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?
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.
Add Nzb360 to this and your pirate life will truly be class
Or LunaSea on iOS
Forgot all about LunaSea, thanks for the reminder!
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
thank you!
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
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.
True!
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.”
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
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
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.
Must try. Thanks for suggesting.
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.
This is amazing. Thanks
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.
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.
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’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.
How does this work? I’m still new here :s
and you dont technically “own” it if you purchase it. You just have right to access it. ridiculous.
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.
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 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 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/
Thanks a lot, I’ll check them out!
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.
Since you are looking for German movies you might be interested in my German DL Sonarr & Radarr guide:
https://github.com/PCJones/radarr-sonarr-german-dual-language
OCHs?
OneClickHoster like uploaded…and whatever cames up new in this way 😆 so you dont share anything and just download
Been pirating movies for many years. At the beggining it was PirateBay, then kickass torrents, now it is a combination of 1337x and torrentgalaxy
rip rarbg
Rarbg torrents are still out there, try rarbg.best
Like losing a childhood friend… Anything you’ve found similar out there?
other guy who replied said .best, but im using torrentgalaxy atm
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.
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.
And the subtitles can sometimes be out of sync or even out of their corresponding chapter!
