this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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It's a trade off. "Free services" typically require more leg work and can come with legal or security risks. I used to have a great XBMC & torrenting setup years ago. I spent significant time customizing it and various plugins, extending scripts etc. I had fun, and took necessary precautions. Millions wouldn't. Some are happy to pay €9/month to another evil corp for convenience (where it works for them).
Your setup is (was?) awesome but it's not necessary these days. An online search for free media streaming sites and an ad-blocker (but of course) brings up sites with at least the same polish as Netflix (the only site i have experience with) and full 1080p. When i briefly used my sister's Disney+ and my in-laws' prime, it was noticeably worse than my favorite bookmarked free streaming sites, not to mention i needn't wonder if the service owns all the seasons of the show i wish to see
agree with that
I agree that there are many great free streaming sites out there, with 1080p and good quality.
But quality is still an advantage of paid services (or acquirung the larger files in other ways). Streaming with higher bitrate costs way more bandwidth (= money) while being marginally better.
It's noticeable though, if you have a good, large enough display. Especially darker scenes suffer from low bitrate. On my phone I don't notice it at all.
That's even true for high bitrate. E.g. I've even compared a Reacher WEB-DL to BluRay remux, and the latter was noticeably better — not that it's worth the additional storage usage.
Resolution doesn't mean much, those sites you are referring to use extremely low bitrate encodes that look terrible. Yes, streaming services (in my experience Netflix is the main offender) can sometimes deliver dogshit quality streams too due to their adaptive bit rates, but the ceiling is way higher than those sites that pull from DDL file hosters. If you are consistently suffering from very low quality paid streams then you likely have some kind of network issue affecting the adaptive bitrate.