> For now, the site remains online, twenty years after Hollywood thought it had seen the last of it. And whoever is in charge today, will likely do everything possible to keep it that way.
I'm vaguely aware that other people than the original group are running it now.
Also, I don't torrent much, but it seems pretty stagnant and dead. It's been occasionally useful to me to find older stuff that doesn't seem to be well represented on newer (public) sites.
<3 Still a great public tracker. We absolutely need people who will run sites like this and crack and bypass stiff like Denuvo and so on. We really do need to keep these sort of skills, tools, and communities alive to be able to resist digital oppression and techno-fascists. Sounds corny as hell but it's true imo.
When it comes to films, I torrent exclusively remuxes or whole Blu-Ray images. TPB hasn't been relevant for me for the last 15 years or more, since 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.
They are not popular because with meager 20 TB drive, you can either have entire movie collection of all movies you actually like (and then some more), and visit again, or you can have 20x less content without much visible gain of quality (if you see it its either rare too complex scene, bad reencode or you are simply sitting too close to TV). Same goes for audio, even 2GB rips have good 5.1 or 7.1 tracks.
Its not hard to decide what to prefer. Even with 1GB/s optic fiber I just couldn't be bothered to download 20-40x larger files and then struggle to see any difference in 4k on 75" screen.
And lets be honest - apart from poor folks with OCD or similar trait, after 1 minute of watching I couldn't care less about audiovisual quality, heck I enjoy even 720p rip if its the only thing available.
That depends on how many movies you watch. I could probably fit every movie I've ever seen (and then some more), as bluray remux if available at that quality and DVD remux if not, into 20TB.
So not to hijack this thread or anything but there's one good metric (if nothing else... the fact FB overwrote your email while Google seems to believe in data liberation, and fewer breaches) to tell apart the difference between those two companies
Google had been asked to remove Pirate Bay in results. They didn't. On Google, and I don't really know how it changed over the years, but there'd be a notice about links removed due to DMCA, if it came to that, basically. (Okay, Youtube, which they own, has always been a bit aggressive, and that isn't nothing)
Facebook? Facebook wouldn't let you SEND a link to PB in private messages. It still deletes your post now if you link Anna's Archive. This after apparently heavily scraping LibGen
I don't love Google for a lot of reasons but I damn well feel better using it compared to Mr. "Dumb Fucks"
The pirate bay raid is a good example of the kind of soft power the US has lost with their recent behavior. Hard to imagine Stockholm police being as receptive nowadays.
edit: I'm very sorry for making a relevant comment that extrapolate on the content of the shared article.
Every once in a while I'll try to watch something through the Intended Method™ and it always proves itself to be a worse experience.
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. Usually some kind of ADR, like someone talking off camera. There's an episode where Reese rents an apartment and there's a recurring bit of him talking to his depressed neighbour through the wall. But you'd have no idea because they somehow completely deleted the neighbour's dialogue from the audio, so it's just Reese having a one-sided conversation with a wall. We saw multiple episodes where something like this happened, and when I looked online there were reports of it dating back years.
Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata, etc. No one providing official routes to this media seems to care. You have AI-upscaled "4k" movies where the actors don't even look like themselves and there are hallucinated artifacts and things that aren't there. Images cropped to widescreen, like the infamous Duff Beer joke being out of frame in The Simpsons. TV series with edits or entire episodes removed because they were deemed too offensive. Movies and shows randomly appearing and disappearing so you have to endlessly manage subscriptions and switch between different apps with better or worse players just to watch a single series. Just a nightmare.
For a while I was really happy because it sounded like the owners of the Intended Method™ had finally realized how much damage to their bottom line their terrible UX was having, so I fondly remembered TPB but moved over to the official platforms... then we started getting some hulu exclusives (not available in Canada) and the H(o)BOGo, and then a few more platform fragmentations... I have enough going on that I can't currently be bothered switching over to TPB but I ended up culling my streaming down to just Dropout, Nebula, severely modified Youtube and some patreons I care about.
I am happy to speak with my wallet and tell the services to get lost and I'd be heading back to TPB if I were still in a phase of my life where discussing the latest Battlestar Galactica, Lost or Game of Thrones was a central focus of my socialization - as it is though, the cost to follow the Intended Method™ is simply too expensive in money, discovery time, and platform bugs for me to give a damn.
Maybe they'll learn their lesson again and sanity will reign - but the current media pricing is too expensive (in a myriad of ways) for the value it's providing.
> Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata, etc.
The thing with free is you will tend to be less demanding & most certainly more forgiving even if not less resentful.
One reason why finding market fit for products built for free consumers is harder than for paid. The ones paying you will want their problems solved pronto, and if you're diligent enough, you'll end up building a product that solves those same "hair on the fire" problems for many others with hopefully deeper pockets.
>and we found that there are entire audio tracks missing in multiple episodes
Personally for me the worst case of this is Scrubs. The soundtrack of the show is so incredibly crucial to its atmosphere. There's a scene with the Coral's Dreaming of You that they've replaced with some awful generic track in the streaming versions. That people see the show now and maybe don't even know it is just a crime.
Also fun, Google purchased movies over the years getting moved to Youtube and then seemingly losing all surround sound content and coming through as 2-channel only (Android TV).
Thing is, most people don't really care about this. They watch something in the evening maybe weekend and that is it. This will not change and these services are meant for the masses.
The Intended Method(tm) is an intentionally gimped feeding trough designed primarily to pacify uninquisitive minds and line Hollywood exec pockets. They have never ever been honest in their accounting or reasonable in their expectations, let alone charitable enough to let the art propagate amongst its consumers in the manner they see fit (without court interventions). So I don't see why we have to be honest in our consumption.
There is plenty of money to be made in secondary sources -- merchandising and so on. They can give up trying to lock down information that naturally wants to be free. But they won't, because greed.
One possible exception, do you consider youtube an "intended method"? (A legit question for those of us who remember what a legal gray area they were in, in the 2000s.) Because the convenience of youtube replaced downloading music torrents, for me at least (who don't really care much audio quality). I only wish they would let me hear the music when I turn my phone's screen off.
The whole "scene" is full of shitty re-encodes of video, with the audio or video spliced from another source. There's a whole cottage industry of squeezing content into smaller sizes.
It is easy enough to avoid those and make sure you get better encodes, if size is not at all a priority for you.
My main problem, even with the better encoders, is the lack of choice in audio tracks and subs when I'm pretty sure the source material had the ones I might want.
I used to pay for "all of them". Netflix, Apple TV, Disney+, HBO Max, Mubi, Prime Video and occasional rents on Youtube movies.
And I made myself believe that I'm doing it THE RIGHT WAY hence they will do good by me.
- price hikes
- shows moved between services or different seasons available on different services
- some movies are just NOWHERE
- sometimes there was no English language (YouTube movies in the none English speaking region like Germany - happened a lot)
So many times we would end up on a treasure hunt through the services to watch what we wanted, only to then end up just watching some Netflix vanilla stuff as we just give up.
I am all for doing the right thing, but my god, my, customer needs, are not on any priority lists.
Even worse, the MBAs at the top of the pile in Netflix and other streaming services refusing to license the music for TV series' they have bought out and geolocked.
This isn't just swapping like-for-like with stock music, it's a pervasive form of Stalinist Revisionism - with certains edits and scenes altered or completely removed when they relied on the track in question.
As a fastcompany article notes, "...streaming is also changing the way music works in new titles, with easier, safer, cheaper song choices being added to TV shows in lieu of anything interesting." The logical end-game being the relegation of musical backing in TV to AI generated muzak and genre 'sound-a-likes', like we've already seen in the lowest echelons of the advertisement and backing-track industry.
This (one of the) reasons why sites like TPB are hard to die. The sheer convenience of a simple torrent compared to some piece of shit proprietary DRM overpriced subscription has no comparison. Not to mention the abundant catalogue and the convenience of using whatever player you find convenient.
> TPB has become an institution that people just expected to be there. Noone willing to take the technology further. The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design. It never changed except for one thing – the ads. More and more ads was filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful they somehow ended up even worse.
> As a big fan of the KLF I once learned that it’s great to burn great things up. At least then you can quit while you’re on top. I think I left TPB just a little bit after that top, and not when it’s as shitty as it was when it was closed today. It feels good that it might have closed down forever, just a real shame the way it did that. A planned retirement would have given the community time and a way to kick off something new, something better, something faster, something more reliable and with no chance of corrupting itself. Something that had a soul and could retain it.
For some reason I thought the pirate bay was like fake/scam urls now. Is that or was that not the case? I thought I was remember the URL constantly changing and it was hard to keep up.
It's very strange to think about this in the current context. Anything P2P used to be the Anti Christ of the Software Industry. The lengths Microsoft and game vendors went to prevent copying is insane. Installing Windows as well as various Higher End software is a huge pain because of this.
On the other hand Microsoft is very much leading with OpenAI in vacuuming any content, stripping effectively copyright claims.
That being said, nowadays the only use case for me to use Pirate Bay is when I cannot get a movie elsewhere. I'd pay for it but it's not possible - because of copyright...
Recently wanted to watch Troy and could not find it for streaming anywhere, nor a pay-to-rent on the streaming platforms like youtube. You can "buy" it but as we've learned recently these companies don't really let you own a copy and reserve the right to remove your access in the future. So I just went ahead and pirated it.
It's not strange at all. It is all about power. At that time, power was obtained by opposing P2P and opposing piracy. Today power is obtained by piracy so they do piracy.
I think the site has been hosted by the police since them. They probably use it as a honeypot or something - except the site is so poorly managed that no one really comes :D
Yandex is the best search engine. Sites like Fmovies or moviesjoy include nearly everything. I couldn't find the Monty Python series, but Yandex's first results were ready to play it for me in seconds.
We need to raid those lobbyists. How much money did the
get from the USA?
So the real pirates was the swedish government. It's time
to completely change the whole government. Back in 2006
they thought they targeted only few individuals. I am sure
there are many more people who don't support what the
swedish government did. Did they ever apologize for serving
US corporations here? How much financial kickback did they
get there?
It's kind of cool but also kind of spooky: A legally targeted site just staying online for 20 years, not because of obscurity, but simply because it can't be taken down.
I'm happy making one-shot payments for most types of media.
But I want to start a new bittorrent tracker for individual movies or episodes for which the provider requires you to create a recurring subscription, to rip off such content unabashedly.
The hypocrisy of tech bros claiming to make well into the six figures being unwilling up pay a few dollars a month for dozens or hundreds of hours of entertainment while simultaneously expecting that everyone else should pay for the increasingly buggier software that pays their salaries....
Most of the problems many of you are complaining about with streamers are the result of your fellow programmers doing poor work. Consider the irony that many in this discussion won't pay for Disney+ because of the technical issues on the software side of things.
66 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 62.8 ms ] threadI'm vaguely aware that other people than the original group are running it now.
Also, I don't torrent much, but it seems pretty stagnant and dead. It's been occasionally useful to me to find older stuff that doesn't seem to be well represented on newer (public) sites.
Its not hard to decide what to prefer. Even with 1GB/s optic fiber I just couldn't be bothered to download 20-40x larger files and then struggle to see any difference in 4k on 75" screen.
And lets be honest - apart from poor folks with OCD or similar trait, after 1 minute of watching I couldn't care less about audiovisual quality, heck I enjoy even 720p rip if its the only thing available.
Google had been asked to remove Pirate Bay in results. They didn't. On Google, and I don't really know how it changed over the years, but there'd be a notice about links removed due to DMCA, if it came to that, basically. (Okay, Youtube, which they own, has always been a bit aggressive, and that isn't nothing)
Facebook? Facebook wouldn't let you SEND a link to PB in private messages. It still deletes your post now if you link Anna's Archive. This after apparently heavily scraping LibGen
I don't love Google for a lot of reasons but I damn well feel better using it compared to Mr. "Dumb Fucks"
edit: I'm very sorry for making a relevant comment that extrapolate on the content of the shared article.
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. Usually some kind of ADR, like someone talking off camera. There's an episode where Reese rents an apartment and there's a recurring bit of him talking to his depressed neighbour through the wall. But you'd have no idea because they somehow completely deleted the neighbour's dialogue from the audio, so it's just Reese having a one-sided conversation with a wall. We saw multiple episodes where something like this happened, and when I looked online there were reports of it dating back years.
Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata, etc. No one providing official routes to this media seems to care. You have AI-upscaled "4k" movies where the actors don't even look like themselves and there are hallucinated artifacts and things that aren't there. Images cropped to widescreen, like the infamous Duff Beer joke being out of frame in The Simpsons. TV series with edits or entire episodes removed because they were deemed too offensive. Movies and shows randomly appearing and disappearing so you have to endlessly manage subscriptions and switch between different apps with better or worse players just to watch a single series. Just a nightmare.
I am happy to speak with my wallet and tell the services to get lost and I'd be heading back to TPB if I were still in a phase of my life where discussing the latest Battlestar Galactica, Lost or Game of Thrones was a central focus of my socialization - as it is though, the cost to follow the Intended Method™ is simply too expensive in money, discovery time, and platform bugs for me to give a damn.
Maybe they'll learn their lesson again and sanity will reign - but the current media pricing is too expensive (in a myriad of ways) for the value it's providing.
The thing with free is you will tend to be less demanding & most certainly more forgiving even if not less resentful.
One reason why finding market fit for products built for free consumers is harder than for paid. The ones paying you will want their problems solved pronto, and if you're diligent enough, you'll end up building a product that solves those same "hair on the fire" problems for many others with hopefully deeper pockets.
I have always prefered downloading
Torrent meets my needs better than official methods.
I don't feel guilty about it because I still paid. Now, if only, I could have a better way to filter out the garbage from the gold.
Personally for me the worst case of this is Scrubs. The soundtrack of the show is so incredibly crucial to its atmosphere. There's a scene with the Coral's Dreaming of You that they've replaced with some awful generic track in the streaming versions. That people see the show now and maybe don't even know it is just a crime.
Many of the episodes on their dubbed versions were just awful or de-synced. It can continue like that for 3-4 episodes then suddenly fix itself.
Then when I watch in Japanese with subtitles, the subtitles can occasionally be missing on some scenes.
There is plenty of money to be made in secondary sources -- merchandising and so on. They can give up trying to lock down information that naturally wants to be free. But they won't, because greed.
The whole "scene" is full of shitty re-encodes of video, with the audio or video spliced from another source. There's a whole cottage industry of squeezing content into smaller sizes.
My main problem, even with the better encoders, is the lack of choice in audio tracks and subs when I'm pretty sure the source material had the ones I might want.
And I made myself believe that I'm doing it THE RIGHT WAY hence they will do good by me.
- price hikes - shows moved between services or different seasons available on different services - some movies are just NOWHERE - sometimes there was no English language (YouTube movies in the none English speaking region like Germany - happened a lot)
So many times we would end up on a treasure hunt through the services to watch what we wanted, only to then end up just watching some Netflix vanilla stuff as we just give up.
I am all for doing the right thing, but my god, my, customer needs, are not on any priority lists.
This isn't just swapping like-for-like with stock music, it's a pervasive form of Stalinist Revisionism - with certains edits and scenes altered or completely removed when they relied on the track in question.
As a fastcompany article notes, "...streaming is also changing the way music works in new titles, with easier, safer, cheaper song choices being added to TV shows in lieu of anything interesting." The logical end-game being the relegation of musical backing in TV to AI generated muzak and genre 'sound-a-likes', like we've already seen in the lowest echelons of the advertisement and backing-track industry.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91109690/why-streaming-platforms...
> TPB has become an institution that people just expected to be there. Noone willing to take the technology further. The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design. It never changed except for one thing – the ads. More and more ads was filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful they somehow ended up even worse.
> As a big fan of the KLF I once learned that it’s great to burn great things up. At least then you can quit while you’re on top. I think I left TPB just a little bit after that top, and not when it’s as shitty as it was when it was closed today. It feels good that it might have closed down forever, just a real shame the way it did that. A planned retirement would have given the community time and a way to kick off something new, something better, something faster, something more reliable and with no chance of corrupting itself. Something that had a soul and could retain it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160712155638/http://blog.broke...
On the other hand Microsoft is very much leading with OpenAI in vacuuming any content, stripping effectively copyright claims.
That being said, nowadays the only use case for me to use Pirate Bay is when I cannot get a movie elsewhere. I'd pay for it but it's not possible - because of copyright...
Entire generations of people have no idea something exists
So the real pirates was the swedish government. It's time to completely change the whole government. Back in 2006 they thought they targeted only few individuals. I am sure there are many more people who don't support what the swedish government did. Did they ever apologize for serving US corporations here? How much financial kickback did they get there?
Are our institutions this incapable?
I feel for the kids that are waking up to this enshitification, without a clue on how to sail.
But I want to start a new bittorrent tracker for individual movies or episodes for which the provider requires you to create a recurring subscription, to rip off such content unabashedly.
Most of the problems many of you are complaining about with streamers are the result of your fellow programmers doing poor work. Consider the irony that many in this discussion won't pay for Disney+ because of the technical issues on the software side of things.