I've long been bitten by the media piracy bug. I think in the early days of Netflix Streaming I really cooled off on it because of the convenience factor of streaming but it's been over 10 years since I streamed from netflix for the first time, watching No Country for Old Men on my Xbox 360. Things have changed and I've been radicalized to not trust companies to do anything correctly, ever. So I cut the streaming out of my life and got back on my bullshit. Kodi and Plex are wonderful.
Obviously you don't check every single file you download as you download them, that would be prohibitively time consuming. But every once in a while I catch wind that something in my collection is turbofucked
For example: Most collections of Comedy Bang Bang have Season 5 Episode 1 (Scott Becomes a Communist & the Introduction of Weird Al as bandleader) replaced with Season 4 Episode 21 (Kid Cudi is introduced as band leader). There were also a couple of episodes in season 5 that had some corruption that I had to go find different sources for. The Adventures of Tintin? Every copy of Season 1 Episode 11 The Black Island (part 2) that I can find has audio from a completely different episode. The collection of Gumby I downloaded mixes 1950's gumby episode numbering with 1980's gumby episode numbering which means I have a large pile of Gumby to sift through to figure out what's missing and what's not.
And then there's the lost media problem. Most of You Can't Do That On Television Season 1 can't be found anywhere. I've got one episode of The Journey of Allen Strange, from the middle of season 1. Your Friend Andrew WK, a show I had long considered to be my holy grail of lost media, just sort of materialized on an Andrew WK fan site called the Andrew WK Archive one day. Welcome Freshmen is on DailyMotion but most of the episodes have audio that's so fucked from VHS Degradation that they're unwatchable. I can't find more than one episode of Roundhouse, a more musical-focused sketch comedy precursor to All That. I have an Unus Annus archive which is explicitly against Markiplier and Ethan's wishes but like... do you know how frustrating lost media is? I get it as a part of the message of the thing you were building, but also like, fuck that.
And who knows how many shows I simply Don't Even Remember that are lost to time?
There's also the weird inbetween stuff like how the Daria DVD releases had all the music pulled out of them (which made any time there was dialog over a song sound HORRIBLE) so someone out there decided hey FUCK that I'm putting the music back in, which led to the Daria Restoration Project. There's a VHS tracking error on the official DVD nickelodeon put out for The Adventures of Pete & Pete it's just there in the master tape they have, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
Anyway, it's alot, there are tools to help, there are avenues to check, but unless someone takes action, finds a VHS in their attic and rips it, or Nickelodeon decides to post up Welcome Freshmen on Paramount+ for someone to rip with youtube-dl, alot of that shit is just gone