A titan has fallen! Or at least gone to sleep. Thz.la had been missing a lot of major studios vids for several months now, forcing me to go to other groups (JaponX is best, 7sht.me is also very good). But now... the last upload was 11 days ago, the Chinese New Year holiday is long long over, so it's past due time to get back to work. I'm prepared to pronounce thz.la DEAD.
But JaponX, 7sht.me and 44x.me combined might already have filled the hole. Taken together I think they are (almost) as good as Thz.la JaponX file size is even more compact than thzla and the watermark is smaller and lighter. The other 2 groups rips (~5900 kbps) are a little bit bloated but not too outrageous. Anyone who's picky about video quality, I'd like to hear your opin on 7sht vs 44x vs thzla vs JaponX. For my eyes, I'm happy enough with JaponX quality and prefer there compact size (~ 3800 kbps). For reference, Yify is a hugely popular rip group for mainstream movies and their rips are only ~2200 kbps.
I only wish there is a single no-nonsense site I can crawl for weekly FHD rips, I wrote an app specifically to crawl thzla. It will be a pain (like an afternoon or two) to adapt it for new sites, but first I need to figure out which site(s) are targets.
Frankly I am puzzled by all the whining. dioguitar is garbage, take it or leave it, but no need to whine about it ad infinitium. (I choose LEAVE, FTR) I only ever get them if no other group release a particular vid, which is so so extremely rare, it's not worth thinking about it. Actually in those cases when there's nothing else, I might stare at the cover and thumbnails for a bit and convince myself, nah she's not that hot or it's a boring plot or something, just move on. Only thing dioguitar is good for is zero-day drop. But zero-day dropped turd is still turd.
And the complains about filehosts... IMHO, paying for premium is kinda dumb. Doing torrents is literally 3 or 4 clicks and often a whole full length is done faster than you can watch a scene. Even with premium, getting from filehost is probably 20-30 clicks and the extra steps (and computer time) to unrar the parts. If I spend money into JAV, I want to prioritize it this way: (1) AV idols (but it's not convenient to) (2) studios (they pay the idols and they also produce the vids and deserves profits) (3) forums (like Akiba Online) and rippers. Forums give us a community platform (but reddit etc managed to cover their cost with ads) but rippers don't have convenient way to get income for their contribution.
I said this a few times already: pay for legit physical copies and merchandise and offline events (and if you are really lucky, buy sexual service from the idol herself) up to a level you can afford, but watch only pirated rips. (many of my physical copies I never even put in a player once) If you prefer that way, pay for legit streaming or subscription, but never legit digital purchase.
I don't include filehosts as deserving payment because way way back since Napster days proved that leeches are more then enough to provide the storage and upload bandwidth without money transaction. If you are a leech and don't have a bank account with multiple zeros, it's still perfectly feasible to contribute to the piracy scene: help seed the vids that you leeched. If you, like me, want to see dioguitar disappears, help make that happen by seeding vids from the groups that you like. As far as I care, filehost (including image hosts) can disappear along with dioguitar. BTW, filehost is not the same as cloud storage, some people or organizations need professional cloud storage, that's fine. But filehosts can only survive because people don't know any better.
