How convenient!

Arrr, me hearty! Batten down the hatches and prepare to set sail, ye scallywags!

You can get it for free in your local public library.
- If you have a DVD/BlueRay player that is

No, you can't. It's $14.99 and in a few years you're going to lose access to it. Fuck you. Give us money.
...fuck you.
- Or the youtube route. You van buy the movie in sd or hd, but also, if you don't watch it on our cancer app on your phone, it's like 480p, sorry not sorry

I think we should be able to co-op a digital library... Say, the Internet archive seems to be just that!
Why is it under constant attack? Oh yeah, greed.
Why aren't we able to digitally host a communal library where each owner can "buy in" access by contributing a library?
Like a digital replication of each piece of physical media owned by a person?
- You mean as in everyone who owns a book could digitize it and contribute it to the library to be lent out one at a time?
  Technically that's possible, but the real argument being made by rightsholders (such as the publishers suing the Internet Archive) is that they don't have the right to digitize it and lend it out, because that would be them replicating the work, and thus not just lending out the same copy, even if it's identical in practice in terms of how many people can access it, and what its content is.
  Under current copyright law, you're going to be sued into oblivion if you try that.
  Though to be fair, the main case being made in court that really holds water is that the Internet Archive lent out unlimited copies of digitized copyrighted works during the pandemic when many libraries where physically shut down and unable to offer books. Practically speaking, they did the morally correct thing by providing access to materials that would otherwise have been available, barring the extreme circumstances of the pandemic, but since the publishers thought they deserved to profit from that by selling every student who needed reading material in closed libraries a fresh copy of the book for $20, the Archive is now facing legal consequences, because that's technically still illegal.
  However, if you want a communal library, you kind of get that with things like Little Free Libraries, where you can contribute any book, and books regularly cycle through the neighborhood over time, groups like BuyNothing, where you can very easily have people request and hand off things they no longer want themselves, including books, and you can always technically just start a local group that gets books and lends them like a traditional library would, although some libraries just accept donations of your used books and can lend them out without any additional administrative effort or separate entity set up in your community. That depends on your local library though, if you have one at all.
  
  I've been out of school since 2017 so I don't know for sure, did publisher really drop textbook prices to around $20 during the pandemic? None of the books I needed to buy were under $100.

Yo ho! Yo ho!

Everyone wants to run a subscription service, until they have everyone on a subscription. Then instead of celebrating that they won capitalism, they go and start with the exclusive extra addons and upgrades. Because unfortunately no company in the history of companies has ever said that's it, we're making enough money, let's relax.
- imo there have been a plenty of those, they just don't go on to become (in)famous
- actually, plenty of companies say exactly that.
  The thing is, they're small privately owned companies. not giant corporations.
  
  do you have any examples worth checking out?
  
  So definitely no streaming services then, those are all big corpos and they should burn.

Yarrtt.

There was a time when almost everything was on Netflix. As a consumer, having all my content in one place for $10/mo is awesome, but according to capitalism, it is a problem that needed to be fixed.
- according to capitalism, it is a problem that needed to be fixed.
  I mean one service having a monopoly might not be that great. Good thing about capitalism could be that if the service got shit, there'd be competing alternatives. Doesn't work out that way often.
  
  Somehow that's kind of how it's worked out for music streaming, the music industry is fucked in many other ways but you can choose any of the services and you'll have more or less access to everything, with some small differences.
- The crazy thing is loads of people stopped pirating and paid for a streaming service that was affordable, worked, met thier needs.
  Now it's all splintered with corporations wanting a piece of the pie.
  
  It won't stop until the system reaches its ultimate form and each movie has its own subscription service.
  
  Back to piracy, it is, then. Yarrr! ☠️
  
  I’m about to cancel everything and buy a good vpn service.
- The part that's wildest to me is that nowadays with all the ways services are trying extract more value from their users (ads, increasing rates, reducing library size, restricting access to features, etc ) plus the DRM, the media consumption experience of just having the media files is so much better than the experience one can have through most of the streaming services or even DVDs with all of the unstoppable prerolls
  Whether you rip your own DVDs (legally murky) or you're just watching a bunch of public domain silent films, or pirating, it's really hard to beat just having the .mkv and opening it in your player of choice.
  About the only way to compete with that is one decent service with good quality, no ads, an extremely wide collection and minimally invasive DRM
  
  Every time I head to the second-hand store I pick up a couple new CDs and DVDs. It's great! I'm paying max $3.99 apiece and I'll own them forever.
- Movies were on Netflix, TV shows were on Hulu. It was great.
  Once Netflix started on their whole “half of all our offerings are going to be original content” is when it began to go downhill. Literally no one (aside from executives) was sitting around going “man, I can’t wait until Netflix starts making shows and movies!” They were a service. That’s all they ever needed to be.
  
  I think they were forced into it when the other companies decided they could make some of that sweet netflix money, so they stopped licensing to netflix and built their own services. Netflix had no choice but to build their own content.
  
  Idk I know I was pretty excited for Netflix's early original content because the proposition was like "HBO, but on the internet and you can watch it any time" and they were doing big budget stuff. Things only went south when they didn't keep up the HBO level quality and ruined their reputation to the point where I see "Netflix original" and immediately think "garbage TV"
- It really did hurt my ressources for pirating though. After not downloading anything for years, finding the right sites and proxies again was hard.
  
  Except that the technology has improved and now Sonarr and radarr take all effort out of the equation.

The Last Of Us season 2 being on a different, new subscription service is very much the last straw.
- They are both on Max for me. Is this a regional issue?
- Wait until you want to watch Pokemon: https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-episodes-movies
- I thought it was weird when I saw a Disney + billboard with The Last of Us. I just sail the high seas but I remember the HBO intro on that shows season 1. For people of pay for these services its really shitty to have a show they like jump to another provider.

- Avast, me hearties!

That's only if it's an older movie. The latest Captain America is available to rent for $25, or to buy for $30.
Or you can do what I did, and sail the high seas for it.
- Yeah, I kind of laughed at that. I wouldnt be surpised if even older movies cost a bit more now. But even renting a new movie is way too expensive now.

🏴‍☠️
- 🏴‍☠️
- 🏴‍☠️

I use an Emby/Jellyfin stream. There's nothing I don't have.
- You should start your own subscription service 😜
  
  They are out there and of varying quality. If only db0 had a good place to source, but c/piracy is very anti paid piracy (oxymoron I know) but sometimes convenience is worth a few $$ for non 1337 haxx0rz in the real world

Or pirate for 0€.
- How much is that in usd
  
  $32
- arrr!
- I do love piracy and I do do it sometimes. But sometimes I don't want to spend 20 minutes finding a torrent and then another 30 minutes to an hour waiting for it to download.
  My main issue with it is that I have to pre-plan if I want to watch anything through that method.
  
  That's what automation is for.
  Whenever I come across an interesting movie/show; I open a webpage that I host, search for a title (results from imdb) and click 'add+search'.
  ~15min later, it's available for me, my friends, and my family to watch on my own private streaming service. (for such reliably quick downloads, I recommend usenet over torrents)
  Sonarr, Radarr, Emby/Jellyfin
  Other users besides me can even request content via Ombi.
  
  When I wanna watch a movie, I have it in less than two minutes. But I’m blessed with gigabit, and I’m on some private trackers.
  
  You don't have to download anything, there are amazing streaming sites: https://fmhy.net/videopiracyguide
  
  Use Usenet instead, way faster downloads. Also lots of clients can stream torrents, so as long the torrent its being seeded well enough you can watch right away.
  Worst case just go to one of the 100s of sites with free streams of basically every popular show and movie.
  
  I have my number of different sites, without torrents, that are overall faster to use, with uBlock. No login, no bullshit design, no pop ups advertising new "features".
  And torrents don't need to be predownloaded, you can stream them.
  
  Where are you looking for torrents, and how bad is your internet? It usually takes me about a minute to find a torrent, and downloads are rarely longer than 15
  
  Kodi and realdebrid solves that problem for me.
  
  iflix, fmovies, sudo flix are all streaming alternatives. Free. No signups required.
  
  With sonarr radarr and trakt you just find a list someone makes of upcoming movies and shows and then maintainarr to auto delete stuff after a certain period. No more pre-planning or searching it's always just automated new content ready to go when you turn on your tv
  
  himovies.to
  Often has cam videos too, which are recorded from theaters before being released outside. The quality is not necessarily as bad as it sounds.
  For the case of better quality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telesync
  While the other end of the spectrum may be a shaky smartphone footage.
  
  Psssst use nzb
- If everyone did that, then they might start cracking down.
  At the very least, though, this person should be service hopping instead of paying for 13.
  
  No, the last time everyone did that Netflix was created, which has nearly killed the piracy for most people.
  We're just going back to the basics.
  
  mmm cracking how? turning off the internet?

Or I can keep it for 0.

Or even better, "even though you pay for the ad free subscription, this video is only available with ads".

- The one live action that is amazing is telling us all that it's good to be a pirate.
  
  What is this from?

I pay for a VPN once a year and then everything is free. Ahoy mateys!

And it’s never anything in demand either. It’s always some random movie you came across on Wikipedia when you were scrolling through some actor’s filmography, and a minor interest was sparked. These companies create no value and hoard wealth and power. The whole copyright regime is tyrannical.
- 99% of these problems would be solved if copyright lasted a reasonable amount of time. IMO copyright should last for 50 years from the date of publication or the life of the original creator, whichever is longer. That way the author has control over their work during their own lifetime, and like an author's husband won't just be screwed if his wife published a blockbuster book and then dies soon after, but we don't have Disney milking shit from the 1920s for a hundred years. It's absurd to me that I have to pay Amazon $4 to watch Citizen Kane, a movie that came out before my grandparents were born, and that's the only legal way to watch it. Literally nobody who was involved in making that movie is still alive to benefit from it, it's only people making money from doing literally nothing.
- Or it's a series of movies, and one of the earlier movies is missing.

DVDs are dirt cheap, plentiful as fuck, don't have DRM bullshit to have to deal with, last for decades when stored properly, and still look pretty damn good with deinterlacing. Plus, they don't run any of the risks associated with piracy. Am I allowed to copy my DVDs onto my hard drive? That may be a legal gray area. But can they see that I copied my DVDs to my hard drive? Of course not. And I'm not making my ISOs and MKVs available to the world for download.
Spend 4 bucks on a used DVD. Give her the ol'
dd if=sr0 of=~/Videos/Movies/Title.iso
And keep the disc for basically forever. Copy it again if something happens to your file. EZPZ. Plus, it's cool to own a physical thing imo.
One last thing: DVDs come with subtitles. I have a hard time understanding spoken words. I like to read my movies as I watch them. Makes it easier to know what's going on without cranking the volume to 11. Speaking of which, the menu for the Spinal Tap DVD is excellent.
- I believe DVDs do have DRM actually but it has been broken so long ago as to be a non-issue
- Plus they have extras which if you really like a movie could be a lot of fun
  
  I miss director's commentary tracks sometimes.
- even DVDs have ads tho
  
  You can rip just the part that's the movie. Most DVDs have the ads before the menu, so on the disk it's a separate file. There are probably better alternatives, but I use a program called MakeMKV that lets you open a disk and only save the videos you're interested in. IIRC there's a free version that lets you rip DVDs and a paid version that also does BluRays (assuming you have an optical drive that can read them,of course). I bought it probably about a decade ago and was still able to recently activate a new copy using my old activation code.
  
  If you burn your own they don't

Streaming becoming cable 2.0 is one of the biggest disappointments in the entertainment industry.
- Streaming is still better for now. Wait until you can only have bundled services with mandatory ads with a minimum year long commitment.
  
  Agreed. Also, the camera detects when we close our eyes or mute the audio and pauses the ads when we disengage from them.

.arr me matey

you guys remember this old goldie?
- lol limewire
- Y'arrr ye old salt!

So it's cable all over again

Enshitification

Was showing the inlaws the bingie skin i'd been setting up...they explicitly said this subscription shit was becoming unmanageable and they were seriously considering setting sail

TPB has almost everything
- At first I was like "Trailer Park Boys is great but it doesn't have almost everything" but then I got it. It's been a while since I've used torrents

Capitalism never learns. I was off of pirating for over a decade because things were actually somewhat affordable and you didn't have to jump through hoops to access everything. I'm right back in it, pirating everything, fuck these business school graduate scumbags.

Right back to cable packages and pay-per-view or on-demand movie rentals.
Tons of paid video service, most of it not worth watching, pay extra again to watch what you do want to watch. Oh, here’s a couple ads, too.
Arr…

I'm relatively happy with the higher quality older television shows. I don't really see a need to watch the latest stuff.
- Currently marathoning Alien Nation. Much better than whatever the fuck that last season of Mythic quest was.
  
  Wow I barely remember that show as a kid. I think it actually helped my dad with his bigotry and interracial marriages though.

DOGMA has entered the chat

Since Xmas I've tried to watch The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Demolition Man. And The Long Kiss Goodnight.
The last 2 were available to rent for 3.99. And only 2 of the Freddy movies were available at all.
- Cough cough https://archive.org/details/a_nightmare_on_elm_street cough
  
  o7

Literally this, I watch the rookie with my friends. Everything but the last season is on netflix. Want to watch the last season? Good luck!

Stremio/Kodi are your friends
- People should seed their torrents tho...
  
  Ya true. Although, I can't say I've ever had any difficulty finding a decent quality stream on either platform unless it's something that is still at the cinema.

Take a turn around the capstan, heave a pawl...

so like, don't get the streaming services? the only ones i respect are Dropout and maybe Crunchyroll
- It's all about what you watch, crunchy roll would be a waste for me, but Disney plus and nextflix are used in my house by everyone constantly
- I use pirate sites over Crunchyroll not because I don't want to watch ads/pay, but mostly because I like the pirate sites better. I just don't really like Crunchyroll's website. Aniwave. to was the greatest imo until it got shut down :(
  And of course the pirate sites have much more variety, Crunchyroll doesn't have everything, but you can bet money that pirate sites will have all 4 seasons of show X, plus the summary season where they recap, plus the chibi side show, plus the 2 anime movies.
- Dropout and Nebula are both worth the price in my opinion.