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.
>... 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.
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.
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
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.
Ironically, tho, sometimes I wish there was a parallel collection without the music videos because I kind of enjoy their actual real-world misadventures and them being "on the road" out in public (menace) more than the hilarious music video critique sessions
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.
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.
Of course it implies volume - shipped volume. Which is what you worry about when you think about posting every day: viewers going elsewhere is a commercial worry about your product, it has nothing to do with the quality of your art. When you think in terms of content, art quality becomes an optional byproduct of commercial worries about having product.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh sure, and I've considered that move a few times. It's definitely something I'll do in the future if the quality of these rips begins to look worse on newer TVs.
I think the biggest thinking preventing me from pulling that trigger is the charm of the old TV station logo in the bottom of each episode that's from the same local station I grew up watching the show on. Even many of the end credits have a little side chyron pop out with the evening's programming schedule on it. It's super nostalgic for me, and it almost feels wrong to watch the show without any of that.
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.
There was an episode in one of the earlier seasons where Homer falls asleep while driving with a dreamlike montage and when it aired it had this nice little guitar melody, but the song was replaced in all later inatances.
I still get that original melody stuck in my head because I must have watched the original dizens of times from VHS, but I've never been able to find it again.
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.
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
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.
> You pay now the price of a single DVD, for a whole extensive catalogue of content.
You pay that amount for access to said catalogue of content for a single month. If you bought the DVD, it would work for years/decades to come (assuming no manufacturing defects) plus you'd be well within your rights to make a digital copy of that DVD for your private collection.
Sure, you probably only watched that DVD 1-3 times, but that's not the point. The point is you bought it and that gives you certain rights that are now totally absent from a digital first media consumption reference point.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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?
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?
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
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!
Not to put words in their mouth, but my question would be: isn't that why movies are more expensive than an audio track? Not to mention that movies have "concerts" much more regularly and in many places at once where they make money, no? I don't really have an idea of the exact economics of it all, so these are genuine questions.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Disney+ defaults to the sound settings passed to it by the user's TV or device. It doesn't default to surround sound unless the user sets their TV or Roku or other device to surround sound.
And either way...it's the programmers at fault here. Very hypocritical for tech bros to pirate someone else's content when it's their own brethren that created the problem they're using to justify their piracy.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've went through the exact same cycle. Also, a year ago I thought I'd gift my elderly dad a Netflix subscription for a year. Just because it was easy for him to use on the TV. When I seen the price and checked the TV shows and movies on it I realised how much stuff was NOT on it!
Anyway - I bought a NAS instead and start running a plex server. Everyone's a winner!
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.
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
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.
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.
There is nothing to negate because there was never a theft in the first place. Consult the laws of your country before making wild assertions and ask a lawyer if you cannot understand them yourself.
It’s like saying the death penalty isn’t murder because the law says it’s not.
I guess in your mind hitler isn’t a mass murderer because what he was doing was technically legal under his regime. To each their own if that’s how you want to logically frame your moral logic.
Personally imo, if I create something and that something is MY work of art and what I put my own blood sweat and tears into, and I want it to be inconvenient to watch because that’s my prerogative, that doesn’t give you the fucking right to watch it. I don’t want someone like you watching it.
Wow. Bringing up murder and hitler when talking about piracy. Some parts of the internet are truly eternal.
None of this is new. None of your ideas are unique. Stop attempting to draw moral equivalency to theft or anything else.
Back in the glory days of piracy, profits from entertainment kept going up? You know why? Those pirates were almost certainly not going to pay in the first place. No one lost money. It was university students, high schoolers, plain old poor people that were pirating.
Making it hard to watch your movie didn’t raise revenue, we all just did something else. Because we had no money.
Seems like the opposite to me. We don't like theft because the victim loses something. If stealing a car spawned a new car for you while the "victim" kept his, would it be a problem? So I don't really get the murder analogy. It's more like if the government had defined some act as murder even though nobody died.
Claiming you have 4k resolution when you upscale (damn, those DS9 episodes looked really terrible on Netflix) and claiming sound quality when you have none, is still theft.
it is. It's like if you're son or daughter was really just a piece of shit human being and I murdered your child.... It's still murder. No amount of excuses can justify it.
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)
Copyright is a deal to encourage the creation of more information that society sees as valuable by granting limited time monopolies. If we don't all end up with the unmolested work in the end then it had no right to ever receive any copyright protections in the first place. The original creator isn't even the primary party being harmed here - they already got their paycheck out of the deal.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lots of systems like Jellyfin/Emby/Plex etc will pull subtitles from a online repo. And yeah, exactly what you say will happen a lot of the time, and it's near imposable to work out which ones are correct.
I watched an English language TV show, that had a load of German in it. And I got subs for all the English, nothing from the German, then I switched to another source, then it had the inverse, which was great. But what if I wanted subs for the whole thing?
I think one even had the German words, in German....
That's considered a feature in the community. Burning subs on the video trace is considered bad, but most video player will not automatically show any subtitle track.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.