I guess it's just a personal thing. I personally cannot stand the "Please Activate Windows" watermark and MAS is such an easy tool that it just makes sense to do it. It's not like this announcement kills MAS, you can still use the other activation methods

A1: Yes, but it depends

I used to be someone who used to watch movies and tv shows on soap2day/fmovies/etc but once I tried watching a proper full release (Bluray encode, or even just a WEB release) I could never go back. If you have a good TV, and you want to maximise your watching experience, private trackers are easily the way to go. But it entirely depends on your needs.

Even with a slower upload speed, it's not impossible to keep a good ratio. As long as you have drive space to seed, you will get bonus points that you can use to keep your ratio positive. About being kicked, most sites are "one lifetime, one account" so you can't just restart from RED if you get in trouble. Ideally, don't get in trouble, stay off the forums except for recruitments, just keep a good ratio and don't fuck up.

A2: Depends on the content

For Movies and TV you generally don't need to care where you get it from. Even if the file is infected somehow, a competent video player will not allow whatever malicious code to be executed so you're good there

What you do need to worry about is for Games and Software. You are essentially running random .exe files that would even show up as a malicious file on VirusTotal if it's a cracked program that bypasses some subscription or premium purchase.

You said you don't download much games and when you do it's Fitgirl so you're good there. Fitgirl is a trusted releaser and as long as you use fitgirl-repacks.site you won't have an issue (double check the hashes anyway, fitgirl releases include a program that does it for you). It is true 1337x had that problem recently with the EMPRESS release for Baldur's Gate 3 that included a Bitcoin miner (apparently EMPRESS was not responsible for it, and someone else had reposted it including the malware).

If you do download games, the best tracker is GazelleGamesNetwork (GGn) and you should consider finding a way in if you want to play more games at some point. Releases there are thoroughly checked and the staff are very careful. People find out very quickly if something is questionable and will not hesitate to call it out so it can be considered safe.

As for software, it's tough because there is no big trusted private tracker for cracked programs for Windows. Rutracker is what I usually recommend, it's semi-private and is atleast better than 1337x or TPB (try not to use those anymore). RuTracker also has m0nkrus releases, just translate the comments and see if anything seems off about it.

It's been proven over and over again that Microsoft simply does not care for individual consumers anymore. I mean, you can use any Microsoft Windows installation without activating for perpetuity and the only issue would be no customisation of the wallpaper and that pesky notice on the bottom right.

The money from Enterprise is enough to justify it

Why go through all that when MAS exists. Just activate it yourself with a single script, use the same thing for MS Office as well. I'll never understand why people choose to pay for stolen/enterprise keys

Don't think about the speeds advertised by providers, you'll never come close to them. You seem to require a media server, so give more importance to storage.

From my research comparing HostingBy, SeedHost and Ultra.cc - HostingBy has the highest €/TB rate except for the 1TB box which is ironically the highest €/TB rate

Here's the Google Sheet if you're interested Ignore the remarks and INR part, I'm Indian so wanted to see what I would end up paying

I will add on more providers at some point, but these 3 are the big names with decent prices and support.

As for your other problem of app selection, I don't think you'll find any of those in most providers natively (except for Transmission). You can request them, but its not a quick process. Instead of that, try installing them yourself. Even without root, it shouldn't be impossible, the only thing that may be annoying is you may not be able to setup reverse proxy so you'll need to access those services with http://ip:port

I believe they're doing 3 Body Problem next, another adaptation but for a Chinese sci-fi this time

To be fair, this "joke" is a pretty accurate representation of her online personality. Just read any of the NFOs on her cracks and you'd see. She's wild but she's all we have :(

Is it fair to call them alternatives? They're just alternative front-ends to YouTube. I use Revanced along with Youtube Premium so I can use SponsorBlock along with not having ads

Surely at that size you would notice the artifacts. Just for my sake can you try a Bluray remux. I expect it's 4k so you could just grab a 4k web-DL and see if you can notice the difference.

IGG has been known to include all kinds of weird shit with their installers

I believe you're referring to 'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 2023 2160p WEB-DL DDP5 1 Atmos HDR DV HEVC-CMRG'

The HDR DV part of the title denotes that the file is "High Dynamic Range + Dolby Vision". The reason you're seeing the pink, or sometimes green, filter is because of the Dolby Vision HDR layer on this file.

This file is sourced from Disney+ and if you had a DV supported display, they would serve this version of the file for you. Otherwise, they would serve a SDR, or Standard Dynamic Range, version of the same movie for displays that don't support DV or has it disabled. I recommend that if you're grabbing 2160p files, you take care to see whether you're grabbing a HDR version.

In your case, I would almost always go with non-HDR and non-DV, sometimes it could be both, sometimes it could be either one. Ideally, grab a release that doesn't included both of those terms and you should have the SDR version. 1080p can also have HDR, but very rarely DV so you only really need to care about this when it's 4k

I use both private trackers and usenet added to Prowlarr along with Sonarr and Radarr. Usenet has priority, reverts to torrents when it can't find something or if I need some specific release