I find TPB is best for old music, and one off random old things, – new TV, I recommend just always waiting for season packs on sites that offer full season packs and just living a few months behind. Must see GoT-style water cooler TV is mostly dead anyway.

The C: prompt let’s you know they mean business

I think the piratebay is fine. I haven’t seen anything mal on piratebay in years, and I think the last mal download I saw then was a basic the video itself is the text “go to http://malware.ru/payload/virus to download the codec for this totally legit file” not like, state actor polymorphic virus shit. For an mkv/mp4 itself to actually do anything, it would need to memory overflow the player (which could be mitigated in several ways) and that’s a heavy engineering lift to use to do much on a modern OS (and would be specific to one OS/version/hardware situation). A criminal organization or state actor bothering to develop something like that isn’t going to put it on piratebay to be downloaded by 10000 randos globally, they’d put it on the public web, or target it to specific high value targets.

I’m old enough to remember when “sneakernet” meant 3.5" floppies, and was a pretty legit solution versus 2400 baud modems…

You gotta love how aggressively they prevent users from seamlessly running executables from the internet, a VERY legitimate common use case, but a desktop shortcut from the internet? Run away!

I’d wager your DVD rips are same quality, most stuff from the 90’s touched by computer anything is 480p at the source. VHS, it would be an improvement probably.

Your VPN isn’t forcing you onto its DNS and is using your ISP’s. I’d assume Proton has some kind of “antitracker” option or similar in the client that would make it use a Proton-provided DNS server. Failing that, you can use a public DNS server located outside of a piracy shield country by setting it manually.

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