Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I went all to AV1 last year. Enough stuff supports it, and realtime transcoding on a (relatively cheap) Arc GPU works well enough.

AV1 is superior enough for both size and visual fidelity, that it's worth the slightly extra encoding time. But absolutely not if you don't have HW encoding.

That's actually not especially good in the EU as far as I can tell (also in the EU, have the same, €15 a month).

That said, it's pretty easy and cheap to get the rest of one's setup (router, Ethernet cables, the actual torrent machine) with Gigabit-Ethernet so that it all actual works at 1Gbps end-to-end but costs a bit more to upgrade one's internal network and download machines (I use a MiniPC next to the router) to go above that - everything pretty much supports 1Gbps by default nowadays, whilst only some stuff supports 2.5Gbps, and you definitely have to pay quite a bit extra for 10Gbps.

The kit I had for years already supported Gigabit Ethernet all the way and I would need newer kit to really use properly a fibre Internet connection above 1Gbps, which is why I personally did not go for the 2.5Gbps or even 10Gbps (the latter would be €45/month). That and downloading an x265 1080p torrent of a 1h episode of a TV series from a popular public tracker taking between 30s and a minute is good enough for me and I don't really want to spend more money to bring that down to 10-20s or less.

I watched some tube-u-mentary a couple of weeks ago that talked about 1080 vs 4k. A shocking amount of fresh content is shot in 2k, editied tand they goes 4k only when they apply the SFX.

THEN, i started looking at 3D releases, there was a bunch of new stuff, it appears it's all virtual 3D :(

Whatever they are. Historians, comedians, filmmakers, etc.

Content is the dumbest word, and again that word means they are making slop to consume so YouTube can shovel you ads.