I started pirating movies again after a decade

Digester@lemmy.world to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 679 points –

I was a happy Netflix user until 2018, before that I haven't really pirated any movies (with very rare exceptions) for almost a decade but I recently started again. I'm was doing my monthly budgeting and realized I was paying for too many subscription services. Netflix, Amazon Prime, Shudder, Disney+, Hulu and Crunchyroll. My family likes to watch different types of content that is distributed on many different platforms.

I was never subscribed to these many services until a couple years ago. I was thinking which service I should cancel when I realized I had the option to cancel all of them this entire time. I'm torrenting again and I started saving a considerate amount.

The only service I'm paying for is Spotify which I think it's fairly priced and offers all the music my family listens too (and it's convenient). All the competitors pretty much offer the same content and that's how streaming services should be.

I remember back in the day using eMule and BitChe (to look for torrents). Now I'm using Deluge as my torrent client and I I get my torrents from 1337x. What sites are you guys using?

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I wish streaming companies would take notes from Spotify. It’s not too expensive, non-exclusive, acceptable quality even on higher end gear.

Doesn’t shove idiotic recommendations on my face, doesn’t bug me about my address, doesn’t randomly drop in quality because my neighbour is taking a piss. Looking at you, Netflix, you expensive useless piece of shit.

(I’m fact, Spotify’s recommendations are so good that I’m constantly finding new stuff I actually like.)

Personally I find the recommendations really bad lol, I never stray outside of my library or playlists. I find music looking at artists I like then seeing other songs they wrote, or search what I hear playing in the world around me, or what I'm watching.

I use an AI playlist creator called songslikex.com which builds a Spotify playlist based on one song. Think it's better than Spotify recommendations and I have found a few new artists that I really like with it.

There's also, everynoise.com. you can find any genre of music and it will link to a Spotify playlist. I've found so much cool stuff on there.

Thank you so much! I read about this a couple weeks ago and was trying to remember the name last night. Et voilà!

Wow, this is awesome. Thanks for sharing it.

It‘s probably going to be the other way around if anything, Spotify eventually doing various moves worsening the experience in an effort for more money. It‘s surprising how long it is holding out (and I‘m still using and enjoying it too), but ever since I learned about Enshittification, I‘m expecting it to worsen eventually.

3 companies own like 90% of all music copyrights and they are getting a fucking sweet deal from Spotify.

Artists are starting to get screwed and it's only a matter of time before they come for the customers.

Buy CDs, use Bandcamp, install Nicotine+ (preferably in that order)

Oh it’s gonna enshittify, that’s for sure. It just hasn’t yet.

The "exclusive content war" already started with podcasts. Wait a few years and let's say Miley Cyrus will sign an exclusive contract with Apple Music and there you have it.

My spotify recommends are hilarious. I played a track white noise that went for like 6 hours. Spotify recommended ai has all white noise tracks ignoring music choices.

Expanding from just torrents - I highly recommend looking into usenet! Downside, you have to pay for a good indexer. You can get a one time purchase depending on what site you go to, mine is ~$80 per year. After that, set up your nzb/Usenet download client (I recommend sabnzb, these are all free), then you can troll through that for more. Generally it's more reliable, and if you find something on there you can download it and it'll max out your download speed (if you let it) instead of getting single seeder torrents that get stalled.

Want to get (slightly) techier but much better? Get Radarr for movies, Sonarr for TV shows, lidarr for music, and readarr for books. (There's also whisparr for porn, mylar3 for comics, Bazarr for subtitles and others, but I haven't felt a need to run these yet) Basically you can find movies, tv, etc that you want and "monitor" them, and let the program do the rest. They scan multiple sources (Usenet and torrent sites) that you setup for the content you want, compare it to filters you put in place (quality, number of seeders, age, number of other downloads, etc) and download it for you. New movie that isn't hd yet? It can grab a webrip or lower def version for you, and automatically replace it with a 1080p version when it's available. You can also grab prowlarr to manage your indexers (nzb site torrent sites) across all of your apps so you have one source of truth.

My setup:

  • Indexers in prowlarr Nzbgeek (paid, mentioned above) 1337x Pirate bay (Some other misc torrent sites)

  • Download clients Qbittorrent (for torrents) Sabnzb (for usenet)

  • Frontend apps Radarr - movie manager Sonarr - tv manager Readarr - book manager Lidarr - music manager - no longer use, switched to paying for Tidal Plex - media server to aggregate and stream the video files from above Calibre - media server for ebooks only

I may be a pirate, but I do it with class and comfort.

Comfort is so easy. I'v only started using Plex, which is not much effort at all, but it gives so much comfort. My subtitles are always in sync now!

What did you use as your music manager before Tidal?

I used lidarr for getting and maintaining the music, and Plex for streaming it. I switched to tidal since the effort of individually selecting songs/albums to download before I could listen to them was far more than the $9/month cost of streaming the music. If you don't like expanding your music library then downloading it is fine (like if you only listen to a few artists and it doesn't change) but my taste in music changes with my mood so I was having to download classic rock, blues and jazz, pop, and classical. Steaming is just a hell of a lot easier than downloading, at least for discovering new music

Do you have a good guide for setting up your qbittorrent with the arrs? Ive had NZBget working flawlessly for about a year now but haven't had the time/focus to figure out the right way to handle the torrent side of things.

I didn't use a guide actually, but here are the steps!

Get qbittorrent configured for normal use (up/down limit, root folder, etc

Enable the webui in qbittorrent. Once done, you should be able to access it at localhost:{port} from your browser, or from {host_ip}.{port} from any other device on your network

Add qbittorrent as a download client for your arr apps just like your nzb downloader (but selecting torrent). I can't remember if you have to do this individually or if prowlarr can handle it, I think prowlarr can handle it so you don't have to do it multiple times though.

Pass in localhost or the IP of the host machine and the port when you're setting it up so it knows where to connect it. You may also need the username and password you made (unless you use bypass on localhost or whitelisted ips)

And that's about it! It will submit the torrent downloads to qbittorrent for you and manage them like sabnzb/nzbget do for nzb.

Hope this helps! It is a super easy process to setup thankfully, if you run into any roadblocks that a basic Google can't solve I'd be happy to try to help

Only way to watch good quality content on Linux is pirating. So, fuck 'em media houses. Imma sail my ship to the high seas!

Seriously, I pay for streaming services and Blu Rays and still wind up just pirating the stuff I already own half the time because that's somehow more convenient...

Same here. Subscribed to some streaming services because my family members use them. For me, it's simply much faster and more convenient to pirate. It's not helped by the fact that the stuff I watch are more often than not unavailable on any streaming platform.

I think a lot of us are in the same boat. The early days of Spotify and Netflix killed piracy for me.

Convenience and a fair price? Not on my watch! - Greedy corporate assholes

I'd honestly be willing to spend $30-$60 a month for 2012 netflix. It's the content loss that really killed things for me. Stupid-ass copyright holders.

Streaming services are bound and determined to make themselves Cable TV all over again. We had it good for a little while, at least.

Streaming services shouldn't be able to have exclusive rights to content similar to the way cinemas work. That way they would have to focus on making a decent service, which honestly most of them are pretty shit atm.

It all should be like radio. Report what you play and pay for it based on your viewers.

At least with cable TV you can get the highest tear subscription with all the channels. With streaming services you have to subscribe to a decent bunch just to have a broad variety of content, resulting in a much higher price than any cable TV subscription.

It's a disaster.

Cable cost well over $100 a month many years ago when I cancelled it. And 1/3 of the content is commercials.

Pretty sure you could subscribe to every major streaming service for less than that. And as long as you avoid Hulu, you won't see commercials.

Things are WAY better now, even though it was better a little while ago when there was just Netflix.

I did the math, subscribing to every major streaming service is about $100. I got an offer to subscribe to Cable with my ISP for $29 a month. Obviously years ago Cable was more expensive but it doesn't feel like we necessarily improved on convenience which streaming services are supposed to provide.

Content gets pulled constantly from these services and they often require dedicated hardware to stream HD content, Prime and Apple TV being an example. By the time I switch between 4 apps to find what I want to watch I've already fallen asleep.

In 2023 it's just stupid having to rely on so many different subscription services to only have access to a portion of the available content (which gets constantly removed). All considering how anti-consumer these big corporations are I wouldn't say things are WAY better. A few years ago Netflix alone had much more diverse content, was generally enough for most people and was cheaper overall.

Music services offer 99% of the available content in one app, if you switch to a different service you don't miss out on content availability. If we had that for videos it would be perfect.

Agree about the comparison with music. I wonder why we didn't see balkanization there like we do for video.

Because they realized people are willing to pay for extra subscriptions. Production studios created their own services while keeping their IPs exclusive rather than licensing it to third parties. They make more money this way until people stop subscribing to every new service that comes out each month.

Music has the potential of undergoing the same path. I wouldn't be surprised if major labels like UMG, Warner and Sony pulled content from Spotify and other services and creating their own. Let's just hope people smarten up so this doesn't happen anytime soon.

I'd be fine with a minimal streaming service and being able to rent shit I want to watch but rental streaming prices are fucking ridiculous. It is $20 to rent Fast X. It is only $25 to "buy" it. One that is not still in theaters is still $6 to rent. And if it is ancient, it is $4 to rent. When I was a wee lad, in the early 2000s, it was $3 to rent a new release and $1 for old movies. That required a storefront and an employee. Shit should not have gone up in price 100% and 300% respectively. General inflation has not gone up nearly that much and more efficient tech is supposed to make things cheaper.

So fuck all that. I'll pay for Disney because I have a kid. But they are starting to remove shit so it is likely I will be dropping that sometime in the future.

I pay a few bucks a month for access to a giant plex share.

It's worth it to just, watch stuff, basically anything, instead of fiddling around with different apps and subscriptions and all that.

I'd happily pay a lot more for the same legal service, but it doesn't exist.

Studios, if you want my money, make everything available in one spot for a reasonable price. Or, continue your bastardization of everything, and I'll just keep watching your stuff anyway.

and you dont technically "own" it if you purchase it. You just have right to access it. ridiculous.

If you are into self hosting, I suggest you look into unraid, from there look at sonnar/radarr/libarr (tv/movies/music), run these in radar as dockers. I recommend looking a spaceinvaders videos on YouTube to get you started.

These three dockers will help with automating your torrent downloads.

Once you get comfortable with this I would suggest looking into seedboxes to host your download clients outside of your local network. And I would also suggest looking into nzb downloads to help pull more content. There are some excellent nzb sites to sign up for.

This is what I do. I have a truenas server and it runs docker containers for couch potato, medusa, transmission, and plex. When shows are released they just show up in plex as if it were Netflix. Easy. No red tape on finding out which streaming service etc. It will just arrive all in one place. Best of all there's a good app to manage it all from your phone. Nzb360

Everything you just said went over my head. Can you clarify what you are describing? Or simplify it?

The arr apps such as sonarr (TV), radarr (movies), lidarr (music), readarr (books), etc automate the search, download and organization of content. So for TV you go into sonarr add a show you like such as Friends and say you want all episodes, or just new episodes, setup the quality you want and it will monitor the torrent sites or your Usenet you added and download the content when it is available. It takes a bit of time to setup but once you do it a few times it becomes easier and all the arr apps have a similar interface, settings and setup. There's a good wiki out there if you search "servarr".

Edit to add: unraid is an OS you can use for virtual machines and containers. I personally use proxmox, but windows will work, probably less efficient, if you're comfortable with it.

I haven't yet jumped into this, because of the amount of Node in some of those, but I've been thinking about it.

One question I have is: is it obvious that a given search result is pirated or legal? There's a lot of "legal" content, and if a user is concerned with legality, can they still very value from the *arr tools? Can they get access to only-legal content, or is it only the usual torrent services, and the usual legal ambiguity?

"Legal," not "ethical."

Same. I have no idea what's going on rn lol. I just use justchill or ee3 to stream and if I really like something I'll torrent it from yts to keep it. That's about as complex as my system gets

1337x is my favorite right now for TV/movies and Nyaa for anime. Between that and Usenet, I can get 99.5% of what I want.

I use qbittorent and Sabnzb for downloads.

Since you've been out of the piracy game for awhile you may consider looking into *arr apps (radarr, sonarr, prowlarr, etc). They can auto download movies/tv you want and format them in a way that Plex/Jellyfin like, so you can get a whole library of content with just a few clicks. There's a bit of a learning curve to the setup though.

What do you find on Usenet thats not on torrents?

It's not so much that I can't find things on torrents, it's that I don't have to worry about something not having seeders so it's more reliable for old uploads. In addition I've found it to be better for single episodes, multiple release groups that I use seem to only use Usenet.

As for things that aren't movies/tv, I think Usenet is better for slightly more obscure content, such as comic books.

I think it depends on the country and language content. If i want german movies, i dont find them on torrents.

Torrents are kind of risky here and usenet seems to be far safer. So a lot of uploaders use OCHs or Usenet.

Very similar situation here. Around 2017/2018 I had Netflix and Prime Video. I was able to watch 95% of the content I wanted to watch and only had to download some obscure 90's SciFi series they didn't have.

But the industry had to fuck it up and create too many platforms. We have Netflix, Prime, Disney+, HBO, Paramount Plus, Apple TV+ and many more. I am not subscribing to your service because one or two titles might interest me. It's way too much cost for a lot less value I had in 2018.

I even wanted to make an exception for Apple TV+ because their series are absolutely amazing. But they force you to buy an expensive Apple device to watch the content in 4K on the Safari Browser. Go fuck yourself, Apple. It's not even a technical issue, because they play the trailers in 4K but then switch to 480p with a terrible bitrate.

Don't go to the big media outlets and start crying that piracy is too damn high if you make it more inconvenient to watch your programs legally than just downloading an MKV file from somewhere.

It's like the old cable tv days where you had to get hundreds of useless channels and multiple packages and pay a fortune just to get the 3 channels you actually want.

Even when I subbed to netflix, I still downloaded what I enjoyed.

I like having an offline copy of my media.

Online content always seems to provide sub-par quality, even on good connections. Don't need to worry about that with downloaded media.

Plus, if the internet goes down for whatever reason? External HDD > Laptop > HDMI > TV. Boom. Offline Netflix.

It's also nice for traveling and staying in hotels. Most hotel TVs have at least one accessible HDMI port, and that's all you need.

Too many shitty streaming services. Just pay for a reliable VPN and torrent to your heart content. I'm using qbittorrent and transmission.

I have surf shark vpn. Are they reliable or who do you recommend?

Surfshark is okay for torrenting but I don't really trust surfshark when it comes to my sensitive info.

I stopped paying for services because of the ease of not having to jump between different apps on the Roku to watch various movies. Locally hosting my content had simplified everything for the whole family.

I would suggest getting a seedbox and joining a private torrent site like torrentleech. That’s what I use and then upload to my NAS that runs Plex and can view from anywhere on any device.

How do you join a private site?

Aren't they all invite only?

Some, like torrentleech, do open invites on a regular basis. But most do not and you'll need an invite to get in

That is the definition of private tracker, yeah. Doesn't require much work to join some entry level ones though, and is worth it. Keen an eye out for open signups.

I tried private trackers a while back (namely for music with what.cd) and it really wasn't worth it. the stuff they had on there was all just stuff you could find anywhere. and they're so tryhard about ratio that you really couldn't download anything. and any attempts to seed just resulted in larger/faster seedboxes doing the work most of the time.

I still buy CDs for the highest possible bitrate and album art. That's how willing I am to pay for content.

I started torrenting movies again about a month ago. This shit is ridiculous. They made the situation absurd. I paid until it turned stupid again.

CD's are 16 bit, 44kHz, and can not go higher. There are higher mediums, tho I agree with your sentiment.

I use Musi and it has everything for free (I have no spotify) and acts like youtube red. No account needed. One ad if u don't pay.

24/192 rips from a half inch tape are the way to go.

You don't do anything with those though without a DAC that can play that without downsampling and an operating system with a sensible sound service.

And the right genre and good ears.

Going back to my Steely Dan collection ->

Good sound quality but shame about the loudness and compression on a lot of CD releases of the last 15 years or so though.

I feel you. I said heck it and cancelled them when I entered the adulthood in which you're exclusively surrounded by people who are pissed about your existence unless you give them money. Paying for things you cannot physically touch has become a rich thing for me, among with grave service, licensing and censorship issues. To truly watch everything I'd have to subscribe to more than one and get into a VPN.

Just Fmovies suffices and I particulary appreciate their subtitle feature, being a foreigner.

Spotify? You might like ViMusic over at F-Droid.

ViMusic looks a well put together app, I'm gonna check it out!

Also InnerTune just released version 0.5 which is very nice, it's a bit more like the YouTube Music app than ViMusic is.

Cheers for the rec. Scraping off Youtube Music can only get better from there. :) I generally prefer that platform because Google is one of the few that make use of the Opus codec. Downside is, you leave so and so many playlists on Spotify behind.

I just use illicit streaming sites nowadays, I wish I could afford more physical storage but I don't really wanna hold onto every TV show I consume anyways. Way to go though, fuck these vastly overpriced subscription models!

Plex shares solved my streaming need and negated my laziness and hatred of downloading files to a penstock for my ps4.

£5 for everything I could ever need with a netflix like interface, and if for whatever reason something isn’t on…it’s obtained and visible to watch. Bliss!

I feel like I must be the only person in the world still still using Piratebay! I switch between that and Kickass Torrents and have done for years. They've been through a variety of guises but seem to have settled down now. I use Tixati to leech and seed, never used a VPN and never had any trouble from my ISPs. It's been interesting reading the comments though, might look at some of the suggestions.

once in a while when i download a disney movie, it triggers an email from the isp. i payed the fee tho so they need to shut up, in canada there's a tax, or was, on blank cd's that went to the entertainment industry to compensate for pirating. they charged me so i feel entitled to sail on.

Same, got tired of shit service.

If a fucking piracy website is better than the cooperate that should make people question why they even pay a single cent to them.

Same here. I was actually pretty okay with just going with Netflix and then maybe HBO. But then every one of their mothers has their own streaming service.

Back to the salty seas for me

I think the phrase you were looking for was "everyone and their mothers" 😅

Been torrenting all through with 1337x and yts.mx despite paying for Netflix. The occasional piratebay for more obscure movies. RARBG was my favorite tracker, but sadly, they are no more.

Luckily I live in China where nobody bothers about copyright laws, so I can max out my 1gbit connection that costs me 2 full dollars a month 🙃

I relate so much to your situation.

I was a subscriber of Netflix, HBO, Disney+ and Apple TV+.

Started to look at alternatives and ended up with a Real Debrid subscription coupled with Stremio and Torrentio.

It’s been smooth sailing for me.

Qbittorrent has search engines as plugins, just google it and choose which ones you want

It feels as though we are moving back towards cable with all the different services and none of them are really anything to brag about anymore. I canceled my Netflix when they raised the prices and stated they would end password sharing. I then canceled my HBOMax when they started pulling content I liked to watch and I had already previously canceled my Hulu account since they really didn't have anything worth watching. Now I am down to Amazon, Paramount+ (as it is free with WalMart+), and Crunchyroll and I rather like have less choices as it gives me the push to go do something else besides watch TV.

Been pirating movies for many years. At the beggining it was PirateBay, then kickass torrents, now it is a combination of 1337x and torrentgalaxy

I see a lot of mixed people between piracy and paying for streaming services.

  • Streamio + Torrentio
  • Plex/Jellyfin etc + Real Debrid
  • Starr stack (not for everyone)

I use a starr stack with custom scripts and shell out more money then if I just payed for services.

For those that don’t want to dive super deep into piracy and want good access to content. Use the Streamio + Torrentio or Real Debrid they’re honestly great and make things easy.

Idk if I would use whatever this debrid is. You can easily accomplish torrenting trackers and what not via either biglybt or any other torrent client that allows I2P, or you can use a vpn, etc.

I don’t understand all this hype lately for downloaders, they look and few exactly like crap ware and malware used to come bundled in - what’s the benefit to using a “downloader” over using a setup with torrenting, plex, private trackers and maybe an *arr product like sonarr?

When you use a debrid service with Stremio, you do not need to use a VPN, and you are less hindered by a devices ability to understand torrent content. It makes it easy to stream in your browser, for instance. Even on your phone.

Yeah see I wouldn’t expect that sort of services from something that’s supposed to manage downloads though.

I’m not going to trust software that’s in charge of downloading my content, doing xyz to it and returning it to me.

Now for the steaming portion, I can do this same thing, with plex. So I still don’t understand what value is being added besides one layer of obfuscation to your identity. Where are these servers hosted, do they have to comply with international regulations and global legal compliance? I bet they do and it’s just a matter of time that they go down and every other IP they have info on with it too.

Just my 2c

It very much depends on the provider, same as VPNs.

Something you cant do with PLEX though, is real time streaming with zero storage necessary.

Yeah, again - just not something that’s needed for me and the risk that’s posed by allowing a 3rd party to act as an intermediary for your files is a great way to get infected.

This streaming part also seems nice, but I personally don’t need to watch something as soon as I find it if I just need to wait a couple hours or create a backlog of shows to dl while I’m doing other stuff.

The only reason I’m especially hesitant of this is because it’s unnecessary risk, this seems like a product for young people and the inexperienced which is who threat actors target

I mean, if you're concerned that malware is going to be injected into your video files… Who’s to say your torrents aren’t already infected?

And yeah, to an extent it requires less knowledge, but the WAF is much higher on a “watch it now” platform than a “I want to watch this let me add it to a queue to watch it later” platform.

I’m also a fan of the fact that I don’t need to dedicate storage to what is essentially a single use file.

But to each their own, of course.

Oooo that’s a really good point I hadn’t thought about although I’m sure you could setup an auto purge of old torrents pretty easily with whatever language you’d like.

Also an excellent point about the initial source possibly being malicious but I did want to bring up the counterpoint that the torrent portion is inherently risky but this service would be adding additional risk on top of that

I can see the use for a real-time torrent streamer but the download management portion just screams adware, Trojan, etc which are only getting worse and nastier as the days go by.

You don’t need to know about bittorrent or set things up as much no VPN either needed and it’s easy to understand. I used it only for a week though personally and thought it was good.

I’m picky though and wanted ZR releases and everything very specific so I opted into a complete starr stack and plex on a dedi server.

Noooice, I was hopeful for an automated setup on my Pi4 but had issues with sonarr or somethin I can’t remember and then I thought about it more and decided to keep things manual and prevent any unnecessary additional risk. The downloads from i2p usually take longer but I just start whatever I might want when I’m making dinner and it’s usually ready for watching that night or next day so its been working pretty well and I don’t have to worry about any malware or anything suddenly creeping in on me or laying low for a long time because something was done automatically without my knowing

With some clients and addons + debrid, you can set up a Netflix/HBO clone, with no downloads necessary and instant streaming. You just browse the shows (it automatically downloads info and images form Trakt, TVDB, etc.), select play and it plays just like any streaming site.

Depending on the jurisdiction it's also legal to stream video, while downloading or torrenting is not.

That sounds nice! Wonder if that will continue to work with netflixs new restrictions on account sharing, how are they accomplishing such a task?

It looks and smells like a free lunch but I’m just not convinced that it’s safer. This is a big claim for them to be making that it’s somehow legal for them to be streaming Netflix and hbo shows to people who do not have an account and haven’t paid for those services

Got caught torrenting a decade ago by my ISP and haven’t since.

PIA for a vpn good enough to hop back in?

I've been using PIA for torrenting for several years with no trouble.

Cool! Thanks you

Make sure there are no "leaks" once you get PIA set up. There are online torrent leak checkers.

I’ve been using PIA to get around various region locked streaming sites for awhile now

What do you mean “leaks” like apps on my Pc not using it?

You can bind your torrent client to only use the VPN connection. The default is that if there is a drop on the vpn, most torrent clients use any connection which means it would just use your normal connection and could leak your ip address.

What happened when they caught you?

Very angry letter home threatening legal action that definitely pissed off my parents (I was in high school at the time)

Did not help that it was an adult movie that got me caught and this was apparent because the bastards included the movie title in the letter lmao

That's rough! I only received an email from my provider Telus telling me to stop torrenting, I didn't and I never received another email since. I don't use any VPN

when i got caught like 15 years ago all they did was send a letter in the mail asking that delete the downloaded game as if they would have any way of knowing if i actually did or not lol. I had a vpn but didn’t know about binding it to the downloader

PIA was bought out by Kape Technologies which has a sketchy history of running malicious man-in-the-middle ad-injection software for profit. Up to you if you think that's a dealbreaker or not, but I'd recommend using Mullvad instead.

They passed a third party audit of their No logs policy in June of 2022 so although Kape is a concern I’ve been keeping a close eye on it. Performance has still been great across my devices (iPad, iOS, windows, MacBook) and so until I see a change from my side or some more concerning news about it comes out I’ve been happy with it.

To be honest, I have been always using NordVPN, never had any issues with them. Torrenting like a beast 😂

Probably there are other, cheaper and better, VPNs.

How does that affect your speeds?

Seconding Nord, love it. If I happen to get slow speeds I just connect to a different location (only happens if im running double vpn, or obfuscated, sometimes they get slow- TOR vpn is super slow so i dont use that one. These are different categories of VPN inside of Nord if you are wondering).

IIRC, Nord is one of the few who keeps their data on RAM, meaning if an agency requests records, they unplug it to give to them, and the data is gone as soon as it's unplugged. If im wrong, let me know!

I started using illegal streams last year after also getting tired paying out of the ass for multiple streaming services. Now I pay only for Spotify and Crunchyroll, and HBO when House of the Dragon starts airing (then I cancel when that's over). Movie/show companies turning online streaming back into cable over greed don't realize they're biting their own faces off. I may pay for Netflix again for the final Stranger Things season, but I won't be keeping it afterwards.

Oh, and if an anime isn't on Crunchyroll, it gets torrented.

Also the constant canceling/dropping shows and movies is maddening and is only pissing people off more.

Yep, pretty much same here. I cut it down to just Spotify and Crunchyroll, and now just Crunchyroll then torrenting/usenet if it's not on Crunchyroll.

I finally got this all setup but I really just use plex and then I2P to source and download content with/from via biglybt and an I2P setup and manually select my torrents and let em download overnight (raspberry pi setup so it’s not disruptive)

Next up I’ll be looking into sonarr or maybe just whipping up or borrowing a Python script to facilitate searching for and init the magnet links for bigly

I haven’t torrented in ages but I also don’t pay for streaming. You can literally stream any movie or show online for free. Just use a search other than Google, I use Yandex for this purpose. Just search for the title and voila. The only catch is you won’t find 4k quality, only 1080p.

Not only the hassle of too many competing services, it's the fact the buggers drop things all the time. Went to rewatch Enders Game the other night after reading the book and could I find it on any of the services I pay for? Nope (it used to be there), they wanted more money for it. Fk you, off to real-debrid, it's like they want to force us back again.

I’m curling up to a movie right now on Hooplah & last night watched one on Kanopy, two streaming services I get free with my library card.

I use FMHY. It's a listing of a bunch of sources.

I cancelled Nowtv because it added adverts and you have to pay extra for 1080 which is ridiculous.

So I started watching some of their stuff on Beetv... Then I started looking at my other streaming services.

I stopped torrenting because streaming services made it more convenient. It no longer is.

I only pay for Netflix because it was the first one that offered a good experience with streaming in my country, but for everything else I torrent.

Doesn't matter what country I'm in. They keep shutting down access to my always-on vpn. I will simply download the content if they literally don't let me have it when i pay.

I'm currently using "Torrent Search Revolution" on my phone, and it is so easy! Is searches a bunch of sites at one (you can remove sites from the site-search list, not sure about adding to it though). The only downside, so far, is you don't get any extras you'd get from going to the site- no comments, no still-frames for QC. You gotta know exactly what your looking for.

Edit- I forgot, you asked for sites! Primary - Torrentday Secondary - tpb, 1337x, YTS, eztv, ext, magnet.dl, nyaa, cloudtorrents (the aforementioned app searches all of these)

Welcome back to the seven seas, matey! We have been saving a spot in Davy Jones' locker for ye!

I am finally getting around to cutting the cord here in a month (Xfinity raising my prices another 40$ a month). I have a Plex server on a WD myCloud, and am ripping DVD's left and right. I need to start hunting for a decent VPN, and site to pull torrents from.

I never stopped 😂.

But in all seriousness I'm still languishing on janky old school public trackers too, commenting here to help me remember to read through these suggestions at a later date.

Less likely to get the episodes out of order by pirating than by watching Netflix nowadays.

It just seems like they don't care anymore.

I'm in the same boat. I stopped for about 10 years and then setup a media server. Started with music and then movies TV series. Mostly using open directories which has been pretty great.

This is why i pay for spotify, because it's so much easier than downloading and hosting music. The music industry got it right. Sign up with any music service and you'll get likely the same or very similar music libraries. But with TV and movies, there's all this fucking exclusive shit. They can eat shit if they think I'm gonna pay more for streaming than fucking cable/pay TV. Fuck that shit.

Me too! After paying for three subscription services and not finding anything to watch after a while, and seeing services raise prices and even add ads, I decided enough was enough.

Piracy is really good these days. 4k movies. :)

I prefer much more to pay for Real Debrid even when their servers are not as perfect as Netflix or alike, they are cheaper and have all the content that you'd normally want to see.

Man, I've been thinking about doing the same thing. I was just talking with my wife about how nice it was when you basically had Hulu and/or Netflix.

What's really pissing me off is having Disney/Hulu/ESPN as one account - that used to be called cable and I fucking hated it.

I pay for a seed box that is powerful enough to run a Plex server and comes with 8TB of storage for a little more than a Netflix subscription. I'll stick with that.

YTS is good for movies.

If you want to share those downloads in an easy netflix-like way you should consider a small homeserver with Jellyfin. Even a newer raspberry pi is strong enough for streaming to 2 or maybe 3 people at the same time, unless files need transcoding to different codecs.

That combined with the servarr docker containers beats any streaming service hands down

welcome again.... and i stopped pirating movies and started streaming over internet on pirate website.

Iptv, stremio, real debrid and torrentio ftw! I'm paying for things, but it's a fraction of what we paid for all the subscriptions. And I can actually find things I want to watch!

unRAID and Plex is the way.

Guide is a little outdated, but works like a dream. Ibracorp (Google them) is also very handy.

I prefer Jellyfin over Plex. Plex has become too bloated. Jellyfin is free, open-source, and well maintained. I have it running on Docker on my NAS, feeding multiple devices, accessible on every platform I use, and it hasn't failed me. I was a lifetime subscriber of Plex before I made the switch, and haven't looked back.

LTT did a great video about Jellyfin. Keep in mind that this video is 5 months old, and they have had updates since.

Doesn't Jellyfin not allow sharing outside of your network or something like that? I've got elderly family members and very non-tech savvy folks that I share with, and Plex keeps it simple. I can't remember if that was the reason or something else, but I know there was a major downside to Jellyfin compared to Plex that just completely took it out of consideration for me.

You can create accounts for Jellyfin that allows people to log in. However, the way you serve it to them is your responsibility. In my case, I set up my system with DDNS to work off a personal domain that anyone can connect to with the correct credentials. It’s a bit more work to set up, but I like it better in the long run.

Oh yeah haha that's way too much trouble. It just works with Plex. Also not trying to make it any more complicated than "it's an app you can download and use anywhere you can use Netflix" for my users.

As long as you’re aware that “it just works” with Plex means it is phoning home to Plex servers with all your logins, actions and movies then you’re good to go.

I've taken all of the proper precautions.

Sounds good! Just be aware that Plex has been hacked in the past and handled communications about it poorly, and that it will probably happen again. It was what made me switch to Jellyfin myself, but doesn’t have to be a showstopper for you.

If I actually cared about watching stuff, I probably would be to. Right now all of my entertainment is YouTube/Twitch with AdBlock, so kind of pirating? Maybe when I actually bring a girl home I'll pirate something to watch if I can't just steal my parents Netflix login still lol. I have zero intentions of ever subscribing to streaming services.

Deluge leaks your ip address if you use a VPN, I use QBittorrent for this reason.

You can configure Deluge so that it can only use the VPN interface and nothing else. This way if the VPN drops even just a second, you're safe. You set this by entering the VPN IP in the the "Outgoing Interface" box in the Network settings. If the VPN IP changes, you need to update it (which can be automated using a script).

Never really stopped, what with being a low income resident in eastern parts of EU.

But a big reason in addition to cost and many services or content simply not being available in my country is all the technical loops you have to jump through to get the best experience—I remember the time when to get full HD streaming you had to either use a specific set-top box or certain Intel CPU-s integrated graphics in a specific browser. If you didn't, you'd be limited to 480p. The same still goes for 4k and Atmos today.

Speaking of Atmos, ironically being a DIY audio enthusiast has pretty much locked me out of that. No way to decode Atmos on a PC, you have to use an AVR. But my speakers use (along with other uncommon components) digital crossovers that take digital inputs and multichannel digital outputs are verboten on AVR-s because MPAA and licensing terms (I believe only the 30000€+ Trinnov and Storm Audio pre-pros have them). Not to mention that even 3000€+ AVR-s have DAC performance no better than my 50€ Asus sound card. In the end, it's just not worth the cost and hassle of setup.

For me, convenience of streaming is also a non-argument; with Jellyfin, Navidrome and Tailscale I can access my whole library from any point on Earth that has internet access. And streaming quality is only limited by the internet connection quality, not by my hardware not having some obscure DRM feature.

What are Navidrome and Tailscale for? I've heard of Jellyfin (but never used it)

Navidrome is a self-hosted music streaming service and Tailscale is an easy to use VPN to remotely access your home (or work) network and services on them without exposing anything on the public internet.

My family still has netflix so I use that sometimes. But... most of the time I'll download from a few places for movies:

  1. rarbg, though the original went down I found a new one at https://therarbg.com/
  2. yts, again the original went down but I've been using https://yts.mx/ which is fantastic.
  3. stremio. set it up with some plugins and it's pretty useful.
  4. this one is a little weird but https://databasegdriveplayer.xyz/player.php?imdb= I have a browser extension to pop up the relevant link on the imdb page, so I can just click that. not always best quality, but for some rarer titles it really does end up helping.

for client I've always really used transmission. it's small, comfy, works.

Therargb is a good one, thx! Sadly I cannot (yet) add it to jackett.

I was mainly torrenting before Netflix but ever since NF has gone to hell I've been on the lookout for a more family-friendly way to stream. After trying out a few options (Kodi, fmovies, Stremio etc) I've found that nothing beats the Stremio+Torrentio+Real Debrid method. You do have to pay subscription for Real Debrid but it's really cheap and not compulsory.

That's what I just setup a few days ago following another thread on here and can confirm, it's so simple and works really well.

I also started using Trakt along with it and adding user lists on stremio to fill up the feed.

Now my only problems are handling language (we watch stuff in original version but would like French versions for the kid). I set up torrentio for it but seems a bit hit or miss.

The other part I still need to figure out is when there's no streams found for more obscure stuff, I read I can fetch magnet links myself and put them in real DB but haven't tried it yet, not sure where best to go get these links and also don't understand if it's then going to work like normal for shows (like do I just search the titles again in stremio after putting the link in real DB and can I just do it for s01ep01 and then it'll autoplay the next episodes as normal?).

You dont need Spotify, check out ViMusic

Try InnerTube. I tried ViMusic, but the UI is terrible isn't it?

InnerTube is the same, but the UI is more intuitive.

My pick with ViMusic is not that the ui looks bad, honestly I kinda like it, but it looks like it isn't being maintained anymore.

Then that's why I found the UI so messy and out of style. It may have been good years ago.

Did you mean InnerTune? That's the result I got from searching

Yes, sorry, it is InnerTune. You can find it on F-Droid.

Whoa! Both of these are very cool. Is there way to migrate from Spotify to another service?

Sadly I don't think so. InnurTune is just a YouTube Music with different UI and Features. You can't even log in with you Google account.

I am afraid you will need to add your favorite artists / songs manually.

It doesn't have an algorithm and isn't cross platform.