Topic: The Movie Thread

@GirlVersusGame Most of the people asking me don't really care about owning media themselves, but they do labour under the misconception that high quality streaming is just as good as physical. Quality seems to be lowest on the list of priorities for pirates as well, file-size seemingly being king. At least it was back when I got most of my tv shows that way. Difficult to find anything above 720p and even those would be heavily compressed. And this was maybe only 10-15 years ago, when ample HD space and high speed internet were readily available and fairly cheap most places. Don't know how it is these days, but would expect 4K being rare as unicorns and insanely compressed if they even exist.

@FuriousMachine I think it is one of those strange effects of 'if you don't know you don't notice as much' but since moving back to physical something has to be very engaging to not drift and notice bitrate issues and artifacts, loss of image data etc. I think watching with people slightly reduces the noticing effect, too, as you are kind of instinctively more forgiving of the content somehow. There is probably some kind of interesting chemical reasoning behind that though, but it doesn't change the fact that image data is lost, just how much you actively notice.

I think my main realisation came with the GoT 4k stream vs a standard Blu Ray discs. There is a boat sailing on dark seas, and the stream version was just a mess of pixels getting confused and I was like... 'oh, damn! that... that looks really quite sh**' 😅 and since then it is pretty obvious when backgrounds, shadows, dark scenes are just completely lost in the presentation of the image data.

That said, I recently enjoyed the latest Knives Out on Netflix 🙃

@FuriousMachine The kind of of piracy quality you are looking for does exists off the surface web, less peer 2 peer but I wouldn't advise dabbling on there unless you have 'tour guides' or are running on virtual machines and even then it's not worth it. With most of the release|groups it's about getting it out there first so quality takes a knock, it's a kind of race/game for a lot of people who do it. From the old 700mb YF (not completing the name) to the current 2GB (TX) Right now there are about fifteen S-tier (their term) groups who compete in those rooms for that top spot. It's about the feedback from the DL's the 'you guys r0ck!' so it's half a game and half a service.

You are looking more for something like this (no links, not breaking any rules, it's an example of file data)

Format : Matroska
Format version : Version 4
File size : 23.1 GiB
Duration : 1 h 38 min
Overall bit rate mode : Variable
Overall bit rate : 33.6 Mb/s
Frame rate : 23.976 FPS
Title : ----------------------------------
Encoded date : 2025-12-16 08:44:20 UTC

or you see

Modalità frame rate : Costante
Frequenza fotogrammi : 23,976 (24000/1001) fps
Spazio colore : YUV
Sottocampionamento croma : 4:2:0 (Type 2)
Profondità bit : 10 bit
Bit/(pixel*frame) : 0.304
Timecode primo fotogramma : 00:00:00:00
Dimensione traccia : 72,6 GiB (95%)

That's 4K Ultra HD. It's all there but groups don't push it onto the surface web because peer 2 peer surface web users want fast content, they don't want to download an 80GB movie. Piracy has improved but it's moved elsewhere. Like everything you can get anything if you know where to look, should you? Well I don't support piracy because I have the resources to do what's right but a lot of people can't afford to even have Netflix so I understand it.

The premium groups on the DeepWeb don't charge, they believe in free media for those who can't afford it and as we've talked about with books before I do believe knowledge should be free, I'd never pirate a video-game. I look at North Korea as an example, when I was there they had no real media only smuggled in USB content, it's a tough argument to make. I've seen it from both sides and technically I'm living it too, but yes everything exists in certain places.