3 days
I’m pirating video because they won’t let me legally download a bluray without tons of drm. I don’t want to lose any quality and even with these ridiculously inflated prices hard drives are cheaper than buying all the blurays (which I’d also need to find a place to store) so I generally try and get remuxes or untouched streams. That said I got my drives from shucked external drives which are now going for over double what I bought them for.
HDR should help with the rich blacks if you have a monitor that supports it, I think it might with tonemapping too but it obviously will depend on how it was mastered in addition to what anyone does to encode it afterwards.
I ordered my last ones directly from seagate but it’s an awful time to buy storage in general right now, the ones I bought last year are already over twice as expensive. I use backblaze for backup as they don’t have storage limits and it’s 100/year.
As someone else said the squares are how it saves space and it usually does the black areas first as (older) monitors are bad at showing detail in black.
Yeah there’s been multiple times where I’ve pirated things for subscriptions I’m already paying for (for other people mostly) because the draconian DRM or shitty players won’t actually play it at the full quality (drm requirements for hdr/4k, desktop player not supporting surround sound etc).
Yeah I mean it’s nice to have physical things but it’s not worth it to me and my friends just use my server anyways.