Studios are cracking down on some of the internet’s most popular pirating sites
Studios are cracking down on some of the internet’s most popular pirating sites
All this does is make me more interested in "pirating" their infinitely copyable material. More to the point it's making my interest in financially supporting them drop to zero if not lower.
With Usenet, Plex* (Streaming Server), Radarr (automated movie downloading) and Sonarr (automated TV downloading and management) it's never been easier!
*Plex is currently on a slow path of enshittification and the only other good alternative, Jellyfin, still has some ways to go before it can pass "The Spouse Test". I myself have only had Jellyfin in testing and not yet replaced Plex with it. But that day is coming. Jellyfin is well under active development and I have no doubt it will get to feature and stability parity with Plex
Jellyfin pased my spouse test for local network.
I put her on tailscale for remote access but she's not a big fan of that.
Where's Jellyfin failing the spouse test? My spouse preferred it to Plex because she could turn off all the crap on the home screen.
I dipped my toes in the self-hosted route and would recommend Stremio + Torrentio + RealDebrid as a much simpler alternative.
Here's a guide I used - you can probably have it up and running in less than an hour.
Major points:
I have very limited self hosting experience, and between getting my first hello world service running, problems with my ISP, sorting through the different ways to get content, and not already having TBs if hard drives sitting around, I found it to be pretty challenging.
If you're already experienced in self hosting (or want to learn) and don't mind the storage costs, then I'd recommend the Plex/Jellyfin route, but if you just want an alternative to the existing streaming services then I'd suggest looking into Stremio.
You can always use the older, well established, actively developed, and stable project that Jellyfin is built from; Emby. (Jellyfin is literally Embys code from 10+ years ago)
Ah yes, I'm sure this crackdown will have the result of ending piracy forever.
The year of the death of the piracy is now
I mean it's only right. Don't we all keep getting paid for work we did years ago?
96% of corps stop with the crackdowns right before they end piracy forever
Don't let reality stop you from doing something you love
Still not subscribing to all the shit services. I'd rather don't watch stuff and go outside. Yeah, you heard me right, I'll rather be going fucking outside!
I'd happily buy stuff if they'd just give me a mkv file or a disc that isn't encrypted.
I've been back to buying UHDs because I can rip them. Amazing how a good experience got me to pay again.
Personally I prefer when people keep their fucking inside, rather than outside where I might have to accidentally see it.
Good luck locating my hard drive with several Terabytes of movies, TV shows and music.
If other sites would shut down I would share those files even if I need to send pigeons with usb sticks attached to their little feet.
Human culture is to be shared. And that is just a basic moral principle that should be engraved on Human Rights declaration.
But you'll hurt the film industry. Their last movie only made 100 million, but they expected 200 million 😿
And they had to work so hard to cook the books to make it look like it lost money on it so they didn't have to pay out their cast and crew, too. Won't anyone think of the poor executives!?!?
I guess you're not talking about the Borderlands movie
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1149
luckily. that seems doable
low throughput
That's a very generous way to put it
Hell yeah. Also, support your local library! I know your local library doesn't have a free for all streaming service, but they lend books and all kinds of media... Just imagine if we could push it to where your local library DID have a Plex/Jellyfin/Netflix-esque service? Just log in with your library card! That's the dream...
The message also ends with a specifically worded call to action: “If possible, please use legal paid services. It’s something we should do to show our respect for creators and content producers.”
LOL... they have fucked EVERY artist with the "streaming is a new medium and you get no royalties from it". Even Black Widow herself had to fight Disney in court to get paid for her very own movie.
Studios can go fuck themselves hard... they won stop piracy and they know it, this is why the always make such a big deal out of whatever little gain they make
Piracy ends when content is offered in a convenient fashion. It's always been this simple and always will be. Naturally, rich and out of touch people want to believe that more authoritarianism is the solution, because they got rich through their contempt for humanity, so why should this be any different?
The thing is, as we learned with Netflix (and... everything lately), even if it starts off convenient and reasonable, that will last only long enough that they think they've cornered the market. So unless something changes to guarantee an ongoing reasonable proposition, i will never trust them again.
Fully agree.
Yes, i'll be very weary of giving up the control I have through physical drives and jellyfin for some shiny new thing that will never last. Fool me once... etc. etc.
Here is how I see Piracy ending. We're offered Netflix and forgot about streamers so the government went heavy handed and forced other governments to change all their laws and give up these pirates while seizing sites.
Even though there are smaller pirates, the leaders of it so are mortality wounded killing any progress. We eventually end up with cable television 3.0 and try to go back to piracy. However while we weren't looking there's a ton of new laws and tools and ability to stop it that was created while we were watching umbrella academy.
Now the final nail is using media to create a foot-in-the-door technique where media convince the public to hate a new thing. Once that zeitgeist is established laws will then slowly be created by as suggested by lobbyists which are really just a facade that would give more power to take out pirates.
Anyone know the names of the pirate Bay owners? a/Anyone hear any news on those guys. Podcasts? Articles? Viral Reddit posts? In my mind it's probably one of the top ten craziest political strong arming and over reaches in the past decade. Here is the story that I can't find for some reason. Pirate Bay placed a server inside a bank in Switzerland. The Swedish laws prevent the government from touching anything inside the bank. Freedom type thing that the USA love. This means the Swedish government couldn't be forced to shut down the server. Until Mike Pompeo on behalf of Hollywood flies to Switzerland and says you're going in or America is going to make you pay. So they change the law for America and seize the servers. My point is this is pretty fun incredibly interesting story. But we don't get these stories we get another season of making handsome real life serial killer show on Netflix. Pirating dies by suppressing it slowly over time until there's no more pirates and the ability to regain the knowledge lost its gone and trying to look up how to crack anything results in the FBI at your door and you on a no fly list. Just like other pirates and creators of technology (look up how tor creators get harassed) and these stories all get suppressed.
jellyfin with sonarr and radarr and now jellyseerr make the whole process simple. usenet and nzb are the way now i just wait 10 min to get the film/series i want and then watch it. a minor delay I'm more than happy with. I'd be happy to pay if, and it's a big if, the studios can catalogue all their shows in one place. i can watch without adverts. i can pay per episode if i want. I'd rather pay 50c an episode than pay for the whole service. let me curate what I want to watch on my terms. until then, the high seas win every time
The fact that nzbs are old as fuck and not one service has been taken down is weird.
They bust torrent sites every day and they don’t even host anything.
News hosters have literally petabytes of warez and nothing.
And don’t get me started with real-debrid
It comes down to where the copyright material is stored. The actual media hosted by torrent users is by the users and as we know over the last 15 years, that backfired entirely. So the easiest way is to take down the tracker.
The files for NZBs are hosted on newsgroups and while obfuscated, is much easier to automate DCMA notices to. Also, the good NZB sites (like private trackers), are tightly controlled so their files are rarely hit vs a lot of ones who have open signups.
Yo-ho-ho. The wife and kids love the pirate life as well. They just search what they want on Radarr or Sonarr and it pops up on Jellyfin in a few minutes. We were spending around $200/no on services with a lot less choice and lower quality.
Considering how the big corporations are "cracking down" on pretty much anything they want is a clear indication that the shift already happened, the internet is no longer a "free space"
Today the internet is mostly owned by big corporations or billionaires more directly, and they subject no only it but the whole world to their whishes.
The capitalist world is a piece of shit, the good things happen despite capitalism, then capitalism comes along and sabotages and ruins everything to sell you something worse.
Everyday that phrase seems more real " you will own nothing" because you won't be allowed to own anything, just take a look at the streaming platforms, or any other platform , they remove , they revoke , they block, they delete, they control what you can and can't do and you can't do anything about it.
Nevermind the decades of these sites compensating for studios just not giving a sh*t about making their content accessible to the rest of the world.
oh is it that time of year again? feels like they just published the 2023 version!
Studios need to remember that their shows are advertising for merch and toy sales. That's where the money is. If I pirate your show, then you don't have to support the infrastructure to provide me a stream (which would look like shit because you're not google). I buy posters and tshirts and stickers. Some people buy minifigs and funcopops and other plastic tat that's cheap to make but sells for, well, whatever that crap sells for.
Furthermore, I wouldn't mind paying $10 or $15 /month for ONE streaming service if it was able to maintain good picture quality at 1080p AND had all the shows/movies I wanted to watch in one convenient place. Extra emphasis on 'convenient'. Even more emphasis on it actually having content I want to watch. When I watch a show, I like to watch the entire thing in like, two days. Then I'll not watch any shows for two or three months, until something gets my attention. I don't want to pay for a service I don't use, cancelling and reactivating a service every couple of months is too much hassle, so I'll just wait until the show is done airing and download it all and watch it at my pace.
surprisingly, I miss dvds.
All-in-one convenience is the only reason I pay Spotify, my only streaming service. Thought about dropping them, but it would be a monstrous hassle gathering, and continuing to gather, all those MP3s. Plus, I can download that content and use it in the woods with no internet connection. Sold.
Video content? What a clusterfuck. I steal every bit of it. Hell, I got Amazon Prime and don't bother looking at video offerings. Default: 🏴☠️
I also used Spotify but it has a serious problem. There's no guarantee your contents will be always available. I had music there that, for whatever reason, was removed and I can no longer listen to it. Not to mention music that was never available there. I don't want them to control what I can and can't listen.
Now I only use Jellyfin. It works great (except on Android Auto, but they'll get there). Sure I have to download the MP3 but you only have to do it once and then it will always be there. Just use spotDL and rip the music right out of Spotify with all the metadata.
Video was nicer when you could buy a piece of physical media to watch your movie on.
Even then, you still had to contend with such nonsense as region locks later on. Can't have people watch the movie earlier than release because the production company decided to delay release a while. That would be apocalyptic.
Spotify is getting worse as well, at least on desktop.
"we are moving the album to a right sidebar, it now only occupies more of your screen"
"we liked the right sidebar so much that we are moving the queue over there as well, we're also removing useful info like album and artist"
I shouldn't have to use spicetify just to get basic features back
Libraries have em. For free. And you can rip them too.
Fmovie is a new one I never heard of before. Good thing they mentioned it so I know to avoid it in the future.
What is immoral about this is that they will essentially use paying customer’s money to chase down an unachievable goal.
Just goes to show you, companies have no integrity. If they truly were about providing the best experience for paying customers, they’d be like valve and just focus on their own service’s quality.
Exactly, piracy is a service problem.
I cancelled my Disney+ subscription of 2+ years because offline playback isn't reliable and they raised prices to the point where it's cheaper for me to buy the physical media I want, rip it, and use Jellyfin to play those offline. If I wasn't so stubborn about paying for content, I'd just pirate it and do the same.
Well perhaps there shouldn't be 45 different streaming services then? If it was just one streaming service that I could pay you for and then everything I wanted was on that site then there wouldn't be a problem would there?
Also that would solve the problem of content being removed from streaming services because they got a better deal on some other service that I'm not subscribed to.
Or if there were 45 services, but they all basically had everything, rather than all of them having basically nothing
Music has this right. Don't like spotify? Try Tidal, Qobuz, etc. They all have the same music, but slightly different models to attract different users (Spotify has free and paid tiers, Tidal does high quality, Qobuz does streaming plans as well as individual song purchases).
Exactly. I'd be fine with picking my favorite streaming service and adding on a bundle for some additional content. As in, I could get Netflix for $10/month, and add Disney+ content for another $5 or whatever.
That way I can pick the service I want without losing the content I want, and the content creators still get paid for their content while keeping prices for most people low.
That's kind of how Steam works, I can buy any game I want and both Steam and the dev get paid. Or I can buy the game through the dev directly and the dev gets a bigger cut. I'll choose Steam if the experience there is better, or I'll choose the dev if they provide a good experience. That should be how streaming works...
If we had to subscribe to Spotify and Amazon and Tidal and all the others to have all the artists we wanted to listen to, then I'd pirate those too.
Convenience is what I'm after, free is just a bonus.
A lot of these streaming services are ultimately owned by the same company. Ever had a favorite show, where only seasons 1,3 and 5 are available on one "service" and only seasons 2 and 4 are available on the other? This lets the owner of the series double-dip customers on subscription fees.
Reminder that when you pay crunchyroll they use your money to pay for western animation instead of anime production, biggest myth ever that we were supporting the industry.
They license the anime so they do pay the studios that create anime. I know for a fact that anime studios factor in the ability to license shows in the decision on what to produce and budget.
Private Trackers are the way forward.
Private trackers disgust me. What kind of pirate turns away from the world, to re-seeding fragments of files they don’t care about to other cowards with slightly slower rss feeds; all for a chance at enough ratio to get the show you want? It’s a country club, with self-validating assholes, dry hot dogs, and tall fences.
The Mainline DHT is the way forward. There is no social credit here. The kids in Africa are starving, and I will throw them as much as I can, kilobyte by kilobyte, for no reason at all, for I too was a leecher once.
I thought I read that private trackers are hard to sign up to. Or that you have to prove yourself somehow and people get stressed about maintaining their ratio. Is that true? If so, that doesn't sound fun.
You do have to get an invite, seed, and maybe toss them a small crypto donation occasionally. The ratio thing depends on the tracker but usually it's just a requirement to seed back anything for at least a week. Popular torrents become FreeLeech and they don't count against your ratio.
Because the participants are all vetted, you don't get RIAA and MPAA shills in swarm trying to vacuum up IPs to start sending nasty legal letters out.
A decade ago when I used public torrents I remember getting those stupid ISP strikes. I know shit-tier regional ISPs would even try to embarrass you with the content you pirated. They'd send you a letter like "the Copyright holder for 'Anal Hookers of Beijing' told us they're big mad at you, and if you do it again you'll get your service revoked". Some of these ISPs were integrated with cable companies so they'd freeze your internet and cable, and display the text of the copyright strike on your fucking TV for your girlfriend or grandma to see.
Fuck that noise.
Since using a private tracker I have never received a single cease and desist or ISP warning letter. Then again, I only use Bit Torrent to download Linux ISOs.
Only the few elite ones, mostly the ones with music.
The most elite trackers perhaps.
Trackers on /r/opensignups ? Nah they open their doors to the public every now and again.
Would not recommend it to anyone who can’t dedicate a seed box or machine uploading torrents most hours of the day every day. It’s possible to do it without those but difficult. With them it’s merely a matter of using free leech and building a buffer up as well as taking advantage of points systems to get free upload just for keeping torrents seeding even without uploading.
If you only ever grab free leech then all you have to worry about is meeting seed time and activity requirements like logging in every 90 days.
An old computer with an external drive. A raspberry pi, a nas that can run a BitTorrent client. Any would work if one doesn’t want to pay for a seed box. (Most trackers ban shared seed boxes though so you will have to get dedicated)
All this means to me is someone is going to make a peer to peer darkweb version of these sites sooner rather than later.
Can’t stop the signal…
Everything goes somewhere, and we go everywhere.
It's time for me to self host a jellyfin server.
I only buy second hand physical media, studios aren't getting a cent of my money no matter what.
There are essentially infinite choices for entertainment these days. Hypothetically, even if they somehow stopped 100% of piracy, I still wouldn't pay for their overpriced slop.
Good luck with that,lol
the only thing that will last forever is the file itself physical media cd.s only last for like 15 years 20 at most you need to get the files of the medium only then will it last forever. physical media is only temporary before you know it you cant play it anymore.
