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?
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 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.
This is amazing. Thanks
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.
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.
Oh it’s gonna enshittify, that’s for sure. It just hasn’t yet.
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)
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.
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Ever since I did this, I haven’t been able to go back. Never thought I’d be technically paying (albeit cheap) for piracy but it’s just really that convenient.
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Only way to watch good quality content on Linux is pirating. So, fuck 'em media houses. Imma sail my ship to the high seas!
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.
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.
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!
I’ve been using flixhq.to which is add-free and I’ve been pretty happy with it!
that’s great to know, these are all the sites I’m aware of atm: https://watcha.movie/ https://fmovies.to/ https://ww8.0123movie.net/ https://www.wcostream.org/ and https://anix.to/
My family still has netflix so I use that sometimes. But… most of the time I’ll download from a few places for movies:
- rarbg, though the original went down I found a new one at https://therarbg.com/
- yts, again the original went down but I’ve been using https://yts.mx/ which is fantastic.
- stremio. set it up with some plugins and it’s pretty useful.
- 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.
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.
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
thank you!
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.
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).
Oh cool. I have no reason to switch back now that I have something that works, but it’s good to know
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.
