This is the first movie I ever pirated, specifically because of this bullshit pricing. Now I have a VPN and a 500 GB server, which I’m sure will need to be upgraded at some point lol
I remember those days...about 20 years ago haha I finally dismantled my 189 TB server about 3 months ago because I'm moving 1,300 miles away. I have 50 TB in the cloud now. Space goes quick, especially these days with 1080p with HDR and 4K with Dolby Atmos and Vision. I think my biggest single file is about 125 GB. Many of them are 50-80 GB a piece.
I find the best way if you're on a budget is to have a small collection of 4k movies, with an even smaller rotation of new 4k movies - then have everything else at 1080p x265. Still want at least 8TB ideally, so down the NAS rabbit hole we go..
If you're low on storage IDK if 4K is even worth it, maybe low-end (compressed audio, HDR10) 4K. Once you go 4K all the way, it gobbles up space quickly. I had like 250 4K movies and it was about 10-15 TB (rough estimation, this was months ago)
I think it depends on your setup - if you've got a good 4k HDR TV then by all means you could just watch then delete and it would be worth it. But yeah good point, may as well do 1080 otherwise, if you want a collection. I've only got 90 movies at 1080p and struggle to justify keeping more than that.
It's object storage, so actually not as much as you'd think. I think it was like $500 for a year, the price increases 4 fold after that if you don't upgrade to a higher tier
Just a heads-up: no matter how safe you feel with your VPN, you shouldn't share this explicitly on a public forum. You're never as safe as you think you are.
Literally no one cares about a single person doing it for personal usage. It's not worth the effort for law enforcement. It's like busting a teenager for a gram of weed when the guy down the road is selling pounds a day.
Unless you have a reason to hide, no one really cares. If OP is in the US it would take at least two subpoenas (one for reddit Lemmy to get OP's IP address, and one to OP's ISP to match the IP to a physical address) to figure out who OP is. If OP isn't in the US then it gets a lot more difficult.
We're on Lemmy, not reddit. Your instance admin likely doesn't have a legal team, if nothing else you'll be putting them at risk.
IDK why people are so flippant about this. The US intelligence agencies absolutely have the means and resources to surveil you if you give them the slightest reason to. Even if they DGAF about your pirating, doing so could flag you for further monitoring and they can do so even if you have a VPN in place.
VPN's aren't armor, they're more like camouflage. But if you're running through the thicket yodeling about the crimes you're committing, that camouflage isn't doing you much good.
It's not a crime, it's a civil offense, so the only people looking for you are, in theory, copyright holders, not cops.
Teenagers actually do get busted for small amounts of weed sometimes, no one is getting busted for piracy since 10+ years outside of a small handful of copyright trolls (so if you torrent the porn videos associated with their companies without a vpn).
Nobody is coming after you, don't worry about it. If they were really determined? Maybe, possibly, depending on many factors but you're a very small fish in a very big pond.
Yep, I've been screaming it from the rooftops for years and have gotten a few "stop downloading pirated content" letters from ISPs, and I'm still here.
Consumer level piracy is like the lowest tier of illegal (assuming US). VPN actually does confer perfect security in this specific circumstance, zero chance of consequences.