[matheusmoreira]

> Nobody is ever going to convince me that pirating is actually easier than finding the thing I want to watch and putting it on my credit card.

That's just because you're fine with consuming the low quality slop they stream out. Doesn't mean people who care more than you do are engaging in "mental gymnastics". We don't want the same things.

I want the best version of everything. The highest quality version. The uncensored version. The uncompressed version. The lossless version. The DRM-free version. The best version.

The copyright holders just aren't providing it. They only provide slop, and only on their terms, take it or leave it.

Then a bunch of fans gather together, hunt down an old film roll, drop tens of thousands of dollars on equipment to scan it and somehow it becomes a better version than the one the industry released. It's not fair to dismiss that level of commitment as "it's just people who don't want to pay for things". Industry should probably hire more people like that. People who give a shit.

[tr4656]

That's true, but a lot of the time the best version is available on a blu ray you can buy.

[matheusmoreira]

The best version isn't some cumbersome Blu-Ray disc, it's the Blu-Ray's data remuxed into an mkv you can play with mpv.

Sometimes the best version just isn't sold anymore. See the 4K77 project for a concrete example.

[Aurornis]

> Then a bunch of fans gather together, hunt down an old film roll, drop tens of thousands of dollars on equipment to scan it and somehow it becomes a better version than the one the industry released. It's not fair to dismiss that level of commitment as "it's just people who don't want to pay for things".

This is absurdity. The average pirate is not downloading content that some fans spent $10K digitizing from an original film roll.

The average pirated content wasn’t even shot on film.

These piracy justifications are some of the weirdest mental gymnastics that happens on this site. I’m not taking about the pirate connoisseurs who only download the finest encoded sourced from artisanal film rolls to complete their collection. We’re talking about the average pirate who searches for a torrent or stream because they don’t want to pay a couple bucks.

This constant attempt to glorify pirates into the true, most moral, purest content consumers is so weird.

[matheusmoreira]

> This constant attempt to glorify pirates into the true, most moral, purest content consumers is so weird.

Why? You just said that they have to put more effort into it than the average person. Normie just signs up for netflix and watches whatever shows up. The pirate has to set up a torrent client, join private trackers and get connected with the so called scenesters, only to end up scrutinizing film grain of different encodes on screenshot comparison sites so he can spend his ratio budget on the best possible version.

It's true, that's a ton of work. Why would anyone put up with that nonsense, if not because they want higher quality than the industry is putting out? Netflix is not that expensive, and even if it was you can always share an account with some family members or something. Trivial.

[antonvs]

> I want the best version of everything. The highest quality version. The uncensored version. The uncompressed version. The lossless version. The DRM-free version. The best version.

Basically the same greed that every billionaire has, just with negligible economic impact.

[inigyou]

If billionaires are allowed to be extremely greedy then why aren't hundredaires allowed to be extremely greedy?