Keep Seeding

monty@lemmy.one to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 918 points –

A few months ago I grabbed this torrent from rarbg, and it took weeks to download. Often going days with no seeders.

I finally got it, and decided I'd seed beyond my usual 2x to help others get this. Then rarbg went under, and now I think I'll just keep this one going.

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A true pirate shares their booty 🔥🔥

Well then I guess that makes ya mum a pirate! 🦜🏴‍☠️🍆💦

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Now if only torrenting wouldn't mean an automatic 500€ invoice from a very specific law firm in my country :(

For about 5€ a month you can free yourself from these risks

Really 5 EUR: https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/products/vpn/#pricing

They base off Mullvad which removed the ability to forward ports, not the 1st choice for P2P, but anything else

I didn't understand. Aren't all ports go through the encrypted traffic once I start a vpn?

They do, but if you can't forward a port nothing can get to you from outside, which you want with P2P, per default anything from outside is blocked.

If two people with no port forwarding meet, they aren't able to connect, one side has to have an open port, so you're missing many peers and seeders and you can counter this by being the one with the open port so anyone is able to connect to you.

Alle meine Zuhausis hassen Waldorf Frommer!

Denen soll ne ente aus'm Arsch kriechen.

can you come back and tag this post with the correct language? would be neat

I'm trying but the save button just loops endlessly..

What difference does it make? Aren't you able to see the comment?

It's not so huge a concern right now, but it lets people that write userscripts write, say, a userscript to automatically translate a post into your preferred language from the post's language.

Such a thing would be easier if the userscript could trust that a post is set to the language it's written in.

This load circle thing is it implicitly failing due to you not having selected Deutsch as one of your languages in your profile (most likely).

There are other things it could be as well.

Interesting! I tried it a bit more:

  • I had "Undetermined", "Deutsch" and "English" selected in my profile.
  • I was able to set the comment to "Undetermined", but then still not able to set it to "Deutsch" (back to "English", worked though)
  • Changing the word "homie" didn't make a difference
  • Other comments set to "Undetermined" were able to switch to "Deutsch"
  • Other comments set to "English" (that were actually written in english) were able to switch to "Deutsch"

Seems like it's a problem with this comment in particular, but I can't figure out why!

Edit: I found another comment set to "Deutsch", written in german, that can't be changed no matter what.

I only really write in one language so I don't have this problem, I just default to English.

But it's interesting that some posts are hard to change.

If you are going throught feddit.de there might be limitations on the languages you can select for comments. I think only German and undetermined are possible there.

How do you tag a comment with a language? Wasn‘t aware that that‘s a thing.

At least on the web browser version of lemmy, there is a dropdown box below where you write a reply, that says "Select language" by default.

Just rent a seedbox.
Torrenting actively from public trackers for 14€ per month and can host the best streaming service right at home.

Real debrid. Torrent to the cloud. Everything becomes available to other users.

Does Realdebrid do that or do you need a separate cloud service?

It does it all. Debrid is the cloud, and a whole bunch of others things. You just copy and paste a magnet link into the page. And it gets the file for you. And if someone else has used that torrent, it’s already on the debrid server so there’s no wait. 95% of the time it’s already there. Then you’re just downloading a file like you would any other file from a webpage, off the debrid server. Usually at the full speed of your isp. No p2p. I can stream 100 gb movies off their servers. Or download them quickly.

Holy shit I've been paying for that just because I can't be arsed waiting for audiobooks to download from Rapidshare

Thanks for the info, I'll look into this too then, saves fucking about with QBT

Update for anyone interested - I put four obscure torrent files into Real Debrib that had been sitting in QBT for months, not downloadable.

Three out of the four downloaded within a couple of hours

I'm fuckin impressed

When I say obscure, I mean a minor British sitcom from the 90s, a french comedy from 1987, and a video of a live Muse gig from ten years ago. All downloaded

Now, the only one left is the episode of Pointless Celebrities with Vic Reeves, Bob Mortimer, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton

I'll be impressed if it can find that

sounds like pure intimidation to me.

1/ one could have "never received this letter"

2/ one could decide not to pay, and then what? will they go to court? based on what evidence?

3/ if it ever goes to court, "i don't know, i wasnt even home that day" should always work no?

i don't understand while in some countries (actually only one that i know of, Germany) people seem to be terrified by this lawyer's spam...

Oh no it isn't. Walldorf Frommer is well known to send "Unterlassungerklärungen" which you have to answer. It will go to court if you do not work against this. You normally need your own lawyer to defuse what they send you.

Also, if you are in court, there is the concept of "Störerhaftung" which is a wet dream for everyone suing you for copyright infringement. They will have your IP and the time, thus your address. Now you either have to name someone who did do it, or if you can't you will automatically be liable.

This isn't any intimidation, it is one company using the laws in place here to fuck you majorly over. There are a lot of stories about this and if you seed on any public tracker you WILL get a letter.

How effective are VPNs at preventing this? I've heard it recommended the most as a counter measure.

VPN's solve this problem completely. This law firm looks at the IP's of seeders and if they are german they request the personal details from the respective ISP.

If it's an IP of a (reputable) VPN they don't achieve anything and if it's not a german IP they can't do anything anyway.

They mostly go for the easy targets since that's their easy business.

This is the way. qBittorrent even has an interface option. You can set that to your VPN and it's basically a killswitch. I've still got mullvads killswitch option enabled on top of it tho. It just cuts your internet connection, if you ever drop the connection to their servers.

Oh right. Binding to the VPN network interface is really important.

It gives peace of mind. One time I noticed the VPN was off and qBit still ran and I didn't bind to the interface. Luckily it was fine.

VPN's solve this problem completely. This law firm looks at the IP's of seeders and if they are german they request the personal details from the respective ISP.

If it's an IP of a (reputable) VPN they don't achieve anything and if it's not a german IP they can't do anything anyway.

They mostly go for the easy targets since that's their easy business.

If you want a year subscription to Speedify, let me know. I got a year in a Humble Bundle that I never used because I have a lifetime subscription to Windscribe. Speaking of which, Windscribe allows 10GB of free transfers each month. Not much but it will get you a few movies or audio books.

God, back in uni with free electricity and internet in the dorms, we managed to seed over a terabyte of data before IT got suspicious and turned off that port. Then we seeded over slower wifi until they turned the port back on next semester, haha. Good times.

That was where we learned that the pirated copies of stuff were easier to find, higher quality, and worked on hardware that websites declared "too old" to stream their content. It all started when we had a bunch of people over to watch a movie, and Amazon refused to play it on older hardware. It instantly converted half a dozen people to piracy, lol.

Like Gabe Newell once said, piracy is a service problem.

The last two things I pirated were No One Lives Forever, a game that's completely delisted on all storefronts, and Ratchet & Clank, because Sony can't figure out how to add the PS2 versions of games to the PS5 and I refuse to stream it (data cap) or lug around my PS3.

Both I would've purchased legally had they not made it a pain in the ass.

When rarbg went down I immediately went and for any torrent I still had loaded in my client I quadrupled my normal ratio (3.5 -> 12.00). Then I also just increased my ratio generally.

I wish I had more disk space to keep things going even longer, but I really gotta cycle stuff out unfortunately.

When rarbg went down I waited a couple weeks for straghlers then stopped seeding all rarbg torrents. Is there a reason to? How will people even find these torrents?

There are archives of all the rarbg magnet links. I still use them to successfully find stuff. As long as those links are out there it is still possible to help people out.

torrents-csv.ml includes a catalogue of any RARBG torrents that are still seeded.

There is a specific magnet link you can get a specific sql file from. Inside is a cool database containing a big amount of records of torrent magnets which you can input into the tracker and download.

I'd love to find a good alternative to Rarbg, truly the end of an era

TorrentGalaxy is the closest I've found so far.

and it getting where rarbg was, i can find similiar release, imdb links, there is a tab with lates releases etc.

Yeah, a lot of similar functionality which is what I was mainly looking for. Especially the IMDB search. Not as much curation, but enough tags and details on most things so you can at least sift past the junk.

My crowning achievement is still seeding a 2.429TB torrent up to a 1.0 ratio, took me about 7 and a half months.

What's inside a 2.4TB torrent? 🤔

It was a 4K porn siterip.

Wonderful! I wish you both a happy relationship! Sounds like you've got your work cut out for you 😊👌

In my defense I was really only trying to find a handful of specific videos from a certain porn site... But you know how sometimes it's just easier to grab an entire album or an entire season / boxset of a show, than it is to find a specific song / episode in high quality? Well that same rules applies to porn, and since I had no issue with space (I have a very large NAS) I just grabbed the whole siterip since it actually had a decent number of seeds lol

I know exactly what you mean. No defence need my friend, but maybe some lotion 😊💦 #staysafe

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Not from the same source, but I'm in the middle of getting a 5GB file that took me five days so far and will take another five to complete. After that, I think I will keep sharing for as long as possible this one, since I see a lot of peers every day, even though there's only one seeder, from which I'm currently downloading at 10Kbps (and not because of my bandwidth, I think it's theirs that's a bit on the slow side).

I have slow upload, but once there are two seeds things should get better for all other peers, compared to now haha

I always am going crazy seeing a 1mib/s upload divided by 10 peers while I am sitting here with a gig symmetric line ready to satisfy all within a minute (if their pipes allow it).
JUST GIVE ME THE DAMN BANDWIDTH and I shall satisfy everyone and their dog for a 100 ratio...

Let me throw my seedbox into the ring. :)

Fun fact: This movie is on the 4k movies google drive

What Google drive are you talking about

The only time I seed, really. If there's only like 2 or 3 seeders and they have shit connections, I'll seed for a while. Not that my upload speed is any good...

But on a thing with thousands of seeders and maybe 20 leeches? Why? 🤷🏻‍♂️

I seed anime OSTs, plenty enough and rare collections.

If you folks happen to download that category, chances are I am one of your sources 🤣

Thanks friend! You're doing the work of Kamisama

Is quality worth the 50gb?

I don't have any fancy speakers or monitor...

At 80+Gb that means it's a straight blu-ray rip without being recompressed at all, which is perfect if you have a nice home theater system. You definitely notice the difference then. But if you're just watching on an average monitor with headphones or such, then you're honestly better off finding a smaller version that someone properly compressed down a bit.

My very fancy sweet spot is somewhere between 10-20gb 1080p
My alright sweet spot is around 7-10gb 1080p.

Higher is too much in disk space for me.

7–20gb for a 1080p movie? Only my 4k movies are allowed to burn that much space. Most of my 1080p movies are under 5gb (usually under 3). I think the only 1080p movie I have at that size is Jiang Ziya: Legend of Deification (2020) at ~11gb, and that's only because I haven't found a dual audio version in HEVC/AV1.

Edit: For context, I watch on a 1440p monitor with headphones that simulate 7.1 surround sound (Logitech G Pro X Wireless). A LOT of my 1080p movies are RARBG's 2gb 5.1 releases. Incredible quality for how tiny the files are. Actual magic.

Like I said those are the movies I really enjoy (like Interstellar etc.)
Most get the usual treatment of sub 10gb.

I didn't read fancy as meaning "good movies I like" my bad. I thought it was just a modifier to sweet spot meant to spice up the sentence oops

Actually both. Might be actually my bad ;)

If it's a movie I enjoy or is often talked about as being visually stunning, it gets the good treatment.
If it's just another run of the mill, it get's the usual treatment.

They look amazing on a big TV with a nice sound system. If it’s just for watching on your computer I would recommend the 2GB RARBG releases.

Try it out and see for yourself if it's worth it to you.

Even with fancy gear some people don't appreciate higher quality, i'm somewhat jealous, because that would save me so much money.

Try getting older!

A decade ago, I was extremely into hi-fi — most of my disposable income went to it. (Martin Logan electrostatic speakers and McIntosh amps, stereo JL Fathom 13.5” subs, sound treatment and reference mic for balancing and analysis …)

Now? I’m perfectly and completely pleased with my AirPods Max. My hearing just ain’t what it used to be, and I genuinely don’t hear the slightest difference. (… obviously modulo feeling the bass, hah.)

(Yes. I listen to music over Bluetooth. Not even APT-X. WHO HAVE I BECOME? 😭)

The process already started, i've bought myself some Anker bluetooth buds for 24€ recently just for podcasts and sounds for sleeping. I have to say, you can make out a difference for sure, but why the fuck have i spent 3k on headphone and DAC, i'm starting to question myself if that noticeable but not immense improvement was worth that kind of money.

I still don't regret it and enjoy it while it lasts, but i don't know if i will do that again.

Maybe we just made inner peace with the knowledge that we experienced higher-end and can settle for less.

You get diminishing returns. But yes, on a large 4K TV you can notice the difference.

With prices being about 14$/tb on sale for the cheapest 8-16tb drives, yeah, it really is. And if the cheap drive breaks, no problem, you only had public torrents on it anyways.

It looks great on my TV! The HD version also looks very good but flipping between them this version is noticably higher quality.

I did this with the That 70s show FGT torrents. Nobody seeds older media anymore, so each one had/has a >30 ratio on the 5GB-per-season BDrips

I wish for low-risk older media people would just keep the seed open forever. Very little bandwidth will be taken up but people will have it there if they want to go back and watch it.

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Why limit the time?

Keeping niche torrents alive for possible years if you're not deleting it might safe someones day.

And this is why I backup all the torrents I download. If I lose the drive, they might not be seeded anymore and I won't be able to re-download everything. There's stuff in my collection that was hard to find 5 years ago.

Is there a specific way you backup torrents? Or do you just drop them in a folder?

The only sane way to have a backup would be a NAS with raid 1. Other than that? Yeah, just drop them in a folder. The other dude probably just has them on an external drive, if that fails they are gone.

I put it on S3 Glacier. It's really really cheap to store. $1/TB. But I also have multiple copies locally

Nice! But how do you organize them? Like putting them in subfolders, etc.

My fear is that I would end up with an infite list of files that I cannot organise easily

I pretty much always leave stuff seeding once I get it these days. Ever since I bumped the disk space on my NAS it made it a lot easier to leave stuff instead of jockeying for space on disk.

My higher ratio items are all old shits like You Got Served lmao

Had that with a few movies recently which took about a week to download. I removed my limits for those, I'm only at a ratio of 5 or smth on those tho. Still, it's honest work

The only torrent I ever removed my seed cap for was a set of DVD-audio ISOs. I had it downloading for months, but it never got above 5%. Eventually I found the same disc images on another site, so I dropped them in the download folder and rechecked the torrent, which came back 97% complete. The only files missing were box art scans and NFOs. I let that thing seed for about five months.

I want to seed too, but I can't get anyone to receive it

I rather just stick to Real-Debrid, and never worry about seeds nor seeding ever again. Cached torrents are the future!

Since Real-Debrid has a copy of the torrent's data, does it do any seeding?

Not as far as I'm aware, but the way I justify it is that the more people who are using a Debrid service, the less strain it puts on torrents because of fewer leechers. Real-Debrid only needs to download the file once, and then every subscriber has immediate access to it.

You can always just use a seedbox instead. The main reason why I use Debrid is because it allows me to stream any show or movie I want instantly to my TV, without having to wait, the instant downloads for games & software is just an added bonus. So for me it's worth the tradeoff of not being able to do my rightful duty and seed.

Paying for piracy is stupid

Seems pretty on-brand to me, considering what the general consensus of pirates has always been: it's not about unwillingness to pay, it's about unwillingness to deal with bullshit.

How can I simultaneously agree with you and the other person?

Cognitive dissonance baby! And I'm right there with you.

Worth it for the Gbps download speeds. I can download two 50+ GB titles, install them, decide I don't like them, and uninstall 'em, all in under an hour.

Not to mention that you need a VPN for torrent clients (and not Debrid), so at the end of the day, you're paying for piracy regardless. So it makes sense to just go with the cheaper and faster option.

I'm from eastern europe. VPN is not required here because the law doesn't care about online piracy. A VPN only slows down my internet speed.

I'm from Western Europe and they don't care about online piracy either. Only some countries are problematic, like France I think, with that Hadopi thing.

Disagree. I use a paid streaming service that's every bit as convenient as Netflix, but has a library consisting of almost anything you could possibly think of. No need to hope somebody's seeding it, or go searching through dozens of different sites. It's one super easy go-to source that not only has the content, but remembers where you left off, allows user profiles, etc. That convenience is worth paying for.

Unless it was something really obscure I never had problems finding seeders.

I use the search engine function inside qBitTorrent and I sort the results descending by the number of seeders. To enable it go to View > Search Engine (iirc) and follow these simple instructions.

qBitTorrent also has a feature that lets you download a torrent in order of their pieces, and also download the first and last piece first, which is basically streaming. No need to wait for the download to finish first.

If needed, VLC has a built-in plugin called VLsub which lets you find and automatically load subtitles for almost anything. To enable it go to View > VLSub.

qBitTorrent + VLC is my Netflix. Never asked me a cent, but to me they are priceless and more convenient than any subscription service.

On Android I use LibreTorrent + VLC.

Yay.

Sometimes certain debried like Alldebried might be able to get you the torrent without any seeding p2p.

But they might be a paid service so that's up to you.

That chance is so low that you might even safe money just buying what you're looking for

Only if it’s still cached on their servers. If the torrent has zero seeders and it’s not cached even the debrid sites can’t complete the download on their side.

The oldest active torrent I know of is the fanimatrix. I'm still seeding it just in case.

Stop using torrents and start using newsgroups.

Where do I start?

Here's a good guide, t's old, but nothing should be too different.

https://www.cuttingcords.com/home/ultimate-server/getting-started

Use radar instead of Couch Potato.

You can find up to date guides for any of the individual products.

I recommend NZBgeek's lifetime subscription.

Then, set torrents as your news group's backup and you should be good to go.

Spend an evening setting this up and you'll be golden. Just subscribe to any shows or movies you want and it will automatically download them when they are available.

You can set preferences around quality, file size, language, format, etc