Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ @lemmy.dbzer0.com Kribensis @lemm.ee 1 yr. ago

Have 4K TV show torrents entirely disappeared from public trackers?

I use a seedbox to run qBittorrent with Jackett, and have a bunch of sources on there. I know there are other methods, but that works for me and I'm comfortable with it.

Rarbg has been gone for about five months and it's harder and harder to find 4k TV rips. For current shows, sometimes you can get episodes as they air, but it's rare to see full seasons.

The tipping point was when I searched for a Netflix show from two weeks ago just now, with zero 4K results.

I've always hated private trackers since they're a pain in the ass, but is that the only option now? Do I need to look at a different method entirely? I've been torrenting since that existed, but if I need to do something else, let me know.

I don't expect to get torrent sites in any responses, but you can do that if you have any 😂

61 comments

I think it's about audience. People who care about quality and bitrates and such usually have their couple of private trackers. People who just want to watch things regardless of quality just get whatever
- That's what I'm asking. Until recently, one didn't need to bother with private trackers unless they wanted, say, a 4K rip of Suspiria from 1977, or some other incredibly specific thing. Private trackers, at least to me, were more trouble than they were worth. Why should I deal with them at all when I can get everything I need without begging for an invite and then annoying myself?
  
  As a result, I have never joined a private tracker, not ever.
  
  But now? I'm not sure. Something does seem to have changed systemically.
  
  There are semi private trackers out there that you can get an invite fairly easy, as do open signups pretty often.
  
  You don’t need to think about it too much, as most 4K content usually crosses the trigger for freeleech. That means you are fine as long as you don’t do a Hit ’n Run, which in itself is an asshole thing to do.
  
  I have a fully automated system and don’t even bother checking where I am downloading from, or what my ratios are, all is taken care in the background.
  
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  What show are you looking for? I'll check my trackers and see if I can get you an invite to somewhere that has it. Shoot me a DM.
Private trackers (e.g. TorrentLeech) often have rules around large torrents (>15gb) or even around season packs for shows. This means it's trivial to download 4K season packs, and all you have to do is seed them for the requisite number of days (to avoid being tagged with a hit and run), rather than try to maintain a ratio.
- I'm on private but don't have a seedbox, so I'm 100% pay to play. I pony up $100 every couple of years and my ratios don't matter. On a personal pride level I make sure my old favorites say seeding, esp now that they only have a couple of seeders, but for torrents with 30-100 seeds I'm not needed and my contribution with a 10Mb cable pip against Gb seedboxes is always nil.
  
  I paid for a seed box for one month, around $25 and built enough ratio from that month to last me years.
The segment of pirates that try to hunt for the highest quality are a small niche. Most pirates will sacrifice just to have it.
Most of the stuff I want to watch, even without piracy, isn't even originally broadcast in 4K to begin with so there is obviously no 4K rips for those.
- Man streaming services are even now making it hard to watch their content in 4k so yeah like, I've stopped expecting to see others ripping at that resolution, and will mostly only seek it out if it's something that deserves to be watched in 4k.
  
  Babylon 5 is being redone, I dunno if it's in 4k though.
Usenet. Found so many things that I couldn’t find on public trackers once I got down the concept and was able to set up an arr server with sabnzbd. It does cost some money, but I feel it’s negligible for what you get.
- I looked into usenet but i could never get over having to subscribe pay for it. Why bother when torrenting is free. I'm on a couple private trackers and use a few public, but I never pay for access for the trackers or pirated content. Ive donated before to private trackers, and I pay for my seedbox monthly but that's for a service, it's not a paywall for access. I also read there are download limits and having to find newsgroups that have the content you want. It all seems more work than its worth and you have to pay for the privilege to do that work for the same exact outcome. 🤷‍♂️
  
  I think OP needs a decent private tracker that's pretty easy to keep up with. My main private tracker has a rule, seed 3x or for 3 days to avoid hit an run on any torrent. You can also use earned coins from seeding to pay off hit and runs.
  
  Until I created a servarr stack, finding what I needed on Usenet never happened. Using Radarr with prowlarr and sabnzbd, now my missing files are down to maybe a dozen.
  
  I'd be fine with this. I have the seedbox for seeding. The problem is more about getting invites to a private tracker through some random method that I don't know 😂
  
  While 'the paywall for access' argument can be made for usenet indexers (which just index NZB files, not the releases themselves, with most still allowing up to 5 downloads a day via free membership tiers), in contrast to torrenting, usenet providers cache newsgroup binaries (the actual releases) on the servers of their respective usenet backbone. Because of that, releases that might run out of active seeders on public or even private torrent trackers after a few years are sometimes available for significantly longer on usenet.
  
  Edit: While it's not an excuse for the usenet indexers, rather the providers, usenet newsgroup binaries are downloaded directly from the servers of providers, and are thus not P2P like bittorrent is.
- It’s so great. I might have an invite if OP wants to try. They have so much 4K I don’t have the drive space.
  
  I'll try it! Feel free to DM me.
  
  Can I try that invite? I've been trying to get back on it lately
Some Netflix shows that are in 4K have not been showing up in private trackers lately
- For years I've assumed there was some kind of invisible image manipulation that effectively encrypts the Netflix user ID in the video feed itself, so they can use leaked video to pinpoint users that share recordings.
  
  Same type of thing paper printers do, and AI giants are trying to push now.
  
  LoL I remember in the early 2010s a porn comic that actually did this and people were shocked because it seemed like a lot of work for a small niche thing.
  
  And then we realized that converting to a png and then back to jpg killed the identifier. But the system was in place and I have seen so many versions of and workarounds for it. Someone even had a custom clipper software that just looked for the excess identifier data on the end of the file and would trim it.
  
  I think it's wise to always think they might be doing this kind of stuff, especially big companies, but breaking it is pretty easy usually even by accident.
  
  How would that work? And if it was being done I’m sure it would have been discovered already. I mean it is just video.
I don't usually torrent, but I just looked at recent eps from Usenet and it looks like the majority is 1080p max. 4k exist, but tend to be from streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, HBO, or AppleTV it seems.

I find NZBFinder to be a decent usenet indexer for free, so maybe take a look on there for the shows you're wanting and see if they're even out there. It could be they just aren't available at all.
- Thanks! I used to use Usenet! It's been quite some time. I think I used to get porn, back when you had to download your porn to watch it 😉
  
  It could be they just aren’t available at all.
  
  Scary thought. If nobody's doing 4K rips of a brand new hit Netflix show, the scene is not working right now. I'm inclined to think it's just gone private, but I really don't know.
  
  Netflix "4K" is often hit and miss. It doesn't always stream at a high enough bitrate even if it's labeled 4K. Basically it's anybody's guess what encoding you're gonna get at any given moment. I imagine that makes ripping quality very random.
  
  Could be completely wrong as I have no idea where i remember hearing this but for Netflix apparently there drm is different than others so there 4k rips are much less common. Again take with a grain of salt. But I also noticed a lack of 4k shows as well.
For some shows I've noticed that it's not too difficult to get around half of their seasons in 4K, with the 4K releases for the remaining seasons being seemingly nowhere, whether it be on public trackers, private trackers, or usenet. Doesn't seem to be an issue of shows only being shot in 4K after their first few seasons, as in some cases the 1st and 3rd seasons may have 4K releases without the 2nd season having one, for instance.
Where is the best place for Debrid users to find 4k content since private trackers are a no go for us?
- hdencode org (best public one)
  
  rlsbb ru
  
  scene-rls net
  
  Thank you very much!
Plenty of them on Stremio and with the Torrentio addon
For some shows I've noticed that it's not too difficult to get around half of their seasons in 4K, with the 4K releases for the remaining seasons being seemingly nowhere, whether it be on public trackers, private trackers, or usenet. Doesn't seem to be an issue of shows only being shot in 4K after their first few seasons, as in some cases the 1st and 3rd seasons may have 4K releases without the 2nd season having one, for instance.
I've been able to found them in 1337x and TorrentGalaxy
- I use both sources daily. 4K TV has notably disappeared from them in the past few months.
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