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?
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.
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.
welcome again… and i stopped pirating movies and started streaming over internet on pirate website.
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.
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 movies, tv, etc like a torrent site. 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.
Only way to watch good quality content on Linux is pirating. So, fuck 'em media houses. Imma sail my ship to the high seas!
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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.
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.”
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.
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.
