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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

If you torrent, you always get 4K, and VLC never has any issue with screenshots, either.

Yes. Apparently Gabe Newell [1] was right:

> We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.

[1] https://www.escapistmagazine.com/Valves-Gabe-Newell-Says-Pir...

It's a pricing to service ratio problem.

Unfortunately, the corporations that own the copyright thinks the price is zero for piracy, when it in actual fact, isn't "truly" zero. The fact of the matter is, these copyright owning entities want to extract the maximum amount of profit, rather than provide the lowest price, maximum service for the least cost.

I'm glad there's piracy as a floor to how bad streaming can get.

We have Netflix. The quality is unusable. There is no price at which I think the service is worth the money. As with so many things by 2025, capitalism has eaten itself and utterly failed. I only have it for a sense of moral rectitude - of which it provides almost none as well. Let me give money to these unbelievably greedy jerks because that's the right thing to do???

> There is no price at which I think the service is worth the money.

It’s fine if you don’t think there’s anything worth watching on Netflix. Worth knowing that more than 300 million people around the world disagree: https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/netflix-subscribers-300-mil...

I would be in the metric as well, while detesting the service. However, I'm not the only person in my home and it's not always easy to transition the family onto my local solutions. It's why I have YouTube premium as well, while letting the family know it's easy to grab all of that content and self host. It's like the chance of seeing something to watch you didn't already know about outweighs the cost and quality of service.

The problem is not what you can watch on Netflix. The two main problems I have are that Netflix is not a one stop shop and that Netflix turns my device into my adversary. The latter means I won't ever use the anything Netflix had made.

We use Linux in my house. My problem is with the quality of the video they send to my device. It is not worth a penny because it is actively disagreeable to watch. There is some good content there, not more than a small percentage, but I understand their fight with other companies greatly impacts availability.

Building a movie library with 1 to 4 movies a month you actually want to watch on Apple TV seems to be the better mid-term investment if you want to stay digital for the same price of an UHD enabled Netflix subscription.

I own a bunch of UHD-Blurays, but the friction to get up from the couch there is also quite large and you can't just decide to watch them on vacation.

Also Netflix bitrate for UHD is abysimal and rarely has any third party stuff.

Amazon bitrates are also good, but I lost a lot of trust in their mid/long term commitment to user needs.

> It’s fine if you don’t think there’s anything worth watching on Netflix. Worth knowing that more than 300 million people around the world disagree

Meh. You could practically say the same about junk food. Just because it's convenient doesn't mean it's the best thing available.

> capitalism has eaten itself and utterly failed

Is it really the capitalism, or is it the monopolism of exclusively owning the copyright and making the money out of it? Who'd fund the widely expensive shows, the CCP? Guess what the quality of the TV shows was during Socialism (and the level of creative freedom they had)?

The capitalism gave the pirates the way to cheaply reap, host and distribute by providing the means to do so for a fraction of the price. If you don't like the service, you don't pay, netflix shares go down and they end up like Blockbuster. If they succeed that means there are enough people who pay gladly.

Copyright system is flawed, but it's not because of capitalism per se (private ownership of the means of production), but because of the over regulation coerced from the government by the copyright owners. But that's bad governance, not the capitalism itself.

If the best that market capitalism can give us is an endless flood of superhero franchises with Grade 6-level dialogue (to serve the largest possible audience), deadline-damaged CGI and $300m budgets, I have a hard time seeing how socialist cinema could do worse.

The market gives what people want. If the majority of people want (and can be influenced to want) shitty franchises and cold popcorn, it will produce this. That's why Italian food is better than German, not because it's capitalism's fault. You cant' find a decent tomato in a German supermarket, but easily find one in even the biggest supermarket in Rome.

You'll also get an ad-free, offline first, non-tracked experience.

Fly that black flag high!

Why I still torrent even while paying for Netflix, prime video, YouTube premium, Spotify and audible.

You also get that warm feeling from sharing with others, which is more than 4k and hdr combined. All we need is connection.

VLC even lets you save a full-res snapshot of whatever you're seeing, regardless of the window size!

Since Netflix never (edit: rarely) releases Blu-Rays for their original content, there's no source to produce high-quality versions of their 4K content right? Could be wrong but I thought webrips that screen capture are relatively low quality because they're reencoding a video that's already being compressed for streaming.

Don't know if I notice these things much personally but if someone already cares about 1080p vs 4K they probably would.

The scene has ways of getting the data without reencoding. Look for web dl.

This is still far less bitrate than the equivalent BluRay. Netflix dropped their 4k bitrate during COVID and never looked back.

This is the difference between “rip” and “DL”. You can certainly pull content from Netflix without re-encoding.

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