An increase in bad seeds on Bit Torrent? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 6 months ago by NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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So I've been grabbing a few shows I want to watch reruns of while playing Balatro that don't have good blu ray releases. My piracy is fairly limited these days so I don't bother with private trackers (do have a VPN though). In the past, I never really had an issue with grabbing a few one offs off the popular, maybe honeypot, sites like rarbg and 1337x.

But over the past month or so, I've noticed I have gotten a lot of shitty files. Skips here and there or garbled colors for a scene or two. At first I though it was just a bad file since re-downloading the torrent had the exact same problem.

But, on a whim, I did a recheck and had to download like 40% of a torrent. And then 20% the next time. Which made me assume my NAS was fucked or I was dealing with a lot of packet lsos (... I AM dealing with a lot of packet loss from my ISP). But when I redownloaded a "known bad" torrent I had the exact same corrupted file.

So am I just REALLY unlucky? Or is there an epidemic of shitty/malicious seeds on the public trackers these days?

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[-] zabadoh@ani.social 8 points 6 months ago

I have also noticed some dips in brightness in some shows.

Sounds like an encoding problem, or some sort of form of copy protection in the streamed video that screws up the encoding algorithms, like the old Macrovision copy protection on VHS tapes.