The Pirate Bay Remains Resilient, 20 Years After the Raid

6/1/2026 at 3:27:13 PM

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.

by hbn

6/1/2026 at 3:55:36 PM

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.

by jjulius

6/1/2026 at 4:10:24 PM

To me it is the difference between art and product.

A show like The Simpsons is both. The viewers care about the art, and we tolerate the product to get it. The creators are creating art, compromising with the corporation and broadcaster to make it enough of a product. But the corp/broadcaster only care about the product. The art is the chocolate around the advertising pill.

So when the product-minded people control preservation and resharing of the product, the art always gets compromised. Jokes are clipped. Audio is broken. Episodes are pulled. For all the wrong reasons.

by Waterluvian

6/1/2026 at 7:57:11 PM

Same with Beavis and Butthead with all its music videos, it seems like it cant be properly released with alm that intact so its up to King Turd to do the dirty work and make it avaikable to all

by Obscurity4340

6/1/2026 at 11:53:33 PM

This happens with any TV or Movie that has music, and its incredibly frustrating. Always best to download to not confuse yourself as to why the media is somehow different than you remember.

by miah_

6/1/2026 at 9:12:17 PM

They are unlikely partners. And yet it is the model that allows arts to get something out there while it gets exploited for gains. But at the end those with the money make the final call.

Alas, we would hope that it would be the best art that gets preserved but a lot of the time it is some of the most mass produced.

by HerbManic

6/1/2026 at 4:38:55 PM

The terminology is art vs content. Anybody talking about "content", by definition, do not actually care about what that content is, just that it is contained into something they charge for.

by toyg

6/1/2026 at 5:21:12 PM

No I don’t think that’s what I’m going for.

To me content often implies a kind of volume of work. Always be posting. Don’t miss a few days or your viewers go elsewhere. Lots and lots of content!

The concerns of a product are the salability. Is has to fit perfectly into a 22 mins slot. It can’t upset the wrong people. It has to fit the mood and culture that our advertisers want. Etc.

by Waterluvian

6/1/2026 at 7:27:33 PM

You seem to be violently agreeing with the parent commenter. What you're saying matches their definition.

by the_af

6/1/2026 at 7:33:26 PM

No, it doesn't. You get good at something by doing it a lot, consistently; it's basically rule 1 of learning any artform.

by cwillu

6/1/2026 at 7:42:31 PM

This still doesn't contradict the framing of "art vs content".

by the_af

6/1/2026 at 8:01:40 PM

It absolutely does for a movie.

by JumpCrisscross

6/1/2026 at 5:06:32 PM

This is a great example of when pulling out a dictionary implies that you've lost the argument, because if people were using the word in the same sense as the dictionary definition, you would have no need of the dictionary to “prove” the meaning.

by cwillu

6/1/2026 at 7:22:21 PM

User toyg is using the same definition than Richard Stallman (I tried to find the relevant essay but can't; I just remember RMS also pushed back against "content"). Toyg is not making up a new line of thought, this has been argued before. Not only by Stallman, either, this dislike for the term "content" is also espoused by some here on HN (and I agree, to be clear).

I think it goes beyond latching on the dictionary definition, and really looking into how platform owners see the bits they push around. It's not about being "clever" with words to score a point, but actually about the meaning we want to give art, be it novels, drawings, music or shows/movies.

by the_af

6/1/2026 at 7:30:20 PM

If they said “platform owners” I'd give them credit for that, but they didn't; they said “anyone”.

by cwillu

6/1/2026 at 7:41:50 PM

Context matters.

Also, "platform owners" (or advertisers, as another comment puts it) managed to install this term and so most of us use it, so it's no longer just platform owners. Which is why RMS railed against it.

by the_af

6/1/2026 at 7:34:09 PM

Your point is valid (and I make a similar one frequently), but it doesn't gain from being presented as good term vs bad term use. It's the context that makes it pejorative.

In the context of advertisers, content is just what you deliver for a price (Netflix, Disney), or against which you slap advertising (Youtube). You want more of it so you can charge more, and care little what fills this content pipeline.

by Lalabadie

6/1/2026 at 11:15:46 PM

For classic simpsons seasons, you can find DVDs on eBay for pretty cheap with the original crops and commentary tracks. I hear there are are rips of those available too.

by tomjakubowski

6/1/2026 at 9:09:04 PM

I managed to grab season 1 thru 10 on DVD for $15. Ripped them to storage, probably the best presentation you can get out of it.

But some of those old rips hold up. Not great but they will do.

A few years ago I did see a rip that pushed the limits of codecs. It was, at that point, every season of Futurama before Hulu brought it back but it fit on a single layer DVD. It was squeezed just a little too much as that was something like 100ish episodes. But neat to see.

by HerbManic

6/1/2026 at 9:46:44 PM

you need to upload that torrent :)

by nwellinghoff

6/1/2026 at 10:52:40 PM

What MJ episode?!

by dkga

6/2/2026 at 1:37:23 AM

The one where Homer wears a pink shirt to work, gets send to a hospital, meets a fat bloke that claims to be Michael Jackson, voiced by Michael Jackson except for the singing parts, which were sung by a Michael Jackson impersonator and all of it credited to some made up name.

Has the “Lisa it’s your birthday”-song.

by wodenokoto

6/1/2026 at 11:16:47 PM

They must be thinking of John Jay Smith's guest episode.

CHALMERS: Yes, and you call him John Jay Smith despite the fact that the voice is obviously Michael Jackson's.

by tomjakubowski

6/1/2026 at 4:58:59 PM

This is the key, streaming content providers delete and edit things to match the feeling of society at the moment or perceived societal pressures. Really not how history should work imho

by 486sx33

6/1/2026 at 4:39:53 PM

[dead]

by hbn

6/1/2026 at 6:31:33 PM

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.

by munk-a

6/1/2026 at 4:10:54 PM

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.

by kobieps

6/1/2026 at 4:39:37 PM

Netflix has the same problem. Downloaded some TV shows for my daughter to watch while we were travelling. Worked fine on the plane, arrived to the hotel, connected to WiFi "This content is not available in your location". Ok, disconnect, don't need wifi. Same message, "This content is not available in your location".

by lucaspiller

6/2/2026 at 12:42:07 AM

I spent a couple of years travelling around the world, and this is what drove me to piracy. Every time I moved country, the streaming services would change and the show I was watching yesterday is no longer available in this country.

Luckily the torrent sites are available from every country.

by marcus_holmes

6/1/2026 at 7:03:52 PM

I've had movies I've "bought" disappear from the Apple account. I guess they lost the license and I'm supposed to download all purchases and manually copy between devices. I contacted Apple and they offered a free rental as compensation. "Buy" doesn't mean the same on these streaming platforms, its just a longer-term rental.

by uxjw

6/1/2026 at 9:09:32 PM

I left Apple Music over this. My albums would keep quietly disappearing. I spent hours on the phone with their support, and despite their promises, nothing ever changed. I left Apple Music, and then all of their cloud services as well. Today, I'm 100% Apple-free, happily playing MP3s from Bandcamp in my Emacs. :)

by salutis

6/1/2026 at 9:14:11 PM

Good job, almost the full Stallman! ;)

Stallman would never use an MP3 as it used to be a proprietary format.

by HerbManic

6/2/2026 at 1:39:48 AM

> I guess they lost the license and I'm supposed to download all purchases and manually copy between devices.

That actually sounds very much like what you are supposed to do with a owned digital asset.

by wodenokoto

6/1/2026 at 6:33:43 PM

It says right in the TOS that it's licensed, not sold. Then the button says "Buy". It's intentionally misleading and contradictory.

by sneak

6/1/2026 at 9:28:35 PM

Fuck the TOS.

When I purchase stuff, I don't wanna read a legal contract. No one wants, no one does.

The contrariam in me thinks: If the contract is that crucial, let's have a mandatory, non skippable, slow scrolling of it, or maybe audio version slowly read.

I bet all TOS would get much simpler and tame!

by pnt12

6/1/2026 at 8:04:04 PM

Whaaat... oh wow that's bleak. I guess Apple do whatever they want.

by kobieps

6/1/2026 at 10:00:18 PM

I’ve had Apple delete my music from my devices.

As in, I had a physical CD I had purchased, ripped to MP3, and loaded onto my iPhone.

iTunes recognised it, linked it to the matching official entry in their music store, they lost the licence and deleted all customer copies including mine.

by jiggawatts

6/1/2026 at 8:44:02 PM

I don't think it's really that misleading. You're buying a license and I'm hard pressed to think of some other interpretation of that.

That the license kind of sucks and comes with restrictions is the bigger problem than any inherent deception

by treis

6/1/2026 at 4:19:27 PM

While I agree with you in spirit... were you expecting that you could... burn the film to a DVD or something?

Of course buying a movie on itunes means you can only watch it on capable devices. You can't play a youtube video on a VHS player either.

by cheeze

6/1/2026 at 10:50:07 PM

You used to be able to buy songs on iTunes and burn them to CD. Why would the expectation for movies be any different?

by GreenVulpine

6/1/2026 at 4:43:02 PM

While I agree it seems obvious you can’t do that, based on how these platforms have limited things for a long time… but that really should be something you can do.

Why can’t I get the file and put it on another device? Why can’t I burn it to a dvd? It makes sense that Apple aren’t required to make more software for random devices, but why can’t I have the file and do what I want with it?

by IanCal

6/1/2026 at 7:47:53 PM

You’re absolutely right. If it was a song from iTunes you bought you sure as hell could burn it on a dvd or cd or whatever. (Right? It’s been a long time.) So if I buy a movie why can’t I archive it on a DVD?

by salad-tycoon

6/1/2026 at 11:56:23 PM

The upcoming financial quarter is a big issue for whomever licenced that content to Apple and to a lesser extant Apple Inc themselves.

by Projectiboga

6/1/2026 at 8:05:12 PM

honestly given these types of shenanigans from the big platforms, I think buying physical discs is underrated. At least for the classics that you really want to add to your long-term collection

by kobieps

6/1/2026 at 4:26:36 PM

Not at all (hence saying "obvious in hindsight"). Simply pointing out that, at the time, my purchasing decision wasn't influenced by how many use cases it would restrict.

Also, IIRC, there was a period where you could burn Audio CDs from music that you purchased on iTunes.

edit: turns out music purchased on iTunes is DRM-free!

by kobieps

6/1/2026 at 4:45:45 PM

> there was a period where you could burn Audio CDs from music that you purchased on iTunes.

Music purchased on iTunes is DRM-free, so you can definitely burn CDs with them.

by cassianoleal

6/1/2026 at 4:51:01 PM

Ah very nice. I suppose it makes sense that music is DRM-free but films aren't

by kobieps

6/1/2026 at 5:24:58 PM

I suppose it makes sense that music is DRM-free but films aren't

Why?

by rkagerer

6/1/2026 at 6:29:52 PM

It's orders of magnitude more expensive to make a movie than it is to make a track.

by crazygringo

6/2/2026 at 3:03:17 AM

and?

by HDBaseT

6/1/2026 at 8:02:01 PM

yeah exactly

by kobieps

6/1/2026 at 7:08:39 PM

Haven't used iTunes in more than a decade, but it used to have options for converting files to different formats and burning playlists to disks and ripping CDs.

by t-3

6/1/2026 at 7:05:21 PM

Actually there were some DVD players back in the day that could play digital files burned to DVD or CD, and it was totally possible to burn DVDs that could play normally on most players from video files.

by t-3

6/1/2026 at 8:00:32 PM

Ah yes, the divx that wasn’t self-destructing discs.

by mathgeek

6/1/2026 at 6:51:12 PM

buying a video game at Walmart means you're only able to play it there, it's so obvious:)

by hartbook

6/1/2026 at 5:23:38 PM

Of course b̵u̵y̵i̵n̵g̵ licensing a movie on itunes...

by rkagerer

6/1/2026 at 4:37:24 PM

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

by someguyiguess

6/1/2026 at 4:46:27 PM

Channel issues are like 90% of issues like this, but it's not always user error. Often a cheap production will just ship the front left + right channels as the stereo mix, instead of down mixing all the left + center channels into the stereo left etc. This is endemic in back catalogs on streaming providers where the catalog is a bulk assets that nobody reviews and is passed around between companies that don't care about the quality they deliver to each other.

by advisedwang

6/1/2026 at 5:04:05 PM

That seems like a terrible default, aren't most people listening in stereo at best?

by RobotToaster

6/1/2026 at 9:11:32 PM

This is basically the issue.

User error but blaming the service to make an ideological point.

The dialog is just fine if you have a surround sound system or spend 5 seconds once to select stereo sound. Importantly, the dialog is still missing in the torrent versions taken from the surround sound stream because the same problem occurs. You only get the missing dialog in stereo if you download the stereo rip.

by gamblor956

6/1/2026 at 10:07:46 PM

>User error but blaming the service to make an ideological point

A streaming service incorrectly defaulting to surround sound is most certainly not a user error.

by Jtarii

6/2/2026 at 1:23:28 AM

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.

by jasonfarnon

6/2/2026 at 1:28:12 AM

Same here. Most of what I want to listen to is on youtube. I use the brave browser on my phone which both blocks adds and allows me to listen with the phone locked.

by merge_software

6/1/2026 at 6:48:24 PM

I'm in China and often get blocked by Netflix or Prime Video for using a VPN... Torrents are often the only thing that works.

by olalonde

6/1/2026 at 4:10:13 PM

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.

by mojo74

6/1/2026 at 5:58:06 PM

Plus I've found "legit" to be a moving goal post. One day a show is on one platform, the next it's on another, or it becomes unavailable except for [insert random foreign country here]. Even HD is a ripoff sometimes when half the episode comes in all compressed looking. They'll blame my bandwidth except I have no problem streaming an episode without adaptive compression over Bittorrent.

People can say what they want about piracy, but it continues to be what I consider a necessity against culturally important media being further tainted by rent seekers looking to make another buck in any way they can.

by ravenstine

6/1/2026 at 6:27:12 PM

i feel like this is an important piece. even if you want to do the "right thing", is it really supporting these platforms that horse-trade content in huge multi-billion dollar deals just so they can increase their userbase with the intent to jam more ads down their throat? have any of these platforms _improved_ the experience for the average creator? they're poison, it almost makes it feel more righteous to steal.

by gk--

6/1/2026 at 6:52:37 PM

Yeah, I was a pirate as a kid. I said “give me a place where I can pay to have legal access to everything and I will.”

Then Netflix came along and introduced streaming. I was happy. It began to fragment a bit, I could live with that.

Now it’s 10 different platforms with rotating content, I need a 3rd party website to know where and when to watch a particular thing, it’s a mess.

Not only that, unlike with cable they make it difficult to record the content they’re serving me so I can watch later myself.

I am now a pirate again.

by lobf

6/1/2026 at 5:33:09 PM

Yeah all the streaming services have gotten so bad and they are adding ads and they are lowering quality and they are getting too expensive. Arghgg I say

by justaman123

6/1/2026 at 9:45:02 PM

> Used to be a TPB regular around the time it took off. Years later I tried to go legit

I still pay for subs but never utilize them because piracy is a superior experience.

by WarOnPrivacy

6/1/2026 at 11:42:32 PM

I mean in the end this is still theft. Someone spent time and effort working on this. And you took a shit on that effort because it was inconvenient not to. Like the creators of said content you stole would not approve of what you did.

I totally get it. I'm a thief as well. But I guess the difference is, I don't need to rationalize everything into some sort of twisted sense justice. I steal because I don't care what the creator thinks.

by threethirtytwo

6/2/2026 at 12:31:31 AM

I truly feel old when we are rehashing the same thing that happened when TPB, Limewire etc were taking off.

Down to the arguments being made why this is “theft”. I also can’t believe that the arguments by the general pop have shifted to support multi billion dollar companies and their narrative.

by 2muchcoffeeman

6/1/2026 at 8:18:19 PM

Ultimately history has proven that copyright owners can't be trusted to preserve their own IP and preservation should be entirely legal.

by whywhywhywhy

6/1/2026 at 8:48:37 PM

Those involved in the creation of the art can write a contract that stops it being ruined by future owners. When the Bobs sold their rights to Back to the Future they added terms to protect the brand. I know of one time where they intervened to stop a 3D conversion that Universal wanted. (Personally, I think 3D conversion can work well, e.g. Titanic, but other times it is monstrous, e.g. Star Wars Ep 1)

by qingcharles

6/1/2026 at 9:04:36 PM

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.

by sourcecodeplz

6/1/2026 at 3:46:06 PM

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?

by a1o

6/1/2026 at 3:53:07 PM

The fact that they refuse to balance audio for standard stereo setups is a whole other nightmare.

by Geonode

6/1/2026 at 5:03:01 PM

Lately whenever I watch movies my remote stays in my hand so I can boost the volume during dialogue and turn it down during loud action scenes. I've had two different soundbars, one of them quite expensive, and it's an issue on both.

by skarz

6/1/2026 at 5:15:36 PM

From my understanding it’s not which soundbar that’s the issue, it’s that you’re only using a soundbar for audio. The channels all get compressed into one device with a couple speakers instead of whatever it was originally created for, like five or seven speakers with a subwoofer

by ramgine

6/1/2026 at 6:29:46 PM

You're right. I just don't want surround.I have two big, nice speakers for my tv, and that's what I want. But I still have to actively work the remote, especially with a kid sleeping in my house.

by Geonode

6/1/2026 at 9:02:40 PM

I’m in the same boat. I have a couple floor standers for audio, but I added a center channel and it helped with dialogue

by ramgine

6/2/2026 at 12:07:24 AM

I'd swear to any diety "The Game" on HBO was a screener. No thank you, I'll just trawl the high seas for loot.

by tosti

6/1/2026 at 7:02:41 PM

RAM is too expensive to waste on "streaming"

I have always prefered downloading

by 1vuio0pswjnm7

6/1/2026 at 4:38:52 PM

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.

by anthonj

6/1/2026 at 5:13:20 PM

I am in the french-speaking part of Canada.

In some Netflix shows, they say words in the english audio that are translated in French with different words with a similar meaning, and with english close-caption words that are also different from the original english audio.

Quite amazing.

by realo

6/1/2026 at 8:57:21 PM

My favorite example of bad Netflix subtitles is Suits (2011). The music during the intro is the same throughout the series, from the song Ima Robot - Greenback Boogie. The English subtitles for the lyrics are wrong every single season, and they're wrong in a different way for every one of those seasons. The lyrics are not at all hard to understand--they've pretty specifically cut together some of the lyrics that are easiest to understand--so it's extremely obvious, but somehow nobody at any point figured out that they could just do it right once and not look totally incompetent.

After the initial Netflix release of the first 3.5 seasons (might have been 4.5, it was a baffling cutoff) they somehow decided not to add the rest, so I pirated it. Every single pirated intro came with perfectly correct lyrics.

by jorams

6/1/2026 at 6:41:08 PM

French part of Switzerland. Quite a few shows and movies, ie anime but also others, have original audio track (so lets say japanese for anime) and only german subs. You can probably count number of folks on your fingers and toes who would even be able, let alone willing to watch this in such combination from this region of meagre 2.2 million folks but quite rich on average.

So torrents it is, its legal here, lightning speed, always superb quality (one can choose any movie in range between 1GB and 50 GB for 1080p and all is very good looking), get it in a minute, and watch.

I don't blame Netflix generally (well for those german subs I definitely do, I know they have english ones just couldn't be bothered and I have hard time believing they have region issue with english subs) but license owners, they are the ultimate fuckers messing with content holders/resellers/renters, and consequently us users.

Also, torrents are so convenient, I won't be paying some service just to see a single show a year. I just won't even for a month and shuffle things like idiot, thats a bad proposition.

by kakacik

6/1/2026 at 6:52:39 PM

Downloading such content is not prohibited by law in Switzerland, thus legal. Uploading however is a different story. So stating that torrenting is legal is not actually true. Unless maybe you simply fake your upload.

by svl7

6/1/2026 at 10:59:27 PM

Even for English speakers, the subtitle experience with pirated movies is often lacking. Movies with non-English-speaking characters are often meant to have subtitles for their dialog and not for English speakers by default, but many pirated versions don't do this. I recently saw discussions online of a lot of people saying they went an embarrassingly long time without knowing there were supposed to be subtitles for the aliens in District 9 or the mute hand-signing girl in The Boys.

by AgentME

6/1/2026 at 9:02:37 PM

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).

by Fr0styMatt88

6/1/2026 at 3:53:06 PM

> 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 these 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 that 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.

by doublerabbit

6/1/2026 at 3:59:36 PM

> That's because the license for the tracks expired

They're talking about pieces of dialogue in the show, not licensed music.

by triceratops

6/1/2026 at 7:41:52 PM

If they're shouting at neighbours through a wall I'd be willing to bet that the dialogue is happening because of loud copyrighted music being played at the same time. They probably just did some automated music detection and cut the whole audio track in those sections.

Edit: I lost the bet and there's no notable music involved: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Pu8-dxRkoTI

by echelon_musk

6/1/2026 at 4:06:19 PM

I know. And I am commenting on that the licensed music within the series has been replaced due to expired licensing for which that itself is ridiculous.

by doublerabbit

6/1/2026 at 4:53:26 PM

Re-licensing music is a two-fold challenge. Sometimes it's much more efficient to use substitute music, instead of negotiating for new rights.

First, licensing arrangements for "all marketing channels" only account for the channels that exist at the time. When a new market channel opens up, such as streaming, music labels will require new licensing terms for that channel. If they don't, they might not get paid. (TV & movie studios are just as ruthless as music labels).

Second, in turn, the labels often have to get new permission from artists for the new channel. Tracking down all artists can be a challenge and require resources that they can't recoup.

by radley

6/1/2026 at 5:12:37 PM

And all that just strengthens the case for piracy: you actually get the original thing.

by cwillu

6/1/2026 at 5:36:20 PM

Hah! How soon 'till some MBA comes up with a scheme to start licensing movies one word at a time?

by rkagerer

6/1/2026 at 7:26:12 PM

Don't worry. Now that you can license actors 'likeness' for AI generation, they'll be replacing the people in the shows soon too.

by olyjohn

6/1/2026 at 4:30:51 PM

I have never seen an episode that had a cover of the theme song.

Maybe that was a thing with the new reboot? I don't know because I heard nothing that made me want to watch it.

by hbn

6/1/2026 at 5:19:54 PM

This is a good point. Another problem with streaming services, specifically for music streaming services, is that they can change the track of a previously released album with no user choice to hear the original. Example: Track 4 of Elephunk by the Black Eyed Peas. It was universally replaced with the “clean” version of the song. I’m not a fan of rewriting history.

by phpdave11

6/1/2026 at 6:57:28 PM

[dead]

by gosub100

6/1/2026 at 4:08:16 PM

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.

by sushisource

6/1/2026 at 4:10:37 PM

> 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.

by iooi

6/1/2026 at 4:24:41 PM

It wasn't a surround sound system, we were watching on the built-in app on a Fire TV from the TV's speakers.

Also just Google "malcolm in the middle missing audio" and you'll find a ton of people with the issue

https://www.reddit.com/r/malcolminthemiddle/comments/1kggg7d...

This also reminded me of another issue - the show was filmed to be broadcast in 4:3 but apparently someone along the line decided 16:9 is inherently better, so they put out the show in widescreen and now there's a ton of shots where you can see things you're not supposed to see. Someone else standing in for an actor that wasn't there when they filmed, or a toy doll in place of a real baby because they filmed on a day the baby actor wasn't there.

by hbn

6/1/2026 at 4:38:10 PM

Yup. That’s your issue. Disney+ outputting Dolby 5.1 and your speakers are stereo.

by someguyiguess

6/1/2026 at 7:22:34 PM

This shouldn't be an issue anybody has. We've had Dolby surround sound for over 40 years now, and everything was fine until recently. We had quadrophonic sound years before that.

by olyjohn

6/1/2026 at 4:42:49 PM

Well it's still their fault for not making sure their audio works on a normal, non-surround setup

Also worth noting that we switched the audio track to Spanish and you can hear it just fine.

by hbn

6/1/2026 at 5:40:35 PM

That's not what the link says. In fact it is specifically saying it should be working in stereo but tdolby surround has missing channels.

by cycomanic

6/1/2026 at 6:25:13 PM

[dead]

by bingaweek

6/2/2026 at 12:27:43 AM

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.

by pdntspa

6/1/2026 at 5:26:04 PM

The Mad Men AI upscale was such trash. You could see cameras, crew, equipment, etc. total mess that showed no care for the material.

by jeffwask

6/1/2026 at 9:49:40 PM

I experienced the same trying to watch One Piece on Crunchy Roll.

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.

by xyst

6/1/2026 at 8:49:44 PM

>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.

by Barrin92

6/1/2026 at 8:20:26 PM

Many times I purchase or rent a movie now, and immediately go to torrent it and feel guilt-free.

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.

by mannanj

6/1/2026 at 11:37:56 PM

stremio.

by threethirtytwo

6/1/2026 at 6:34:55 PM

> 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.

by ignoramous

6/1/2026 at 7:03:43 PM

It doesn't seem you understood we talk about movies and tv shows, not some customer app solving... problems?

Puzzling comment overall, will refrain from usual tropes and assume in good faith its 'lost in translation'.

by kakacik

6/2/2026 at 12:10:58 AM

Not talking about movies or apps, but a general observation on the dynamics of free v paid, from both, the supply & demand sides.

  As counterproductive as putting prices up feels, charging $20 for VEED brought in a different and more serious type of user, they need the product and they are happy to pay for it and have different needs to the $5 users we originally had. Things started looking up for the first time in ages.

https://medium.com/@veedio/the-journey-to-ramen-profitabilit... / https://archive.vn/Yt0sn

by ignoramous

6/1/2026 at 5:13:44 PM

> 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).

by shevy-java

6/1/2026 at 8:05:33 PM

[dead]

by lovich

6/1/2026 at 6:14:29 PM

> you have to endlessly manage subscriptions and switch between different apps with better or worse players just to watch a single series.

Obligatory classic joke:

Have you seen the new show? It's on Tubu. It's literally on Heebee. It's on Poodee with ads. It's literally on Dippy. You can probably find it on Weeno. Dude it's on Gumpy. It's a Pheebo original. It's on Poob. You can watch it on Poob. You can go to Poob and watch it. Log onto Poob right now. Go to Poob. Dive into Poob. You can Poob it. It's on Poob. Poob has it for you. Poob has it for you.

by throw-the-towel

6/1/2026 at 4:36:45 PM

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...

by blablabla123

6/1/2026 at 4:47:16 PM

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.

by ronsor

6/1/2026 at 5:24:11 PM

The software industry certainly didn't give up. Most smaller game studios outsource their copy protection to Steam. Larger studios use Denuvo which works better than ever. Some Denuvo games stay uncracked for years. Non-entertainment software mostly moved to SaaS with a subscription model which is essentially uncrackable or, where that was not feasible (CAD and video editing), use extremely invasive copy protection measures. For example, Dassault can catch your Solidworks cracks even on an airgapped computer. They taint every file you create as pirated and when you give that file to a licensed user, their legitimate copy will phone home and have their lawyers force the legitimate user to betray you.

by tsss

6/1/2026 at 6:20:39 PM

Steam's DRM is completely symbolic. There are widespread cracks available and Steam is AFAIK not even bothering with the cat and mouse game, and Denuvo games released this year are being cracked in < 24 hours.

I would never underestimate the lengths people are willing to go to to 'crack' games. Countless online-only games have been cracked with users reverse engineering the network protocol and writing their own servers. LLMs will probably greatly ease that process as well.

by somenameforme

6/1/2026 at 7:01:47 PM

The SteamDRM wrapper tool itself, freely distributed through the Stramworks SDK, used to straight up ship with a feature to strip the DRM from any exe.

by B3L

6/1/2026 at 6:29:03 PM

> Some Denuvo games stay uncracked for years

this era is well and truly over. you've got pre-release hypervisor bypasses and then a conventional crack a couple weeks later.

edit: i might've misinterpreted your comment, i expect some older denovo titles might never get the modern treatment

by gk--

6/1/2026 at 11:25:59 PM

> They taint every file you create as pirated and when you give that file to a licensed user, their legitimate copy will phone home and have their lawyers force the legitimate user to betray you.

Can this be manipulated to frame arbitrary users for piracy?

by ronsor

6/1/2026 at 5:35:42 PM

Oh wow that's really smart of them, now you have a reason to send your hacked version along the cad file so the user on the other side can escape from their spyware :D

by hollow-moe

6/1/2026 at 7:24:00 PM

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.

by indoordin0saur

6/1/2026 at 9:57:52 PM

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.

by whateverboat

6/1/2026 at 4:44:03 PM

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.

by lenerdenator

6/2/2026 at 12:43:52 AM

If the corporates are OK downloading content in breach of licences for training their intelligences, which apparently they are, I consider myself OK doing the same to train the model in my head.

by dspillett

6/1/2026 at 10:31:16 PM

    Although the raid and the subsequent criminal investigation were
    carried out in Sweden, the US Government played a major role behind
    the scenes.

As for why the US Gov was willing to act as MPAA's private enforcer...

    (2012) Chris Dodd [MPAA chief] went on Fox News to explicitly threaten
    politicians who accept MPAA campaign donations that they’d better
    pass Hollywood’s favorite legislation… or else:

Trading law for campaign donations is a place one might go after years of trading Gov power for campaign donations.

https://www.techdirt.com/2012/01/20/mpaa-directly-publicly-t...

by WarOnPrivacy

6/1/2026 at 3:04:29 PM

I haven't visited a torrent site since I found out I could search for them from within qBittorrent.

by Unai

6/1/2026 at 3:19:00 PM

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?)...

by Hoodedcrow

6/1/2026 at 4:06:03 PM

After a certain point, you get a sense of which release groups to trust or not.

Not to mention you can just open the download page from within qBittorrent.

by squigz

6/1/2026 at 4:28:07 PM

I had no idea! As much as I appreciate TPB, their ads are cursed.

by RajT88

6/1/2026 at 4:44:37 PM

You browse torrent sites without uBlock Origin?

by worble

6/1/2026 at 5:02:29 PM

You use anything on the web without uBlock Origin?

by everyone

6/1/2026 at 5:42:35 PM

They are cursed even with it.

by RajT88

6/1/2026 at 7:21:14 PM

wtf you talk about? here's my example of searching latest euphoria episode:

i.postimg.cc/tJ2tMJYm/pb-example.jpg

Do you see any ads there?

You mean you don't use Firefox? Then that's on you bro!!

by unnouinceput

6/1/2026 at 8:16:00 PM

They all do have auto firing things that would not necessarily show on a screenshot. It's a cat and mouse game between these sites and filter maintainers.

But even for those I recommend the popup blocker strict extension.

by dizhn

6/1/2026 at 6:16:46 PM

I only used Rutracker and Rarbg (rip), TPB felt sketchier. I wonder what's the "prime" English-language public tracker now? 1337?

by Hoodedcrow

6/1/2026 at 8:31:57 PM

1337 is OK. Rarbg too. For movies, nothing beats YTS imo.

by RajT88

6/1/2026 at 8:46:21 PM

I might be misremembering, but wasn't YIFY/YTS known for their awful quality ultra compressed releases? I thought they closed down many years ago tho, so no idea if they are the same people or if they still focus on low-quality releases.

by Unai

6/1/2026 at 8:16:55 PM

tpb.party works without JS. It's the main mirror I use.

by iamalizard

6/1/2026 at 3:46:41 PM

I've never seen a torrent site that had things marked.

by Pay08

6/1/2026 at 3:55:52 PM

Not those exact markings, but TPB does have user-markings displayed that can serve as a vouch for credibility.

- Normal User, no special status (No Skull) - Trusted (Pink Skull) - VIP (Green Skull) - Helper (Blue Skull, Legacy) - Moderator (Black MOD Tag) - Super Moderator (Red MOD Tag) - Administrator (Black ADMIN Tag)

https://pirates-forum.org/Thread-ThePirateBay-Want-Trusted-V...

by dpoloncsak

6/1/2026 at 3:58:57 PM

Weird, I don't think I have ever seen that. Granted, I'm not a frequent user of TPB.

by Pay08

6/1/2026 at 3:57:19 PM

Perhaps you could try visiting the famous one mentioned in the headline.

by applfanboysbgon

6/1/2026 at 3:53:50 PM

What he is describing is how Rutracker does things.

by ls612

6/1/2026 at 5:49:53 PM

You can? Tell me how

by Levitating

6/1/2026 at 8:38:46 PM

You can turn it on in `View -> Search engine`. Then a new tab will appear next to the main transfers one. You can (have to?) add search plugins, which is done from the same search tab (look for a button in the bottom right). And I think to remember you need to have Python installed for the search tab to work, but qBittorrent should prompt you automatically for it.

I might be misremembering something, so ask again if something I said didn't work or wasn't where I said.

Free extra tip: did you know qBittorrent has support for themes? I got a pretty clean dark theme one, but no way I can remember the name or where I found it.

I love qBittorrent.

by Unai

6/2/2026 at 2:30:48 AM

You can take that a step further and integrate it with Jackett: https://github.com/Jackett/Jackett

by swat535

6/2/2026 at 1:26:27 AM

private trackers are the only way to go nowadays I think. I've stopped using TPB for 11 years now since I joined private trackers. safer, less dead torrents, higher quality

by robertwt7

6/1/2026 at 3:02:21 PM

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.

by TFNA

6/1/2026 at 4:34:14 PM

> 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.

by hbn

6/1/2026 at 3:07:28 PM

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.

by dmos62

6/1/2026 at 3:21:46 PM

E.g. ext.to aggregates torrents from a lot of public trackers, very often you can find good releases there.

by Anonyneko

6/1/2026 at 8:53:23 PM

I commented somewhere else already, but you can search directly from qBittorrent. Search by title, then filter by "Remux" or sort by size. Keep in mind tho that a blu-ray release must exist in the first place, and that some 4k blu-rays are just not very good to begin with (upscaling and what not).

by Unai

6/1/2026 at 3:23:23 PM

RARBG used to be the way to go, until they shut down. I'm not aware of a good public replacement.

by Retr0id

6/1/2026 at 5:40:11 PM

thepiratebay is fine they just don’t run indexes often so searches often fail for stuff just uploaded within last hour or two. Limetorrents updates indices frequently but uses ad providers that try to hijack your clicks and presses so it takes three or four clicks to get one click that isn’t hijacked. There is a bit of non overlap between those two sites.

by stevenwoo

6/1/2026 at 8:50:14 PM

Sounds like something that a browser like Brave was built to combat. I haven't visited the site in question but for a lot of the ad-heavy sites I do visit, I jump over to Brave to deal with the nonsense.

by nobleach

6/1/2026 at 6:24:33 PM

> RARBG used to be the way to go, until they shut down. I'm not aware of a good public replacement.

https://therarbg.to/

by ur-whale

6/1/2026 at 9:35:28 PM

That’s not RARBG. That’s a quasi-domain squatter trying to lure people in with the name of a legendary community, but just showing the same crap results as any other public torrent aggregator and presumably loading it with ads (that I mercifully don’t see with Firefox uBlock Origin) in order to profit.

by TFNA

6/1/2026 at 6:34:41 PM

Whatever this is, it's not RARBG.

by Retr0id

6/1/2026 at 3:29:12 PM

I honestly wouldn’t bother with public trackers. They work great for debrid services with something like kodi or stremio but if you want to “own” or build your collection you have much better options 1. Private trackers - people seed, they have rules on uploads and actually moderate

2. Usenet is still alive and thriving for this.

3. Libraries still exist and you can rent and rip media there

4.Internet Archive is a great resource for old stuff

5. Just buy physical copies and rip em. Can check eBay etc.

by sporedro

6/1/2026 at 3:40:31 PM

How do you join private trackers from scratch?

I used to do this kind of things decades ago, but there was also still a few things not ripped and uploaded you had _some_ chance of participating.

Nowadays I imagine ~everything under the sun is already ripped, so how can you contribute to seed ratio? (or is that not even a thing anymore?)

by saganus

6/1/2026 at 4:31:02 PM

Generally a lot of them you can get an invite from someone on Reddit or discord. A lot also open up for a week or so allowing people to register every year or whenever a major tracker goes down so the refuges can join. you can check places like Reddit /r/opensignups.

A lot of mainstream stuff is ripped already, the “ratio” on some is more if you download a torrent, they want you to seed it for x amount of time or seed it back x amount to the community. I don’t know of any that expect you to be ripping and uploading that way, it’s recommended but a lot have groups for mainstream content.

There are a few “elitist” private trackers that require “interviews” and stuff, but don’t let that scare you off 99% of them are all just grab and invite or sign up and seed back to community for the week or so minimum (preferably longer) and your good to go!

by sporedro

6/1/2026 at 4:19:45 PM

>> How do you join private trackers from scratch?

https://old.reddit.com/r/trackers/wiki/how_to_get_started

by shmoil

6/1/2026 at 4:43:18 PM

Regarding seed ratio, generally by perma seeding. Many private sites either use seed time requirements instead of ratio or offer bonus points for seed time which can be exchanged for ratio. But also as new editions and formats are released, the library has a bit more turnaround than your music sites of yesteryear.

by radlad

6/1/2026 at 4:08:29 PM

I was looking for this european movie from 10 years ago only last month, could not find it anywhere on line, streaming or torrent. I'm pretty confident there is still a lot of stuff missing.

hey there's a project idea: a "todo list" for rippers that scrapes imdb and checks what's not in pirate bay (and then looks for dvd's on ebay / libraries)

by pirta

6/1/2026 at 8:11:15 PM

What movie was it? There’s a good chance I can find it.

If you’re in Reddit, there’s also a subreddit dedicated specifically to this kind of thing (requests for stuff that is no longer available) called /r/DHExchange

by einsteinx2

6/1/2026 at 4:37:07 PM

Public trackers like the piratebay face a lot of issues with retention. If it’s not mainstream or recent people often don’t seed or maintain it. If you join a private tracker there’s ones dedicated to keeping older sources like that a live!

For really obscure content, internet archive, your library, usenet or even eBay are the go to!

by sporedro

6/1/2026 at 8:10:41 PM

SoulSeek was also pretty good for finding obscure music. I like collecting everything that was released (not live performances, though) and SoulSeek filled some, but not all gaps I had.

It's not E2EE IIRC, though, so use with caution.

by iamalizard

6/1/2026 at 4:39:22 PM

Out of curiosity, what movie?

> hey there's a project idea: a "todo list" for rippers that scrapes imdb and checks what's not in pirate ba

Private sites do things like this, archival efforts and have request systems.

by radlad

6/1/2026 at 4:41:53 PM

Piracy is and always has been the only way for more obscure stuff.

Personally I do not feel guilty pirating a decades old TV show or movie. And I really doubt the industry cares much either.

by TitaRusell

6/1/2026 at 4:54:22 PM

How can anyone sit through a length of a film, especially a European one, and not have a cigarette?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VzSiilYSKs

by DonHopkins

6/1/2026 at 4:01:57 PM

use their RSS feed + a seed box to automatically grab stuff as it’s posted some sites have ratio free for large files to get them seeded faster. at least that’s what I did a decade plus ago.

by vuln

6/1/2026 at 7:00:29 PM

> ~everything under the sun is already ripped

But good luck to see a live seed. I have a torrent from ~2010 which is stuck at 2%, so some seed did come online some years ago I was able to leech those meager bits from them - but not ever since.

Same for my own torrent on TPB from 2008, i tried to dload it in 2015 and wasn't sucessful in it despite it was 1st one for some years for that particular title.

by justsomehnguy

6/1/2026 at 8:14:38 PM

Don't give up hope, though. I've had torrents complete after a few years. I've long lost anything from 2010, though.

Try other protocols/services (listed in other comments in the thread) or maybe offer a bounty if it's something you can't buy.

by iamalizard

6/1/2026 at 9:01:50 PM

I had one finish after 2 years recently. Someone in China came online and completed the last few MB.

I've got three open right now for ebooks which I don't think will ever finish. (one is 3.5TB)

by qingcharles

6/1/2026 at 4:03:49 PM

[dead]

by goestoo

6/1/2026 at 5:52:24 PM

Are you sure what you're looking for isn't on TPB as well? Just lower down the list.

I torrent TPB because it's what people know. I don't care for private trackers, I just want to support the common torrenters.

by Levitating

6/1/2026 at 6:28:55 PM

For any query, just look at the file sizes (or sort by file size if the view allows you). Then you can see that there just aren’t many movie torrents on TPB larger than single-digit GB. A Blu-Ray remux will be minimum 14GB, and often much larger.

by TFNA

6/1/2026 at 7:13:16 PM

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.

by kakacik

6/1/2026 at 7:23:12 PM

Not only does TPB not have many remuxes, but it also has fairly few re-encodes using the modern high-quality codecs that you are talking about.

It’s funny to hear someone say that hard drive sizes are too small, and internet connections too slow, when RuTracker (a tracker whose core audience is former USSR, often shitty provincial cities) has a very lively culture of remuxes.

by TFNA

6/1/2026 at 4:02:49 PM

Sometimes feel like I'm the only one still using it around me, but the service is still great and functional

by elar_verole

6/1/2026 at 5:55:09 PM

Ya I still have mad love for TPB. My ISP was blocking my private tracker recently and while I would usually just run things through a seedbox it made me happy I could still turn to my trusty ol' friend.

by goolz

6/1/2026 at 8:25:58 PM

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.

by arwhatever

6/1/2026 at 3:46:08 PM

From "The Pirate Bay down, forever?" (2014)

> 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...

by boramalper

6/1/2026 at 5:43:48 PM

> As a big fan of the KLF I once learned that it’s great to burn great things up.

For anyone who doesn't know, the KLF took a million pounds in cash, and set it on fire. For no obvious reason.

by razakel

6/2/2026 at 1:37:22 AM

thepiratebay founders got fined for 7$ million

I wonder if they ever paid the fine. Probably they will be in debt forever.

by aboardRat4

6/1/2026 at 3:05:22 PM

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.

by tokai

6/1/2026 at 3:21:32 PM

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

by dmos62

6/1/2026 at 7:54:33 PM

"Their movies"

Meanwhile a huge portion of them are filmed in other countries, edited by brits, staring europeans, etc.

There's a good reason major studios have spent billions on film studios in the UK instead of the US.

Take something like Andor. Filmed in the UK and Spain, with a team of staff almost exclusively from the UK and EU. With a Mexican lead actor, 1 American co-lead, and then tons of British Actors, a few Australians, Swedish, German, Irish, etc.

Very few big movies or tv shows can be classed as "American" these days. They require people and facilities from all over the place.

by esskay

6/1/2026 at 9:01:50 PM

Even if that's true, the influence is on the decline. It's a combination of factors: fewer and fewer era-defining works and simply novel messages to tell, franchises sucked dry, games and youtube replacing movies.

by orbital-decay

6/1/2026 at 8:00:18 PM

You can always ruin your advantages. People seem to currently like a lot of US culture and dislike the US (or, it's government at least).

by nitwit005

6/1/2026 at 6:21:59 PM

Anecdotally, the people I talk to outside the U.S. see the film industry there as stuck in a Disney/Marvel pattern for the most part. Sure, there are good films, but there's a lot of cynical slop being turned out too and it's become so prevalent that it's a bit of a joke at this point. I blame the stagnation on the extreme consolidation of media companies.

by RankingMember

6/1/2026 at 3:27:02 PM

Are we though?

People I know watch less and less each year. I don't think it's because they're getting older, as the reasons they cite usually revolves around how the source material has been butchered.

And if subscriber numbers were still going up, I sincerely doubt that the producers kept increasing the subscription cost over the last few years.

Honestly, I think that soft power has been massively damaged too, with people looking for less virtue signalling and less asinine gender swaps along with contrived homosexuality in their media

by ffsm8

6/1/2026 at 5:46:53 PM

U.S. population pyramid graph is sobering enough.

by MajorTakeaway

6/1/2026 at 9:51:21 PM

Less and less though. New-ish Hollywood movies started feeling like a slop before ChatGPT was released with all their endless "Batman vs Pikachu"-likes.

by lII1lIlI11ll

6/1/2026 at 4:01:13 PM

Speak for yourself.

by gverrilla

6/1/2026 at 4:30:39 PM

You've not seen Dune?

by dmos62

6/1/2026 at 5:36:24 PM

I have not seen Dune.

by Biganon

6/1/2026 at 4:18:32 PM

[dead]

by redsocksfan45

6/1/2026 at 6:01:16 PM

American troops have been granted full immunity against Swedish law when they are in Sweden, according to the most recent military treaties. I don't know if you consider such a deal to be soft power or hard power. But it is a lot more than any server room raid.

by carlosjobim

6/1/2026 at 3:13:28 PM

[dead]

by han1

6/1/2026 at 3:08:34 PM

Yes! thank fuck!

by everyone

6/1/2026 at 4:13:35 PM

Great documentary on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6qcJt2NPY8

by kobieps

6/1/2026 at 9:22:58 PM

I was hoping someone shared this! Truly a great doc.

by rglover

6/1/2026 at 10:21:25 PM

A much more interesting article would cover HOW they are still up. Would love to know the details of the how in this case.

by nwellinghoff

6/1/2026 at 10:40:44 PM

Here you go:

https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-runs-on-21-raid-proo...

by lobf

6/1/2026 at 10:35:09 PM

... said the FBI/NSA agent

by sleight42

6/1/2026 at 9:53:59 PM

I'm curious why IPFS never took off (I haven't dug into it much), but it seems more decentralized than BT.

by theLiminator

6/1/2026 at 9:38:06 PM

For most of that 20y, TPB was behind OVPN (vpn provider). They're the other provider I trust besides Mullvad.

by WarOnPrivacy

6/1/2026 at 4:39:08 PM

It works great with a nice stremio setup for live streaming. No subscriptions necessary anymore.

by someguyiguess

6/1/2026 at 8:27:49 PM

So many gigabytes downloaded! Long live the King !

by gitowiec

6/1/2026 at 5:12:19 PM

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?

by shevy-java

6/1/2026 at 4:49:09 PM

All the best stuff doesn’t get licensed by streaming services at all

Entire generations of people have no idea something exists

by yieldcrv

6/1/2026 at 7:48:32 PM

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.

by system2

6/1/2026 at 3:02:10 PM

If its not on their top 100/48 hr list then its not worth watching.

by t1234s

6/1/2026 at 3:47:07 PM

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.

by mmh0000

6/1/2026 at 6:47:40 PM

Remember how liberating it was to record TV shows or movies to VHS tape? My dad still has VHS tapes of Simpsons recordings that I'd rewatch as a kid.

by 2OEH8eoCRo0

6/1/2026 at 3:58:18 PM

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.

by tayo42

6/1/2026 at 5:06:14 PM

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

by smallstepforman

6/1/2026 at 4:02:16 PM

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

by Cockbrand

6/2/2026 at 12:22:45 AM

You're probably in the US? Doesn't work here in the UK like half of the internet these days.

by kypro

6/1/2026 at 7:01:40 PM

The industry combats piracy by making fake websites that deliver scam URLs. But I've almost never had a problem finding the real TPB link.

by gosub100

6/1/2026 at 2:58:09 PM

<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.

by everyone

6/1/2026 at 4:08:12 PM

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

by kobieps

6/1/2026 at 7:15:59 PM

For a brief moment I used Netflix, but very quickly went back to actually watching anything by I want.

I feel for the kids that are waking up to this enshitification, without a clue on how to sail.

by dlev_pika

6/1/2026 at 3:04:01 PM

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"

by alex1138

6/1/2026 at 8:19:34 PM

Try to use Yandex for some shady stuff and see what actually google blocks and doesn't.

by dizhn

6/1/2026 at 9:20:57 PM

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.

by gamblor956

6/2/2026 at 12:40:29 AM

[flagged]

by Automator666

6/1/2026 at 5:23:04 PM

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.

Are our institutions this incapable?

by jstummbillig

6/1/2026 at 5:32:59 PM

I don't know who's included in your "our", but I rather strongly like that American/Swedish/EU/whoever institutions don't have the capability to control the entire world and would prefer it stay that way. That's the beauty of the internet, and it's concerning that many people regard that lack of complete global control as an "incapability". Your laws don't, and shouldn't, apply to me.

by applfanboysbgon

6/1/2026 at 5:39:02 PM

I'm astounded that they've been able to keep that domain name.

by ProjectArcturis

6/1/2026 at 6:20:39 PM

God I hope so

by squibonpig

6/1/2026 at 2:37:41 PM

> 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.

by palmotea

6/1/2026 at 2:43:03 PM

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.

by Jeremy1026

6/1/2026 at 3:55:53 PM

For one, not every entry of the Stormlight Archives is on it.

by Pay08

6/1/2026 at 2:53:54 PM

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

by voidUpdate

6/1/2026 at 2:55:24 PM

once it hit streaming services the webrip was on it within hours.

by busterarm

6/1/2026 at 2:56:50 PM

I don't recall exactly when it went onto streaming, but I'm pretty sure I got a good quality version before that. It may have been released for streaming in other regions earlier than I thought though, I don't keep super up to date with that sort of thing, as I generally don't watch movies super soon after they're released

by voidUpdate

6/1/2026 at 3:01:35 PM

I find the stream rips to be really shitty quality.. The original source is very low bitrate, compressed tae fuck. I find for stream rips from netflix for example I need to download a 4k rip in order to watch in 1080, and that's acceptable.

by everyone

6/1/2026 at 2:50:15 PM

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

by 1970-01-01

6/1/2026 at 2:49:18 PM

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.

by dyauspitr

6/1/2026 at 3:05:01 PM

That's the tragedy of the MAFIAA death throes period imo.. With all their lawsuits and bullshit they never even slowed down the big public trackers and torrents of the popular stuff they were trying to stop being shared.. Instead they killed loads of small private trackers which housed exquisitely curated collections of stuff that wasn't available anywhere else for neither love nor money.

by everyone

6/1/2026 at 2:45:56 PM

> on newer (public) sites

Example of said sites?

by xnx

6/1/2026 at 2:49:33 PM

rutracker, 1337x, nyaa are the first that come to mind.

by Retr0id

6/1/2026 at 5:17:03 PM

newer? my rutracker account is an adult, I'm pretty sure.

by b65e8bee43c2ed0

6/1/2026 at 5:28:07 PM

It's marginally newer than TPB

by Retr0id

6/1/2026 at 2:51:06 PM

ext in tonga

by johncoltrane

6/1/2026 at 2:53:36 PM

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

by moi2388

6/1/2026 at 4:43:56 PM

Tons of Japanese shows and movies are not there at all.

Not a single Utaban episode is there, even though there's many on youtube.

by ranger_danger

6/1/2026 at 4:44:41 PM

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

by bronlund

6/1/2026 at 4:53:08 PM

References for this claim?

by efnx

6/1/2026 at 5:05:40 PM

[flagged]

by bronlund

6/1/2026 at 7:29:09 PM

I can't wait to be indicted for downloading Daria with the original soundtrack, something no one will sell me.

by platevoltage