I do the this and it’s great. An entire distro takes up only a few GB. Many graphical installers don’t support installing on an existing btrfs partition (or subvolume) and want to create a new one. This can often be solved by manual intervention (via terminal).
Hate the players not the game. Players being the rights holders.
Yeah. Piracy being legal or Piracy not being sanctioned are two entirely different things. Idk about the former, but the latter is the case in many countries.
E.g. downloading and streaming is legal in Switzerland, while it’s illegal in the EU. But it’s not sanctioned, so nobody cares.
Uploading/seeding is illegal in both regions, thus torrenting copyrighted material is illegal. But Switzerland doesn’t really prosecute torrenting, so nobody cares.
If Cloudflare wants to operate in a jurisdiction it has to follow its laws. They can fight them in court, but if a court orders them to do something they’ll likely comply in some way or another.
E.g. UK wanted a backdoor in E2EE iCloud, so Apple disabled E2EE in the UK.
Yes, but the point is keeping the quality the same. If you reencode a 5000 kbps x264 Blu-ray encode to 3000kbps x265 you will have visibly worse quality.
If you encode the corresponding Blu-ray remux with x265 to 3000 kbps the result will likely be nearly indistinguishable from the 5000 kbps x264 encode.
For OP: I also prefer smaller releases so I download mostly h265 WEB-DLs. They are usually around 3000-5000 kbps (1.3-2.3GB/hour) and look fine (especially as they usually come with HDR).
Redownloading WEB-DLs in the right size will give you the best quality for the small size (and saves energy, depending on where you live).
I’ve never used them but I heard about them in the context of private DNS and VPS hosting. E.g. they act as a middleman to shield domain the shield the client from authorities (at least to some extent — they still have to follow the laws).
Given their focus on privacy I’d trust them for torrenting at least as much as the other options. As a first VPN I’d say it’s great because of their flat 5€/m price. A few years ago I used Mullvad for that purpose — until they removed port forwarding.
If you want port forwarding the choice is between AirVPN, ProtonVPN and Njalla. Iirc PIA also supports port forwarding, but their ownerships reputation is no good.
Mullvad, IVPN and many other services don’t support port forwarding.
Gitlab also follows DMCA.
Codeberg is a bit different, since they aren’t based in the US. However, they’re still required to forward copyright complaints. I don’t know of any examples of them taking down repos.
Edit: German law, which applies to Codeberg, is quite strict when it comes to what is considered circumvention of copy protection, so it’s not unlikely that Nintendo would have a good chance there too. IANAL.
[…] what happens when everyone starts using it and torrents are no longer downloaded and properly seeded?
It’s already happening. More and more people stream torrents and don’t seed back which kills public torrents. Imo Debrid is not as big of an issue as they don’t necessarily tax the P2P network as much as someone only streaming torrents and automatically dumping them directly.
Additionally downloading torrents after you watched them does not make much sense as you’d tax the network without benefit (unless you seed to say a ratio of 2+).
If you currently have torrents there’s nothing stopping you from continuing to seed them if you don’t need the storage. Long term seeders are especially important for keeping torrents alive and you won’t need to redownload content you’ve watched just to seed it.
As long as you seed to 1.0 ratio (e.g. 1GB up, 1GB down) per torrent you don’t hurt the network. More means you compensate for someone not seeding.