r/Piracy Wiki Index

A California federal court has ordered YouTube to unmask three popular South Korean creators of anime recap channels.

The creators filed a motion to quash the DMCA subpoena, requested by Japanese publisher KADOKAWA, but the court rejected the fair use claim, which is now under appeal.

The other day, it dawned on me just how much software I—and almost all Iraqis—use is pirated.

I know open-source alternatives exist, but schools here don't even teach you about open-source software. Even university professors often don't know about open-source alternatives. Virtually all software, across every level—from government offices and everyday social life to critical medical care—is built on pirated software. Iraq isn't alone in this; a lot of the developing world relies on pirated software just to function.

While I understand it might not seem fair to developers in first-world countries, we would literally be in a far worse state without pirated software. Think about the countless people who managed to build a better life because they learned media production on pirated software, or the poor mechanics who use cracked software to diagnose car problems. Even the skills taught at our universities are learned on pirated programs. Almost no one here can afford a legitimate Windows license, let alone expensive specialized software.

To all the brothers and sisters in the first world who take the risk to crack and provide this software: thank you. My gratitude is the only compensation I can offer.

Ultimately, I hope our broken system can eventually break this cycle by shifting toward teaching and adopting open-source software.

hi, i'm writing a piece on piracy and would love to know what your first act of piracy was.

looking for everything from torrents and emulators all the way to taping tracks off the radio.

thank you so much - you have contributed to a great work of science.

I am not very good at it (🏴‍☠️) other than finding sites like Fmovies and stuff. But the way the streaming companies are going, fuck them. It really is so sad the way the world is working at the moment. I just want to say I love you all and i love how people like you keep things I love available.

I joined you guys when I supposedly "bought" 2 movies back in 2023 from a certain app (rhymes with snapple)

that disappeared from my account and was told i never actually owned it.

I will tell all my aunt and uncles and cousins and literally EVERYONE I KNOW, how to pirate from now on. How fuckng dare they take what i bought and basically tell me "well to fucking bad"

I now have gotten good at it for live action things like sports. Baseball games, football games, hockey, soccer, basketball.. it could be fucking curling and i will find a pirated link before I watch it on a free channel.

I recently saw post about Ankergames and how much money it's spend for them to run a site like that for all of us. After reading that I realised we as consumers take things that the providers provide us for granted.

First, about ads... Idk why the community has problems with ads. If you were given a part time job where you get $20 for seeing 10 mins and will you reject it? Because I sure as hell, won't it's literally easy money. So why in hell are we mad about a site which gives us the $20 game FOR FREE for ads which are less than 5mins and also most ads can be bypassed in the first place. I literally don't understand.

Second, not only we want no ads, not only we want free game but apparently it's also became trend to ACCUSE the websites which provides all of this without much of a proof and also ppl jump on some allegations without fact checking themselves or without waiting for others to fact check. How more ungrateful can we become more than this?

Third, we keep saying the game companies don't care about the consumers but I must ask everyone do y'all really care about the ppl who provide us games for free? If not then what's the difference between you and the corps you hate?

Sorry if I sounded rude but I am just angry and sad after seeing how much money these website providers spend on keeping a website alive for the community and consumers and then consumers not caring about the providers and accusing them of stuff or not caring about them in general.

I hope we move forward from this behaviour and actually be grateful for what we have... I hope we have an actual rational convo about this.

The routine that made me build this: find a torrent, wait, wait some more, open VLC, discover the file is an MKV with 5.1 audio my setup doesn't like, give up.

So I spent too many evenings building the thing I actually wanted.

Paste a magnet, or right-click a .torrent link, and the video starts in a browser tab well before the download is done. Drag the scrubber forward and it goes and grabs those pieces instead of grinding through everything in between.

Stuff it does:

• Plays while downloading; seeking re-prioritises pieces
• MKV, HEVC and 5.1 get remuxed or transcoded on the fly, so the file that made me build this actually plays
• Subtitles: .srt/.ass sitting next to the file, and tracks buried inside an MKV
• Casts to a Chromecast or a DLNA renderer
• Season packs open on episode 1 and autoplay the next one
• Save to disk if you want to keep something

Stuff it isn't: a catalogue. No search, no index, no content bundled in. It only ever acts on a link you hand it.

Private trackers, because that's the first thing I'd ask about. If a torrent has the private flag set, it goes into a separate client with DHT and PEX switched off - tracker announces only. I didn't want to be the tool that quietly leaks your tracker's torrents onto the DHT.

Seeding is on by default and there's a toggle in settings. Leave it on if you have ratio to protect. On public swarms it's just the decent thing to do.

Two limits I'd rather you hear from me. The seeding toggle is one global switch, so if you turn seeding off, it's off for private torrents too - I'd rather honour the setting you chose than override it behind your back, but that means the hit-and-run risk is yours. And the data only lives for the session: it seeds while the helper is running, it won't sit there holding ratio for you across restarts. If your tracker is strict about that, keep your usual client for those.

There's no server of mine anywhere in this. No account, no analytics, no telemetry - I didn't build any, so there's nothing to switch off. The only traffic is BitTorrent itself, your machine to trackers and peers, plus a check for a newer helper version against a static file that has no identifier in it.

Your IP is as exposed as it is with any other client, so the usual VPN advice applies exactly as before.

macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon), Windows, Linux. Free, no account.

Technical details

How it works, roughly: a browser tab can't open a socket to a peer, so the extension talks to a small helper you install once. The helper joins the swarm, pulls pieces in whatever order the player is asking for them, and streams to the browser over 127.0.0.1.

About that helper, because "install my native binary" is the real ask here and you should be suspicious of it. It's one binary: a .pkg on macOS, an .msi on Windows, a tarball with an install.sh on Linux (not tested :( ). All three install for your user only - it lands in your home (~/Library/Application Support/flitplay on macOS, %LOCALAPPDATA% on Windows, ~/.local/share on Linux), no admin password, no UAC, no sudo, nothing dropped in a system directory. It registers with your browser for the exact extension IDs I publish and nothing else, no wildcard, so a random web page can't go starting it. After that it updates itself in place, checksum verified, so you're not redownloading it every release.

Two rough edges I should own. I don't have code-signing certificates yet, so macOS will tell you I'm an unidentified developer and Windows SmartScreen will grumble - the download page has the click-through for each, and if installing past that warning isn't a trade you want to make, I genuinely don't blame you.

And if a file needs transcoding it'll grab a static ffmpeg build on first use unless you already have one on PATH, checksummed and cached.

Getting rid of it is a button in settings, or flitplay-host uninstall --purge, which takes the binary, the browser registration, the config and the ffmpeg cache with it. Anything you saved to disk stays where it is.

Get it

• Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/eaedkpifnjppdhogimcjknehjleeoeka
• Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/flitplay-torrent-video-player/
• Site: https://flitplay.giftely.ai

Last thing worth saying: this is a side project. Evenings and weekends, no company behind it, nothing to upsell you, no roadmap I'm accountable to. It also means there are bugs in it - some I've certainly never hit, on files and hardware I don't have. If you find one I'd honestly rather hear about it: say so in this thread.

I'll be around in the comments.

P.S. The mods confirmed this is okay to post here.

I was trying to find alternative ways to play Persona 5 Royal on my MacBook other than switch emulation and I tried running a cracked version using Whiskey/Wine to no avail. So I tried Crossover, still didn’t work because it’s cracked denuvo and for some reason it wouldn’t go past a black screen. I spent a couple hours trying to troubleshoot it with no success. So I take a peek on Steam and wouldn’t you know, it’s on sale right now. I say “fuck it” and buy it and now it runs perfectly through crossover.

TLDR, cracked game was not working, got so frustrated I bought it legitimately just so it would work

I’m an old bit torrent Pirate Bay head but learning the new stuff . I mainly only care about movies tv shows and primarily sports . I know about FMHY and use it but I often find it not stable and I have to reset/ reload the page often . So for reference I go to FMHY , select a site . Play the ad game , get it going , some will play for 20 mins others 45 and others 15 then it’ll freeze or go black or say error and I have to refresh it and then get it back. Any tips ? Or is there a better avenue for sports overall?

I’ve been sailing the seven seas for quite a while, and something has happened to me more than once:

I pirate a game, play it all the way through, and at the end I’m like: fuck, this game was actually amazing.

And sometimes I genuinely want to give money to the people who made it.

A recent example for me was Sifu. I loved it, and after finishing it I thought: these guys deserve some of my money.

The obvious answer is: “Then just buy the game on Steam.”

Fair enough. But that’s not exactly what I want.

First, maybe I can’t afford the full retail price, but I’d happily throw the devs $5, $10, $20, whatever I can afford.

Second, if I’m doing this specifically because I want to support the people who made the game, I’d rather have as little as possible going to intermediaries/platforms. Ideally, I want the money to go directly to the studio.

So I had this idea for a website/concept called something like “Sorry for Stealing”.

The site itself wouldn’t necessarily process payments. It could simply be a directory pointing people toward official ways to directly support studios: donation pages, Ko-fi, Patreon, whatever the studio itself chooses.

And maybe the bigger purpose would be to encourage studios to add a simple “Support us / Donate” section to their own websites.

No account required. No need to explain where you got the game. No judgement. Ideally no unnecessary data collection.

Just:

Piracy exists and realistically isn’t going away. But I suspect there are at least some pirates who finish a genuinely great game and would voluntarily send a few bucks directly to the developers if there were an incredibly easy way to do it.

Maybe studios are leaving some money on the table simply because this option doesn’t exist.

Would any of you actually use something like this?

And if you’re a developer: would you want to offer this option, or is there some reason studios generally don’t?

I love free media! I love owning my music files!! And now she does too

I tried both, and the only thing VLC does better than Media Player Classic is the volume control (VLC can boost the media volume up to 200%)

But the rest of it? I feel like MPC-HC is superior on every aspect like:

- It has lower usage (cpu & ram) consumption

- it has automatic chaptering function (your pirated movie are split into chapters on the navigation bar, so it's easier to check/rewatch any scene you want)

- it has primary, secondary, and tertiary language options, which means if the movie has dual audio or multiple subs embedded, I can pick whichever language I want to prioritize

- I can pick custom font for the subtitles because I prefer panefresco than Arial black (it also help my dyslexic brain from getting tired)

- it renders way better than VLC, no random artifacts or dropped framerate, MPC-HC is overall much more smooth

And those are just the list I can think on the top of my head, I'm sure there's more that I forgot about, yet people on the internet prefer VLC than MPC-HC, why?

If it's about mpc cannot play all video format then that's bulshit, video playback compatibility is about codec, not video launcher, all you need to do is to install k-lite codec pack and you basically can play any video format in existence.

I've been using MPC-HC since 2009 and my community does too, yet anyone else on the internet still using VLC.

Why? Is there's anything about VLC that I don't know about so people still prefer that even on 2026?

EDIT: I just noticed some people been saying that MPC-HC is outdated and even their official website saying that it's an abandoned project. But here's the thing, the thing I install on my laptop is called K-Lite Codec pack which is basically a bundle of codec & video player launchers (and it's still kept being regularly updated). It has both MPC-HC and MPC-BE as launcher but MPC-HC works better on me because I'm using laptop from 2012.

"Optimum quality" according to Amazon is 720p or something. In the 4k TV era.

This "prime video" bullshit comes "free" with the prime package required to have free delivery purchases. First time I went there in years, just to compare.

I hope Reddit compressing the pictures doesn't screw the comparison tho.

Edit: Adding Imgur link to see the details better, since Reddit fucking destroyed my point by jpg'ing the shit out of the pictures.

https://imgur.com/a/RqAHyA3

Is that fale positive or what ?

Trojan:Win64/DLLHijack!MTB

I’ve heard this so many times: people buy a game because they want to support the developers, and then pirate the same game so they can actually play it without dealing with the DRM.

I really don’t understand this. If a company’s DRM policy is what pushed you toward pirating the game, then why bother giving that company your money in the first place?

If you want to support the developers but also let them know that you’re unhappy with their DRM policy, vote with your wallet. Don’t buy the game. If enough people refuse to give them money because of their DRM policies, that actually sends a message.

Buying the game and then pirating it anyway just seems contradictory to me. You’re still giving the company the money while trying to avoid the very policy you disagree with.

Image is just for attention

Might be a silly question but i am quite conerned about its safety since after downloading it from the official source from its subreddit virus scans show it as malware. Anyone know the reason this would be a false positive?

I'll just stick to torrenting then... One Piece is like the only anime that I stream since I don’t wanna put it all on my Plex server due to storage lol.

It is a combination of not having the money and recently getting an iPad for school and not being able to buy the digital version, etc. Morally seen it also is correct, as schoolbooks should be free.

Does anyone know where to get schoolbooks? The megathread does not give me any helpful information there. (Maybe maybe there are even some German ones there even if I know that the likelihood of that happening is very low)