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Not to go off on a complete tangent, but...

>... like the infamous Duff Beer joke being out of frame in The Simpsons.

My collection of The Simpsons, seasons 1-13, are all TV rips from waaaaayyyyy back in the 00's. Sure, it's not super high-quality, but at least they don't look like the ugly remasters (on some of the ones I've tried watching on Disney+, they look like someone's drawn over the old cells), the aspect ratio is the original so nothing's missing and, as a personal bonus, they've got the old Q13 logo in the bottom (I grew up in western WA). They still look great on my newer TV.

Edit: Oh, and the Michael Jackson episode never suddenly disappeared from my library.

Are you trying to listen in Dolby surround on a stereo setup? Disney+ defaults to surround sound and you’ll lose some audio channels if your speakers are stereo

A recent experience I had was :

1. buy movie on iTunes 2. have kids that can't do long distance drives 3. obtain dvd players for car 4. realized I can't play films that I "bought" on DVD players

It feels like the "Buy" button on iTunes/Apple TV is misleading, and should be renamed to "License to watch on Apple devices". Obvious in hindsight, but this type of DRM severely restricts use cases.

On missing audio: usually I notice this when I watch with subtitles at night and then end up rewatching during the day with audio at much higher volume… And the thing that is said to be said is just… Not there?

This is the first year I have cancelled all my subs. Used to be a TPB regular around the time it took off. Years later I tried to go legit and have had subs with all the major streamers (netflix, disney, amazon etc) But the way you get squeezed year on year for what was standard before e.g. 4K or no ads to be gradually offered worse terms and degraded output quality just bites after a while. I can't justify spending €20-30 per month on what isn't the best quality available for the content on offer.

I will add to the list that for some weird reason in my country original language is not always available for all movies, and the subtitle experience in genenal is lacking.

> But you'd have no idea because they somehow completely deleted the neighbour's dialogue from the audio

This sounds pretty unlikely. It's more likely that there's an issue with your surround system, and that audio "should" be coming from your rear speakers but for some reason it's not.

Disney+ is truly unmitigated dogshit. It constantly chokes and stutters, seems to cause my NVIDIA Sheild to peg its CPU and/or page to disk, or something, to the point where it becomes unresponsive for multiple seconds at a time. I genuinely cannot understand how you could so utterly bungle software that's been a solved problem for over a decade.

> Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata

A friend once pointed that out. He pays a lot and gets low quality. That was what changed his mind. That was also almost twenty years ago.

Most people changed. US corporations trying to raid people in foreign countries is, in my opinion, no longer acceptable at all. The swedish government should be ashamed for acting as US proxies here (nowadays with Trump this is more clear, but even 20 years ago or 25 years ago, it should have been a no-brainer).

> Most recent example - I was watching Malcolm in the Middle on Disney+ with my girlfriend, and we found that there are entire audio tracks missing in multiple episodes.

The licenses for the song tracks have also expired; so they removed them too. The main noticeable difference is being the intro sequence originally sung by There Might be Giants which has been replaced with a less-impressive cover. Ruins the vibe.

Why can't these tracks just forever live with the series? I went and bought the DVD box-set just because of such. A £2 purchase that I than ripped to my NAS. I've not watched the latest remake because I don't want to ruin the original vibe of such a great show. Real acting, real filming; the last of it's kind.

The software industry mostly gave up when they saw it wasn't working.

Even the music industry (of all of them!) mostly gave up.

Only Hollywood and the wider film/TV industry is so stubborn.

They're organizations run by people who may or may not have something that could be described as narcissistic personality disorder.

It's not particularly strange; the rationale for organizations like Microsoft and OpenAI is to be immune to any and all rules that could possibly foreseeably impact shareholder value. If you're not paying for their wares, you're impacting shareholder value. If you're asking them to actually license out content that they're training an AI on, you're impacting shareholder value.

Rules for thee, not for me, especially when it makes me - the special person who charitably graces society with my presence - a rich person.

I don't think I'd prefer this, tbh. I would want to see the whole topic information when choosing what exact torrent to download. Is it marked "verified" or "questionable"? If it's "questionable", is it for some arbitrary formality, or something like "the audio is desynced"? Are there many different dubs (because I'd rather prefer not to have them, as they're bloating the files?)...

> 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.

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.

This has been my go-to for discovering new things to watch for 15 years. If something doesn't show up in the top-100 list, I'm generally unaware of it.

Paradoxically, it's also a good example of the kind of soft power the US still has: we're all watching their movies.

Yes! thank fuck!

In non free countries it wont show up since the ISP will block the domain (eg. Oz). Free countries show it …

It's been thepiratebay.org for ages now (or so I heard, not that I'd ever go there ever, of course).

agreed. the walls are closing in so skills need to remain sharp.

I've never not found something that has been publicly released on it. Though, I don't typically stray too far from the mainstream path for the media I'm looking for.

I can absolutely find new stuff on there. It took Project Hail Mary a little while to get on there, presumably because it was a cinema release only for quite a while but a good quality version popped up after a couple of weeks, and a bad quality "guy holding a camcorder in the cinema" version showed up after about 1 week, IIRC

/top/48hall seems pretty fresh and healthy. What do you mean by stagnant?

Torrenting is alive and well… for recent releases and new stuff. All the old stuff is pretty hard to find now. When demonoid was around you could find just about everything. The worst part is for a lot of it there isn’t a legal way to get them either.

> on newer (public) sites

Example of said sites?

I use Stremio with pirate bay torrents. There literally isn’t anything that came out and isn’t on there.

References for this claim?