So tonight I watched a 1080p pirated copy of Spiderman: Far From Home. And I gotta say, it was kinda crap. The sound would randomly cut out, and the compression was absolute ass (it was the perfect artifact to show people when explaining “not all 1080p’s are created equal”, especially when they’re fighting the water elemental)
I really do think that DRM has won folks. We have seen the 4K HDR future, and what we find on torrent sites is the same aXXo “encoded to be burned to a CD-R” bullshit I used to download as a college student. We aren’t getting 4K, we’re not even really getting 1080p. Whatever the DRM people are doing, they have succeeded in creating a gulf in quality between what you get on a streaming service, and what you get via torrents.
Meanwhile the anime fansub encoders are taking Blu-Rays upscaled with crappy linear scalers, using fancy deconvolution math to restore the original resolution material, and encoding the result. You get a smaller file, and if played on a player with decent upscaling (i.e. mpv, which is what everyone uses these days), better quality than the original Blu-Ray. There's also often other processing involved, like de-banding filters to remove banding caused by low bit depth processing in the original material, deinterlacing/inverse telecine, color correction, etc.
It all depends on how much effort the people involved put into it.
I’ve had the opposite experience: If you have a decent connection (1gbps), you can torrent the 50GB Blu-ray in 7 minutes instead of watching the 0.5GB stream on Netflix. The difference in bitrate/quality is massive during fast action sequences where the Netflix version splits into 100 puzzle pieces made of DCT blocks that don’t quite fit together.
Oh and Netflix is one of the better sites when it comes to bitrate. Other streams are full of artifacts even when the camera is panning over a static scene.
Strange I have the exact opposite experience. All of the content I get from TPB and other sites is often much higher quality than what I seem to get when I go "legit" on Netflix and such. I rarely use Netflix now because I really enjoy pressing the right arrow to skip past parts of content I don't find interesting (b-roll, fades, filler content, etc.) and Netflix does a pretty poor job of this whereas VLC just works.
There are usually several copies of a varied quality to choose from based on ones needs on a decent tracker. Of course you can't expect stellar quality 2h movie fit into <1 GB, look for reasonable file sizes 5+ GB) to avoid ultracompressed versions with garbage sound. Making conclusions on a single sample is not very wise.
There are certainly groups who sacrifice quality to minimize file size. Sounds like you downloaded a file from one of those. There are people out there who care so much about quality they will splice different sources together because some specific section is better in some obscure release for some reason. You also have blu-ray remuxes if you want the exact original.
Netflix manages to generate compression artifacts in 90% black frames, to say nothing of highly dynamic footage. Satellite TV is even worse, it actually hurts to watch. Makes me feel like an idiot for actually paying for this.
Movies that are theater-only often have very poor copies upfront. Camcorder-in-the-theater sort of poor. The site I use tells folks when it is in cam, and I wait until there are HD versions.
I suggest the same if you want some quality. Streaming pirated stuff takes patience - if you really want to watch things early, with good quality, I'd suggest theaters if those are available to you right now (COVID limits this).
If you are linux user you cannot consume legal content (that you paid for) in high quality, even when you are paying for it, iirc Prime gives you 720p and Netflix 1080p.
> Some of the codecs distributed with VLC are patented and require you to pay royalties to their licensors. These are mostly the MPEG style codecs.
> With many products the producer pays the license body (in this case MPEG LA) so the user (commercial or personal) does not have to take care of this. VLC (and ffmpeg and libmpeg2 – which it uses in most of these cases) cannot do this because they are Free and Open Source implementations of these codecs. The software is not sold, and therefore the end-user becomes responsible for complying with the licensing and royalty requirements. You will need to contact the licensor on how to comply with these licenses.
> This goes for playing a DVD with VLC for your personal enjoyment ($2.50 one time payment to MPEG LA) as well as for using VLC for streaming a live event in MPEG-4 over the Internet.
And the main reason that they haven't been bothered about making software that allows this :
Even public trackers have 4K HDR / Dolby Vision / Dolby Atmos content, which is more than you get for example from Netflix (outside of their own catalog.)
What!? You have obviously nicked a trash release from somewhere shady; there definitely exist pirate releases that are arguably better in quality than any modern streaming service. Even after having accounts in both PrimeVideo and Netflix I often prefer to download and watch from PSArips for the sheer quality (4k with 10bit audio).
You can get 4K HDR blurary rips on torrent. I also just checked for the expanse, and there is a 4K HDR version (presumably ripped from a streaming service) on the torrent site I'm frequenting. I don't think the claimed gap in quality exists.
The future is kids using Unreal Engine (or similar) and making a high definition "retelling" of the new Spiderman movie hours after its release, injecting their own humor and style into the process.
Just as kids now watch other people playing games, they'll soon watch other people acting out movies. Kids make Star Wars at home. Kids make Star Wars meets Godzilla at home. The possibilities are endless, and Hollywood won't be able to keep up.
Sometimes I think it's the copyright holding companies spamming downloaders with these crappy versions to gaslight them into thinking the official versions are always better.
Maybe for a high visual movie like spiderman but there are many movies that are fine watching in a lower quality. Also it just depends on the torrent that is available. I have seen screeners that were of high quality, mind you a couple scenes were missing the special effects but hardly took away from the video imo.
I really do think that DRM has won folks. We have seen the 4K HDR future, and what we find on torrent sites is the same aXXo “encoded to be burned to a CD-R” bullshit I used to download as a college student. We aren’t getting 4K, we’re not even really getting 1080p. Whatever the DRM people are doing, they have succeeded in creating a gulf in quality between what you get on a streaming service, and what you get via torrents.