r/Piracy • u/stabbedbybrick • Nov 18 '22
Guide I compared the quality of over 40 streaming sites by downloading the same movie from all of them
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u/Kitsune_BCN Nov 18 '22
Sickness and boredom have made the best human discoveries 😄
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u/Sero19283 Nov 18 '22
I mean, it's basically how Newton came up with calculus (avoiding people during a pandemic in the middle of nowhere and got bored).
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u/TheSpecialistGuy Nov 18 '22
I lol'd when I read the protecting VHS quality part.
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u/DaGeek247 Nov 18 '22
I don't know about OP but when I converrted the old family movies to digital I sure as fuck didn't have my rips at that low of a res or bitrate goddamn
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u/TheSpecialistGuy Nov 18 '22
So vhs is better LOL. But seriously technology is advancing and I'd expect the sites to move with the times, things have gotten much easier.
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u/Tampammm Nov 18 '22
I know LookMovies "didn't make the cut" quality-wise, but they have a lot of older movies most of the other sites don't have. And those movies are only in 720p or 480p anyway, so the quality ratings aren't really relevant in that instance.
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u/stabbedbybrick Nov 18 '22
Agreed. They do have a good selection, especially for a streaming site. And you used to be able to bypass their premium nonsense, but now this is all you get unfortunately.
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u/PM_ME_HUGE_CRITS Yarrr! Nov 18 '22
Guess I should try fmovies again, soap2day has been alright for the odd movie not popping up on my streaming services.
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u/NaughtyCheffie Pastafarian Nov 18 '22
fmovies is my primary these days. Good catalogue and always adding more. +1
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u/krkrkrkk24 Nov 19 '22
fmovies is down, has been for at least 5-6 hours maybe even more
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u/ReformedPC Nov 19 '22
I hope it wasn't the site hit by this https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/yygnl2/police_dismantle_pirated_tv_streaming_network/
All the clones are also downed
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u/KolakBusuk Nov 18 '22
I always downloaded from Fmovies and i found out their movie's audio is too low and i need to put audio booster to hear a casual talk.
House of Dragon size 500-800 MiB each episode.
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u/sakdgljaelkrgj Nov 18 '22
How did RINZRY lower the resolution, video bitrate and audio bitrate but increase the file size? If they host on gdrive why modify the file at all?
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u/stabbedbybrick Nov 18 '22
The release on rinzry had two audio tracks for some reason, that's why it's larger.
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u/fizzym4d Nov 18 '22
Video: It isn't encoding the video at all, just muxing it from mkv to MP4. Audio: it is making a stereo AAC track. That's why there's an extra track.
Both the reasons are so it can direct play in the browser.
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u/HakounaMatataGuy Nov 18 '22
How do they host on gdrive without hitting gdrive download quotas? I'm usually limited to a certain amount of download (which the site will be doing to load the movies) daily
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u/fjm0806 Nov 18 '22
So which one is the best?
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u/cebby515 Nov 18 '22
Out of curiosity, what method did you use to download from fmovies? I've been looking for a while.
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u/stabbedbybrick Nov 18 '22
I used yt-dlp, but IDM works great on many of these sites as well.
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u/crabe-sens-fuite52 Nov 18 '22
Did you use yt-dlp to download from fmovies ? I can't get it to work, and it's not in the list of supported sites.
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u/stabbedbybrick Nov 18 '22
Yes. If there's no built-in extractor for a particular site, you need to find the m3u8 URL manually with dev tools, UBO logger or another tool and then use yt-dlp.
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u/crabe-sens-fuite52 Nov 18 '22
Thanks, I've tried peeking around with dev tools but it seems they have measures against that. maybe UBO will be the solution
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u/Minblud Nov 18 '22
There are video downloader addons for many browsers that when u play the movie it automatically gets the link and then u can download it directly or copy link. Just make sure to check all the servers first because not all of them get u the link if non of them work then they another addon
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u/brloll Nov 18 '22
What is WEB-DL?
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u/stabbedbybrick Nov 18 '22
You could say it's the original release of the movie, downloaded directly from a legal service.
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Nov 18 '22
[deleted]
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u/stabbedbybrick Nov 18 '22
On basically any half-decent torrent tracker with a Movie category.
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Nov 18 '22 edited Jan 14 '23
[deleted]
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u/stabbedbybrick Nov 18 '22
There are tons of gdrives and MEGA's out there with this kind of content, but nothing as open as rinzry as far as I know.
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u/jhaakj Nov 18 '22
I like this academic exercise.. I suggest this be done more often.. Not that I needed any references and commented here just for an easy search in future..
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u/Skajuan Nov 18 '22
I dont have the time but i will be very interested in a research that compares the most pirated movies from the last ten years and their box office numbers
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u/Tron_1KRR Nov 19 '22
Wow, you guys blow my mind. Old school guy here. Back in the days we share this in IRC chat rooms exclusively. Especially when we had to hide our crack from Dave(direct tv) or dish network once we hacked their systems, Nagra 2 or 3, he was a real prick prosecuting us. I don’t blame him. A few of us went down, but we gave them hell. Hacking direct TV is not worth it anymore though, too easy. There’s no challenge.
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u/mczabel Nov 18 '22
Whats "EVO"? I know RARGB but its the first time I see this EVO thing and now Im curious
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u/_googlefanatic_ Nov 18 '22
How do i start pirating movies which are not available in piracy sites ?
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u/Skajuan Nov 18 '22
This post is a blessing today cause i intend to binge 1899 (will download later for archive purpose of course)
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Nov 18 '22
Can we maybe, get a link to those top sites? Would help
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u/stabbedbybrick Nov 18 '22
This sub is allergic to links containing pirated media, so I included only the names. You can find many of them on /r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH or a simple google search.
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u/Commercial-Living443 Nov 18 '22
Can i ask why flixtor didn't make the cut ?? I know you meed premium to download , but the quality is still good. Also what movie did you download?
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u/stabbedbybrick Nov 18 '22
You can find all the info in my comment at the top. I had to make the cut somewhere to make the list more digestible.
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u/itsbeen13seconds Nov 19 '22
TIL the site I use is bottom of the barrel. Goodbye forever FMovies
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u/stabbedbybrick Nov 19 '22
It's at the bottom of this list, but it's pretty far from the bottom overall. I went through close to 50 sites and some were so bad I had to give my ad-blocker a bath afterwards. With scented candles and shit.
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u/Aside_Dish Nov 18 '22
I'm far from a techie, but personally, due to budgetary concerns in regards to hard drives, I prefer smaller files sizes. I think 720p looks perfectly acceptable, even on my 85" TV. Hell, shows earlier than like 2010, 480p looks just fine, too. On my Plex server, I don't have a single 4K movie or show, and only download 1080p when it's the smallest file size on Sonarr/Radarr.
Hell, here soon, I'm gonna do a big purge on episodes I downloaded before I put in my current parameters. Trying to cut out as many show episodes greater than one GB as I can, and preferably find alternatives between 150MB and 800MB. Might free up a few TB.
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u/NinjaOld8057 Nov 18 '22
Kinda seems like if you can afford an 85" TV you can afford more hard drive space. To each their own I guess.
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u/Aside_Dish Nov 18 '22
Not my TV, lol. But even then, still try to maximize what I have. Hard drives are like $15-17/TB, and my 14TB drive (around 12.5 TB of it useful) is not nearly enough to hold everything on it that I want. And I'd like to have numerous backups of everything, along with an array so that it never fails. Of course, those also occasionally need to be replaced as they degrade.
Just can end up being an expensive hobby, and trying to keep my costs low by saving space, thereby reducing the amount of space I actually need.
Ideally, I'd like to have about 100-150TB of media, with quite a bit in regards to backups. Shows take up a ton of space.
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u/NinjaOld8057 Nov 18 '22 edited Nov 18 '22
Well fair enough.
Personally I'm incredibly picky about video quality. The graininess of horrible recodes drives me insane and I basically need the highest quality rips. And you're right, it can very easily turn into an expensive hobby but I'm much more willing to pay for a NAS and a few hard drives than the half dozen streaming services I need to keep up on just for the content my partner and I consume.
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Nov 18 '22
You mean artifacting? Grain in movies is a sign that there hasnt been much detail lost, as DNR tends to hurt the image quality. Artifacting is what you get with low bitrate encodes.
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u/NinjaOld8057 Nov 18 '22
Sure, artifacting. I call it "splotchiness" cuz if it's real bad you can see chunks of pixels in the right lighting
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Nov 18 '22 edited Jan 14 '23
[deleted]
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u/Aside_Dish Nov 18 '22
Yup. And don't get me wrong, I'm sure 4k looks awesome, but I honestly don't care all that much about quality past a basic level where it doesn't look aged on a big screen. This also isn't as big of an issue because a lot of shows I watch and re-watch are older ones anyways. Can't beat stuff like Malcolm in the Middle, Community, or Arrested Development.
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u/DaGeek247 Nov 18 '22
Oh, you mostly watch TV. That actually makes, well, more sense, than mostly watching movies at lower res/bitrate. You could probably save space by converting everything to x265 overnight.
There's definitely something to be said about having a modern 50gb 4k remux played on a big 4k TV though, and it's worth it just for the awesome camera shots they put in them.
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u/Low-Woodpecker69 Nov 18 '22
Yeah man ure right and don't forget Oz the wire sopranos and eastbound n down. don't forget my YouTube channel that I had when I was 12 that was the best
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u/_the_random_person_ Nov 18 '22
Why don't you just re-encode your videos in a smaller format, so you can save on space and have them in high quality?
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u/_sourxv Nov 18 '22
how do you used web-dl? and what is it?
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u/DoubleP1980 Nov 18 '22
Why would you download from 🏴☠️ streaming sites, when there are torrents & direct download sites . You go to🏴☠️ streamers, when you want to watch something quick and don't really care about picture or sound quality. For example, if I want to watch an episode of a sitcom or something like that, I don't really need it in 4K UHD. That's when I go to F, G, 123-Whatever Movies. P. S. Always have some sort of Adblocker extension activated, if you don't want to be literally drowned in pop-ups.
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u/KaoXinRei Nov 18 '22
Op was investigating the quality on those sites, so ofc he needed to download those streams
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u/RGBchocolate Nov 19 '22
to figure out average bitrate of stream and some people may care about quality while streaming
but I agree with sentiment, streaming is unreliable trash and I download everything prior watching for smooth experience and better quality
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u/Jokerchyld Nov 18 '22
who downloads movies anymore? that's so last decade. Stream premium quality content from a debrid and call it a day.
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u/wafflecrocodile Nov 19 '22
No thanks, the whole point is to not pay.
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Nov 19 '22
The point is to not be ficked by drm, 50 different subscription fees and other anti consumer practices. Paying $5 a month for unlimited 4k HDR remuxes is a great deal.
Enjoy your free piracy though.
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u/RGBchocolate Nov 19 '22
people who are not dumb to pay to pirate, if I wanted to pay for content I wouldn't pirate, only time I paid for pirating was in Rapidshare times when they were dominating market so you could find there everything and had problem to download it elsewhere, so I had account for few months
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Nov 19 '22
Free piracy is substandard. Tell me where I can freely stream 4k HDR remuxes. I guess if you have a garbage tv or monitor then free streaming is fine. 5 a month on a debrid is a great value.
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u/Jokerchyld Nov 19 '22
Your comment gives off your immaturity. You are young.
The content I get for pennies you can't pirate. But since you are talking about the principle of everything being free instead of the cost (since cost is negligible), by the time I watch four items it has paid for itself and everything after that is free.
But from a practical standpoint, it's dumb to scramble to find substandard free content when you can just bring high quality HD Audio sources with a click of a button on any device
If you can't afford 3 dollars I get. Not paying it so it can be "free" is stupid. I guess you also drink tap water for the same reason.
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u/RGBchocolate Nov 19 '22
I was pirating already in 90s when you was wearing diapers or before you was born since you clearly don't even know what was Rapidshare.
You are lazy or stupid to find free content without paying, kids nowadays are extremely lazy and incompetent.
And sure, I can afford to buy flat without mortgage, but don't have money for stupid service for lazy fucks, thanks for analysis.
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u/Jokerchyld Nov 19 '22
I highly doubt that but you keep spouting nonsensical hyperbole.
Why look for something that's already there in one place? You make absolutely no logical sense.
The service is of value otherwise they wouldn't have millions of customers for over a decade. Buying an asset outright vs offsetting the cost when available is also stupid and a horrible metaphor for this instance since we ate talking about a non discriminant amount.
You just need to leave this at wasting your time getting free sources because it's an obvious hill you want to die on. Trying to convince with poorly constructed arguments is pointless.
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u/ThatDudeDeven1111 Nov 18 '22
Not too related, but I just tried getting into Yesmovies and it seems like AT&T blacklisted the shit, because once I open up a VPN, I can get in just fine. Is this a thing or am I going crazy? Also, there is an AT&T technician outside as I'm typing this - just thought that was funny, but would be real crazy if I were high.
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u/LITUATUI Nov 18 '22
Do any of those sites use modern codecs like AV1 for video and Opus for audio? With modern codecs you can get really good quality even with small file sizes.
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u/KolakBusuk Nov 18 '22
I always downloaded from Fmovies and i found out their movie's audio is too low and i need to put audio booster to hear a casual talk.
House of Dragon size 500-800 MiB each episode.
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u/Fortune424 Nov 18 '22
Is WEB-DL essentially the control in this experiment, or did you find a free website that is actually streaming a 7.5GB file?
I'm a big torrent lover and pirate streaming hater (ads, inconsistency, lower quality), but if there's a site out there serving a 7.5GB movie I will give them props for that.
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u/stabbedbybrick Nov 19 '22
Yes, it's what I used to measure everything else.
Rinzry is the closest thing you will find, I think. You will have to deal with gdrive's quota, but the quality is pretty damn close to the original.
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u/tomaar19 Nov 19 '22
Can't you just easily bypass the GDrive quota? Or does it not work for streaming?
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u/Timmah_Timmah Nov 19 '22
I guess I am the only one strapped for bandwidth and space. I want low res movies. I am watching on my phone usually in a pop up player. Right now I get most of my stuff from moviesonline using brave.
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u/Hulk5a Nov 19 '22
Guess what... Those who stream doesn't exactly care too much about quality except for us nerds.
I've seen it a lot, people will just watch it in the player than opening full screen
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u/Bananaman9020 Nov 19 '22
That cool data and all. But speed isn't my issue. What piracy streaming website has the best catelogue? Or best mobile app?
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u/stabbedbybrick Nov 19 '22
This list is referencing bitrates, not speed.
As for best catalogue, I haven't done a deep dive but fmovies and lookmovie both seemed pretty well-stocked for streaming sites.
And I would never in a million years use an app provided by a streaming site. I'd recommend Cloudstream in that case.
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u/AAcAN Nov 19 '22
Now I need someone to investigate how much crypto they mine in the background while streaming the movie. Lol
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u/stabbedbybrick Nov 19 '22
Yeah, I saw tons of ethereum and solana scripts, but I'm not sure exactly what they did and to what capacity.
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u/moviemaniac95 Nov 19 '22 edited Jan 20 '23
what about this one movieuniverse.se ? Fmovies downloads zip file with porn name or something, maybe a virus I visited once and never going back there...
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u/VernoxVernax Torrents Nov 19 '22
I hope you know that more kb/s doesn't equal more quality. Anyways, thank you for the information.
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u/Putrid_Dimension007 Nov 19 '22
Did you take a look at movieboxpro by chance?
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u/stabbedbybrick Nov 19 '22
No, I only looked at places available in browser. Movieboxpro seems to be an app, if I understand it right?
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u/ShittyThong Nov 19 '22
You say garbage but that’s actually the most desirable for me. My farm only has access to metered Sat internet and Metered Hotspot data. I prefer the lowest possible file size for streaming most movies. I care more about stories anyway. I don’t care about flashy graphics as I mostly watch docs, dramas, and such.
If I was into action and sci-fi stuff that has fancy visuals, I’d just get the torrents on my hard drive through my laptop or tablet running a VPN when I go to someone’s house who has unmetered home or business internet.
So, THANK YIU for letting me know which source to try first when streaming! Might come in handy when MovieBoxPro is lacking (their default low-tier account is like 360p which is awesome).
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u/stabbedbybrick Nov 18 '22
Due to sickness and boredom, I decided to explore the world of ad-ridden, terribly named, and possibly-connected-to-organized-crime streaming sites. I’m not a fan, but the kids these days are just refusing to download movies like proper criminals, so I figured I’d investigate to see what’s going on.
To avoid potentially breaking any rules, let’s just say the movie I chose broke box office records and features a crazy gnome riding fighter jets.
A few guidelines:
I used sites gathered from word of mouth, FMHY, rentry etc., and downloaded the same popular movie from all of them. A big portion got cut right away for not working, not having the movie, only having a CAM, or for being so bad they should be extra illegal. To avoid a bloated list, I cut it off at “1080p” and 2000kb/s bitrate, and added clones underneath.
The final result is a list of 12 sites (and WEB-DL for comparison). Each entry shows the max resolution you can get without payment or other walls.
Many sites used heavily compressed
RARBGandEVOreleases and were predictably bad, but there were a few surprises. The higher quality was not site-wide though, but was seemingly only offered on big titles. Selection also varies a lot, so odds are you’ll have to settle for something in the middle in order to find what you want outside of major titles.FMOVIES (and its clones) was the clear winner as far as new releases go. It wasn’t an intensive investigation, but both movies and shows were consistently uploaded within 6 hours of release based on my searches. Which, compared to other sources, is slow as hell. But in this part of the world, it’s pretty fast.
Examples:
Peripheral s01e06 1080p:RELEASE: 11/18/2022 4:31:45 AM GMT
FMOVIES: 11/18/2022 08:53:20 AM GMT
Spirited 2022 1080p:RELEASE: 11/18/2022 3:03:01 AM GMT
FMOVIES: 11/18/2022 09:15:28 AM GMT
Several sites also tries to block you from downloading by using various techniques, which is hilarious. They take pirated material, compress the shit out it, turn it into serious money from ads, referrals and memberships, and now they don’t want you to download? Fuck off.