Is Hollywood winning the war against the pirates?

A

Arielle luvs u™

New member
The other day me and some frienRAB were discussing how we no longer bother 'acquiring' movies from the internet as they all seem to be such poor quality these days (in terms of A/V). Maybe it's because we've all got so used to HD TV and Blueray or maybe the novelty has warn off but the poorly shot hand cam copies just seem a complete waste of time now. As for DVD rips - I haven't seen one of them for film that's not already out on DVD in about a year.

Is this everyone else's experience or has the good quality stuff just moved on to another level of piracy that i haven't heard of yet (a bit like the change from Kazaa style programmes to BitTorrents)?

BTW - i'm not interested in a debate about the morality of it and i'm not asking or wishing to discuss how to do anything illegal.
 
As far as file sharing goes the genie is out of the bottle. All the "war on piracy" will do is force the people doing it further underground. They'll just find more ingenious ways of covering their tracks and continue out of sight.
 
You've not been looking hard. Toy Story 3 in 3D has been on the Pirate Bay for weeks.

A-Team movie has been up there about 2 months.
 
As said further back in the thread, I get given the occasional 'knock off' DVD by mates. I watch it and if the film's any good I buy a copy, with resultant decent picture and sound quality plus extras.
If it's naff then it gets consigned to the round file never to be watched again!

I think the film companies are missing a trick here.
They should make low quality copies available on the internet. People could watch them and then decide based on what they've seen, whether or not to buy a decent copy.
 
To be honest, I think the effect piracy has on hollywood isn't as bad as they like to make out. The majority of people like going to the cinema as a social thing, as a treat and as a source of entertainment. These people would never be happy with downloaRAB which, if not dvdrips, tend to be very poor quality.

There are plenty of people willing to watch poor knock-off versions but I don't think these people would go to the cinema anyway. Take Wolverine as an example. An early workprint was widely circulated as a torrent months before its release. Only the special effects at the end were unfinished. It was portrayed as a nightmare by the studio and the certain death of the film at the box office. End result: an $87 million opening in the US.
 
Agreed with this.

The pirates will always be one step ahead. The big crack down on file-sharing music, for example, hasn't really made a dent to the pirates, just driven them further into hiding...yet it still takes next to no effort to find what you want illegally, for all the fuss the authorities make about closing down sides and issuing fines.
 
One inacurrate thing the studios do is when they say a blockbuster (lets say 'Watchmen') ''lost $450 million to piracy last year. They get that figure by assuming that everyone who illegally downloaded the movie would have gone and paid to see it. I think only a fraction of illegal downloader would have gone to the cinema to see it anyway.

I think there is a large factor as to why piracy has risen, that the business doesn't address......is that a substantial number of people don't like going to the cinema anymore as prices are very high and anti-social behaviour at screenings is not being stamped out by cinema owners. I don't pirate, and i think it's wrong, but i can completely see why people do it.

If you charge people
 
Hollywood is far from winning the war on piracy. With the advent of Broadband and better computers, the quality of pirate films has gone up. It doesn't take long these days to download a good quality pirate copy. Also cinemas are cracking down on people bringing in video cameras. Oh and why waste your bandwidth downloading a bad quality copy?

Edit: 1000th post! Woohoo!
 
Never bought any of these movie bootlegs.
Quality is too important to me so I'd rather wait and get the best quality picture and sound for a price thats hardly going to break the bank

I missed episode 2 of the last series of Lost so I downloaded it to copy to dvd.
While the quality was acceptable , it wasn't a patch on the genuine article and the time and trouble involved in downloading then converting to dvd format then burning was simply not worth it
 
"Time and trouble" = five minutes to find a torrent, then let it download in the background. I can watch avi's by plugging a USB stick into my DVD player. No DVD burning necessary.

If a film is good enough to warrant multiple viewings, I will buy the DVD for the higher quality and the extras. If I'm only ever going to watch it once, a downloaded rip will more than suffice.
 
you're fortunate you live near a cineworld (however correct me if i'm wrong, doesn't the cineworld unlimited offer exclude London, if so that exempts a large chunk of people) .
ODEON (the largest cinema chain in UK and Europe,) do not do such an offer like this, their only scheme is the 'premiere club' a pretty poor loyalty points scheme, which you need to pay for just to be set up with. Vue (the other big player) had a good season pass, but that's been phased out for a similar points reward scheme. People with access to a Cineworld style pass are the exception and not the rule sadly.
 
I think piracy is more likely because compression technology has improved dramatically in the last few years. A Blu-ray film compressed as a 2gb MKV file will look great played on a laptop media player such as VLC, Windows Media Player, Realplayer. This is near perfect HD 720p or 1080p quality and yet the size of the file is approximately half of a single side standard definition DVD disc (that holRAB 4.7gb). H.264 and MPEG-4 codec - this is what makes it possible. It's revolutionized file sizes.

Super-fast broadband speeRAB matched with films at around 2gb - at near perfect HD resolution - will only encourage more illegal downloading. The compression and downloading technology is too advanced. In 2000 this wasn't possible, speeRAB were slower, files were much bigger, Blu-ray HD wasn't invented, but now, in 2010, it's all changed. Nobody can stop technological progress.
 
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