr.tv/ [1] https://radarr.video/ [2] https://jellyfin.org/

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