Enshitification
Or pirate for 0€.
I do love piracy and I do do it sometimes. But sometimes I don’t want to spend 20 minutes finding a torrent and then another 30 minutes to an hour waiting for it to download.
My main issue with it is that I have to pre-plan if I want to watch anything through that method.
iflix, fmovies, sudo flix are all streaming alternatives. Free. No signups required.
When I wanna watch a movie, I have it in less than two minutes. But I’m blessed with gigabit, and I’m on some private trackers.
You don’t have to download anything, there are amazing streaming sites: https://fmhy.net/videopiracyguide
There’s also rentry.co/megathread
That’s what automation is for.
Whenever I come across an interesting movie/show; I open a webpage that I host, search for a title (results from imdb) and click ‘add+search’.
~15min later, it’s available for me, my friends, and my family to watch on my own private streaming service. (for such reliably quick downloads, I recommend usenet over torrents)
Other users besides me can even request content via Ombi.
that’s sounds so complicated, just downloading it myself is easier
if someone made one application to install and set it up automatically id probably try it thoughIt’s complicated to get set up. Once done, it makes everything very simple.
My setup is a conglomeration of a quite a few different pieces; but they are not all required. I’d encourage you to explore, start small and expand into new pieces/areas when you feel comfortable. I started this ~8 years ago with basically 0 knowledge of hosting web services; and just built up the knowledge through exploration over time.
If all you’re looking to do is watch movies, and you’re happy to play the downloaded media directly on your pc (or move the files around manually, just like manual torrenting); the only piece you need is Radarr.
Once setup; You tell it what movies you want to watch, it searches for those using the indexers you’ve given it (YourBittorrent, TPB, and BadassTorrents for example), choses the best results out of them all based on things like upload date, seeds, quality descriptors in the title, etc. Then passes that to your torrent/usenet client. Finally it will rename and sort the files into nicely organized media folders for you, once the download client has marked it as complete.
I want to organize and automate movies at some point, but the cost of managing additional hardware feels intimidating. How do you handle it? Doesn’t arr stack require lots of processing power?
The arrs are pretty light weight; the memory use can add up when you run several of them with really large libraries alongside other projects, but otherwise I hardly notice them running in the background. You don’t need any sort of special hardware; this stuff will run on an old laptop you shove in the corner and ignore.
The part that really takes processing power is transcoding media between formats when streaming it to clients, but that’s Emby/Jellyfins job.
When it renamed them… Do you continue to seed (in the case of torrents)?
Torrents have two options:
Ideally you use Hardlinking - This creates a ‘copy’ of the file that’s just a link to the original data, instead of actually duplicating it. This only works when both ‘copies’ are kept on the same drive/filesystem; but gives you two versions so you can leave one available to seed and have one renamed and sorted away.
Failing that, it can fallback to plain duplicating the files. One copy kept to seed, and one copy sorted away.
Personally, I’ve switched to usenet for 99% of downloads, so seeding isn’t really a thing. It’s there as a fallback though.
Thanks! This is useful.
This is slowly what I’m working on
There’s a ton of people happy to help on [email protected] if you run into troubles :)
Next year is the year I buy a new/new-ish dedicated family server. I will have to come back to this
ooo that looks interesting. I will look into it more when I get home. Thanks for sharing
Ombi always gave me issues and I switched to Overseerr. Similar but more in the *arr family. Since you use Jellyfin, can use Jellyseerr instead for a better integration.
Then use Prowlarr to sync Torrent/Usenet sites to all the *arr services.
The three of them are all pretty similar, achieving the same goal; whatever works for you.
I’ve never had an issue with Ombi, so I’ve stuck with it. I actually use Emby instead of Jellyfin, so Overseerr isn’t an option, and I’ve just not had a reason to try out Jellyseer over what’s already setup and working.
Prowlarr is definitely a good recommendation. I used Jackett for the longest time; but being able to modify indexers in one place, then have it propagate to the rest of the stack is so much nicer. It lists a ton of indexers to look into too, if you need more.
Use Usenet instead, way faster downloads. Also lots of clients can stream torrents, so as long the torrent its being seeded well enough you can watch right away.
Worst case just go to one of the 100s of sites with free streams of basically every popular show and movie.
Any kickstart guide for a total noob?
This guide is pretty good, but I’ll also explains the basics here.
You pay a provider for access to Usenet files, which you locate through an indexer, and download through a client such as nzbget.
Picking a provider is the most complicated part. The guide explains how to choose one and r/Usenet has a page in their wiki for good provider deals. I use NewsDemon and they’ve been fine.
Indexers are pretty much the same as torrent indexers, they can be free or paid, public or private. NZBGeek has been great for me, and AnimeTosho is nice if you want to download anime.
The download clients work similarly to torrent clients with the addition of configuring the connection to your provider. Whichever provider you choose will have instructions for connecting to it.
Downloads aren’t peer-to-peer like torrents, so a VPN isnt as necessary, just make sure you pick a provider that doesnt keep logs. It also doesnt hurt to use one if you already pay for one and its not too slow.
One you’ve picked your provider and indexer, setting everything up is super easy.
With sonarr radarr and trakt you just find a list someone makes of upcoming movies and shows and then maintainarr to auto delete stuff after a certain period. No more pre-planning or searching it’s always just automated new content ready to go when you turn on your tv
and then maintainarr to auto delete stuff after a certain period
Lol, storage is cheap, archive that shit forever
Lol I’m trying to keep it under 90tb but I do have a few replacement drives in my cart in case the temptation kicks in
Where are you looking for torrents, and how bad is your internet? It usually takes me about a minute to find a torrent, and downloads are rarely longer than 15
Often has cam videos too, which are recorded from theaters before being released outside. The quality is not necessarily as bad as it sounds.
For the case of better quality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telesync
While the other end of the spectrum may be a shaky smartphone footage.I have my number of different sites, without torrents, that are overall faster to use, with uBlock. No login, no bullshit design, no pop ups advertising new “features”.
And torrents don’t need to be predownloaded, you can stream them.
Psssst use nzb
If everyone did that, then they might start cracking down.
At the very least, though, this person should be service hopping instead of paying for 13.
mmm cracking how? turning off the internet?
I’m airways afraid of VPN bans
I see. I can use torrent without VPN in my location but I get it.
Blocking VPNs is a nightmare for governments. Some companies rely on them for normal operation. I doubt western countries will take such path due to the economic impact of it. You got also ways to bypass blocks, new obfs protocols popping up everyday, residential proxies, tor, i2p,… So yeah, you need a full time large team working to keep up with some of that for a full implementation. How China didnt give up on that yet is beyond me TBH.
IMO, it s not something we should worry about it now.
No, the last time everyone did that Netflix was created, which has nearly killed the piracy for most people.
We’re just going back to the basics.
Umm…actually. (<–joking)
Netflix was one of the biggest reasons movie studios were freaking out about piracy. Back then people would use Netflix, a DVD rental by mail service, to rip or copy movies in bulk. Even my father (I’m 52) had a machine dedicated to copying Netflix DVDs. So it is very ironic that Netflix streaming ended up being the “solution” to a problem they had exacerbated.
The problem they have now is that it is very easy and cheap to rip streams, and bandwidth is fast and plentiful (vs early 2Ks). People rent a movie off of Prime, rip the stream, and upload it to Mega out of spite.
Piracy is a result of a service problem. I would gladly pay a reasonable fee monthly for access to any and every show I want to watch. I’m for sure am not going to pay for 12 different streaming services so I can watch severance on one, the office on another, the wire on a third when I can just download it for free.
Hell I would pay a pirate a monthly amount just to have seamless turnkey access. But the level of effort is so low these days that honestly there’s no reason to pay for streaming.
I always forget they ever made DVDs, I don’t think they ever did that outside of USA.
But then, there was a second, then a third, a fourth… And they all have different catalogues.
Under other US administrations, I’d picture a new model or iteration. Right now? Paramilitary busting down doors and more states banning porn for some reason
Thankfully though, the US != the entire world
Unfortunately, though, they are mostly based out of the US, which means instead of innovating (which is what I think he was implying) they will just make shit more miserable for everyone, but mostly for those in the US. Until US people learn to stop spending money on companies doing harm, we’re fucked. Examples are drastic price increases, cracking down on password sharing, and shelving “costly” media instead of trying to improve service.
Just a side note, I haven’t personally paid for these services for a long time
How much is that in usd
$32
Is that Fahrenheit joke? Nice.
Damn metric system.
… and the tanking exchange rate.
These new tariffs are a bitch
arrr!
Was showing the inlaws the bingie skin i’d been setting up…they explicitly said this subscription shit was becoming unmanageable and they were seriously considering setting sail
Streaming becoming cable 2.0 is one of the biggest disappointments in the entertainment industry.
Streaming is still better for now. Wait until you can only have bundled services with mandatory ads with a minimum year long commitment.
Agreed. Also, the camera detects when we close our eyes or mute the audio and pauses the ads when we disengage from them.
Well, yeah, we gotta protect shareholder value. Sure, they might be mostly people born into wealth, but anyone can join them. I saw a documentary that showed it costs as little as fifteen million merits.
The one live action that is amazing is telling us all that it’s good to be a pirate.
What is this from?
The other person is correct, it’s One Piece. The anime is over 1000 episodes and the live action does a great job with most of the characters.
I’m guessing one piece but I don’t know enough to know if that’s correct
yea that’s Luffy and his brother Ace
DVDs are dirt cheap, plentiful as fuck, don’t have DRM bullshit to have to deal with, last for decades when stored properly, and still look pretty damn good with deinterlacing. Plus, they don’t run any of the risks associated with piracy. Am I allowed to copy my DVDs onto my hard drive? That may be a legal gray area. But can they see that I copied my DVDs to my hard drive? Of course not. And I’m not making my ISOs and MKVs available to the world for download.
Spend 4 bucks on a used DVD. Give her the ol’
dd if=sr0 of=~/Videos/Movies/Title.iso
And keep the disc for basically forever. Copy it again if something happens to your file. EZPZ. Plus, it’s cool to own a physical thing imo.
I believe DVDs do have DRM actually but it has been broken so long ago as to be a non-issue
even DVDs have ads tho
If you burn your own they don’t
You can rip just the part that’s the movie. Most DVDs have the ads before the menu, so on the disk it’s a separate file. There are probably better alternatives, but I use a program called MakeMKV that lets you open a disk and only save the videos you’re interested in. IIRC there’s a free version that lets you rip DVDs and a paid version that also does BluRays (assuming you have an optical drive that can read them,of course). I bought it probably about a decade ago and was still able to recently activate a new copy using my old activation code.
Plus they have extras which if you really like a movie could be a lot of fun
I miss director’s commentary tracks sometimes.
It would be awesome to have a service that releases those commentaries as podcasts you can sync up with the content. I’ll never forget the BSG director’s cut podcasts by Ronald D. Moore. They’d come out about a week after the show and he’d sip a whiskey and smoke some cigarettes and it felt like we were just chilling together.
Capitalism never learns. I was off of pirating for over a decade because things were actually somewhat affordable and you didn’t have to jump through hoops to access everything. I’m right back in it, pirating everything, fuck these business school graduate scumbags.
Stremio/Kodi are your friends
People should seed their torrents tho…
Ya true. Although, I can’t say I’ve ever had any difficulty finding a decent quality stream on either platform unless it’s something that is still at the cinema.
Removed by mod
so like, don’t get the streaming services? the only ones i respect are Dropout and maybe Crunchyroll
I use pirate sites over Crunchyroll not because I don’t want to watch ads/pay, but mostly because I like the pirate sites better. I just don’t really like Crunchyroll’s website. Aniwave. to was the greatest imo until it got shut down :(
And of course the pirate sites have much more variety, Crunchyroll doesn’t have everything, but you can bet money that pirate sites will have all 4 seasons of show X, plus the summary season where they recap, plus the chibi side show, plus the 2 anime movies.
It’s all about what you watch, crunchy roll would be a waste for me, but Disney plus and nextflix are used in my house by everyone constantly
Dropout and Nebula are both worth the price in my opinion.
Or even better, “even though you pay for the ad free subscription, this video is only available with ads”.
There was a time when almost everything was on Netflix. As a consumer, having all my content in one place for $10/mo is awesome, but according to capitalism, it is a problem that needed to be fixed.
according to capitalism, it is a problem that needed to be fixed.
I mean one service having a monopoly might not be that great. Good thing about capitalism could be that if the service got shit, there’d be competing alternatives. Doesn’t work out that way often.
Somehow that’s kind of how it’s worked out for music streaming, the music industry is fucked in many other ways but you can choose any of the services and you’ll have more or less access to everything, with some small differences.
It really did hurt my ressources for pirating though. After not downloading anything for years, finding the right sites and proxies again was hard.
Except that the technology has improved and now Sonarr and radarr take all effort out of the equation.
Movies were on Netflix, TV shows were on Hulu. It was great.
Once Netflix started on their whole “half of all our offerings are going to be original content” is when it began to go downhill. Literally no one (aside from executives) was sitting around going “man, I can’t wait until Netflix starts making shows and movies!” They were a service. That’s all they ever needed to be.
I think they were forced into it when the other companies decided they could make some of that sweet netflix money, so they stopped licensing to netflix and built their own services. Netflix had no choice but to build their own content.
Idk I know I was pretty excited for Netflix’s early original content because the proposition was like “HBO, but on the internet and you can watch it any time” and they were doing big budget stuff. Things only went south when they didn’t keep up the HBO level quality and ruined their reputation to the point where I see “Netflix original” and immediately think “garbage TV”
The crazy thing is loads of people stopped pirating and paid for a streaming service that was affordable, worked, met thier needs.
Now it’s all splintered with corporations wanting a piece of the pie.
It won’t stop until the system reaches its ultimate form and each movie has its own subscription service.
So, buying physical media again lol
except that you don’t have any sort of long terms rights to it and it costs more.
So, renting physical media again.
That last remaining blockbuster is playing the long game.
Now also show ads when you pause!
And they know when we watch, pause, fast forward…
…and all your ID
I’m about to cancel everything and buy a good vpn service.
And a good NAS. It’s worth every penny.
Care to fill me in on what that’s about?
I could Google it, and I’ll do that if you tell me I’m a moron and that’s what I should do. I don’t want to be an imposition, I’d just rather hear from someone who know what they’re doing firsthand.
Isn’t Synology having issues because they expect you to use specifically their drives?
Yes, apparently they remove features if you don’t use synology-branded drives.
“Piracy is a service problem” - gaben, the OKish billionaire
Back to piracy, it is, then. Yarrr! ☠️
The part that’s wildest to me is that nowadays with all the ways services are trying extract more value from their users (ads, increasing rates, reducing library size, restricting access to features, etc ) plus the DRM, the media consumption experience of just having the media files is so much better than the experience one can have through most of the streaming services or even DVDs with all of the unstoppable prerolls
Whether you rip your own DVDs (legally murky) or you’re just watching a bunch of public domain silent films, or pirating, it’s really hard to beat just having the .mkv and opening it in your player of choice.
About the only way to compete with that is one decent service with good quality, no ads, an extremely wide collection and minimally invasive DRM
Every time I head to the second-hand store I pick up a couple new CDs and DVDs. It’s great! I’m paying max $3.99 apiece and I’ll own them forever.
Since Xmas I’ve tried to watch The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Demolition Man. And The Long Kiss Goodnight.
The last 2 were available to rent for 3.99. And only 2 of the Freddy movies were available at all.
Cough cough https://archive.org/details/a_nightmare_on_elm_street cough
o7
Take a turn around the capstan, heave a pawl…
yar har har, bottle of rum for me thx