Well for convenience I pay 1.99 pmth to torbox to stream stuff on Kodi using add-ons like POV or umbrella, links scraped with cocoscrapers (there are better scraper modules out there but cocoscrapers has never done me wrong). I think most people just use stremio add-ons for this but I’m very picky about UI/UX.
Fundamentally all that’s really doing is searching public torrent sites. Paid access to a debrid cache just streamlines the process
Screw free, is it possible for paid content? I mean, I’m sure there’s some out there, but probably not much you’d actually be interested in watching. Most of the movies I stream are about 40mbps average, I think that’s really good. It’s often significantly better than watching the same video on a paid streaming service, and I think it’s as high as you’re likely to find across a broad range of content (at least, content which isn’t AI upscaled, which creates more issues than it solves).
It’s hard enough finding 8K content of any bitrate - I think your parameters would need 16K res or higher to make any real difference. Almost every AV device on the planet would need a significant upgrade to play that - it’s just not likely to be distributed, at least in the next decade.
HiRes (up to 24-bit/192khz) lossless audio averages around 5mbps, it wouldn’t even peak at 10mbps. Standards like TrueHD Atmos or DTS-HD are already redundant - audio master tracks for video content are usually inherently lossy.
If you’re saying you play files like I described and the quality is average, I’d suspect you’re either dealing with issues with the production techniques inherent to the masters or just lossy transcoded video.
It’s only quite recently that some countries have begun to start trading oil in yuan. It’s certainly not easy to circumvent the petrodollar system that’s been in place since WW2. For one thing, the US will start bombing you.
Many cracks rely on underlying mechanisms of Windows that end users don’t really need to think about. So if “better for piracy” is purely about ease of applying cracks and successfully executing them, Windows is definitely better. That doesn’t mean it offers the best possible experience though.
Any old-school cracks (anything that isn’t a hypervisor bypass for games with denuvo, which isn’t recommended for most users anyway) will run on Linux, with varying levels of required tinkering. A lot of the time you can just add a cracked game or app to steam and run it there, but sometimes it isn’t quite that simple. It depends entirely on the game/app and how the crack functions.
If you’re willing to learn the tinkering part, it’s good knowledge to have and gives you more flexibility over how software/games are run. This is particularly useful for mid-tier machines that can’t max out all settings on all games, for example with forcing specific resolutions, display modes, virtual displays, upscaler presets, global upscaling, gamepad config.
Given there are very few roadblocks with Linux I don’t think there is an OS that is “best for piracy”, rather the best choice depends on user preferences and expectations. Certainly if your top priority is the least amount of effort to get things running, choose Windows. But you’d also need to accept dealing with Microsoft’s bullshit, and forego performance improvements you’d potentially get with Linux.
A quick demo for you to show this isn’t some weird unintuitive process, at least once you have everything configured (and that’s half the fun). This kodi skin won’t show me bitrate per video/audio track but this example is approx average 47mbps video, 4mbps audio. Similar results for most movies released this decade.
https://streamable.com/bgkyp5