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Comment by TFNA | Hacker News Reader

When it comes to films, I torrent exclusively remuxes or whole Blu-Ray images. TPB hasn't been relevant for me for the last 15 years or more, since it never had a culture of such large file sizes, just small re-encodes. I wonder why, because obviously that data doesn't have to pass through TPB's own servers.

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> it never had a culture of such large file sizes, just small re-encodes. I wonder why, because obviously that data doesn't have to pass through TPB's own servers.

We (the users) have to concern ourselves with how big the file is. And TPB tends to surface the most popular stuff first.

Usually a 1080p re-encode is good enough quality for me. And a lot of the time if I'm looking for a movie to watch right away I'd rather just get it fast so I can start watching.

They are not popular because with meager 20 TB drive, you can either have entire movie collection of all movies you actually like (and then some more), and visit again, or you can have 20x less content without much visible gain of quality (if you see it its either rare too complex scene, bad reencode or you are simply sitting too close to TV). Same goes for audio, even 2GB rips have good 5.1 or 7.1 tracks.

Its not hard to decide what to prefer. Even with 1GB/s optic fiber I just couldn't be bothered to download 20-40x larger files and then struggle to see any difference in 4k on 75" screen.

And lets be honest - apart from poor folks with OCD or similar trait, after 1 minute of watching I couldn't care less about audiovisual quality, heck I enjoy even 720p rip if its the only thing available.

Not only does TPB not have many remuxes, but it also has fairly few re-encodes using the modern high-quality codecs that you are talking about.

It’s funny to hear someone say that hard drive sizes are too small, and internet connections too slow, when RuTracker (a tracker whose core audience is former USSR, often shitty provincial cities) has a very lively culture of remuxes.

That depends on how many movies you watch. I could probably fit every movie I've ever seen (and then some more), as bluray remux if available at that quality and DVD remux if not, into 20TB.

Where do you find those? I use 1337 and dht search engines. Can't be bothered to fiddle with private trackers. Wondering if you found something better.

E.g. ext.to aggregates torrents from a lot of public trackers, very often you can find good releases there.

RARBG used to be the way to go, until they shut down. I'm not aware of a good public replacement.

thepiratebay is fine they just don’t run indexes often so searches often fail for stuff just uploaded within last hour or two. Limetorrents updates indices frequently but uses ad providers that try to hijack your clicks and presses so it takes three or four clicks to get one click that isn’t hijacked. There is a bit of non overlap between those two sites.

Sounds like something that a browser like Brave was built to combat. I haven't visited the site in question but for a lot of the ad-heavy sites I do visit, I jump over to Brave to deal with the nonsense.

> RARBG used to be the way to go, until they shut down. I'm not aware of a good public replacement.

https://therarbg.to/

Whatever this is, it's not RARBG.

That’s not RARBG. That’s a quasi-domain squatter trying to lure people in with the name of a legendary community, but just showing the same crap results as any other public torrent aggregator and presumably loading it with ads (that I mercifully don’t see with Firefox uBlock Origin) in order to profit.

Not a rarbg without daily scene music releases.

you can find the sqlite dump of their database

no trackers, but the hash is enough to find seeds on dht

everything pre-2023 just works

I honestly wouldn’t bother with public trackers. They work great for debrid services with something like kodi or stremio but if you want to “own” or build your collection you have much better options 1. Private trackers - people seed, they have rules on uploads and actually moderate

2. Usenet is still alive and thriving for this.

3. Libraries still exist and you can rent and rip media there

4.Internet Archive is a great resource for old stuff

5. Just buy physical copies and rip em. Can check eBay etc.

How do you join private trackers from scratch?

I used to do this kind of things decades ago, but there was also still a few things not ripped and uploaded you had _some_ chance of participating.

Nowadays I imagine ~everything under the sun is already ripped, so how can you contribute to seed ratio? (or is that not even a thing anymore?)

use their RSS feed + a seed box to automatically grab stuff as it’s posted some sites have ratio free for large files to get them seeded faster. at least that’s what I did a decade plus ago.

I was looking for this european movie from 10 years ago only last month, could not find it anywhere on line, streaming or torrent. I'm pretty confident there is still a lot of stuff missing.

hey there's a project idea: a "todo list" for rippers that scrapes imdb and checks what's not in pirate bay (and then looks for dvd's on ebay / libraries)

Public trackers like the piratebay face a lot of issues with retention. If it’s not mainstream or recent people often don’t seed or maintain it. If you join a private tracker there’s ones dedicated to keeping older sources like that a live!

For really obscure content, internet archive, your library, usenet or even eBay are the go to!

SoulSeek was also pretty good for finding obscure music. I like collecting everything that was released (not live performances, though) and SoulSeek filled some, but not all gaps I had.

It's not E2EE IIRC, though, so use with caution.

Out of curiosity, what movie?

> hey there's a project idea: a "todo list" for rippers that scrapes imdb and checks what's not in pirate ba

Private sites do things like this, archival efforts and have request systems.

Piracy is and always has been the only way for more obscure stuff.

Personally I do not feel guilty pirating a decades old TV show or movie. And I really doubt the industry cares much either.

How can anyone sit through a length of a film, especially a European one, and not have a cigarette?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VzSiilYSKs

What movie was it? There’s a good chance I can find it.

If you’re in Reddit, there’s also a subreddit dedicated specifically to this kind of thing (requests for stuff that is no longer available) called /r/DHExchange

How about a non-vhs rip of Einstein's brain?

I did some searching. I assume you mean “Relics: Einstein's Brain (1994)”? If so, it doesn’t look like it was ever released on anything but VHS, so I only found a TV recording and a VHS recording.

>> How do you join private trackers from scratch?

https://old.reddit.com/r/trackers/wiki/how_to_get_started

Generally a lot of them you can get an invite from someone on Reddit or discord. A lot also open up for a week or so allowing people to register every year or whenever a major tracker goes down so the refuges can join. you can check places like Reddit /r/opensignups.

A lot of mainstream stuff is ripped already, the “ratio” on some is more if you download a torrent, they want you to seed it for x amount of time or seed it back x amount to the community. I don’t know of any that expect you to be ripping and uploading that way, it’s recommended but a lot have groups for mainstream content.

There are a few “elitist” private trackers that require “interviews” and stuff, but don’t let that scare you off 99% of them are all just grab and invite or sign up and seed back to community for the week or so minimum (preferably longer) and your good to go!

Regarding seed ratio, generally by perma seeding. Many private sites either use seed time requirements instead of ratio or offer bonus points for seed time which can be exchanged for ratio. But also as new editions and formats are released, the library has a bit more turnaround than your music sites of yesteryear.

> ~everything under the sun is already ripped

But good luck to see a live seed. I have a torrent from ~2010 which is stuck at 2%, so some seed did come online some years ago I was able to leech those meager bits from them - but not ever since.

Same for my own torrent on TPB from 2008, i tried to dload it in 2015 and wasn't sucessful in it despite it was 1st one for some years for that particular title.

Don't give up hope, though. I've had torrents complete after a few years. I've long lost anything from 2010, though.

Try other protocols/services (listed in other comments in the thread) or maybe offer a bounty if it's something you can't buy.

I had one finish after 2 years recently. Someone in China came online and completed the last few MB.

I've got three open right now for ebooks which I don't think will ever finish. (one is 3.5TB)

I commented somewhere else already, but you can search directly from qBittorrent. Search by title, then filter by "Remux" or sort by size. Keep in mind tho that a blu-ray release must exist in the first place, and that some 4k blu-rays are just not very good to begin with (upscaling and what not).

rutracker.org is pretty good and is still going strong despite its age.

Are you sure what you're looking for isn't on TPB as well? Just lower down the list.

I torrent TPB because it's what people know. I don't care for private trackers, I just want to support the common torrenters.

For any query, just look at the file sizes (or sort by file size if the view allows you). Then you can see that there just aren’t many movie torrents on TPB larger than single-digit GB. A Blu-Ray remux will be minimum 14GB, and often much larger.

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