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 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 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.
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)
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.
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.
welcome again… and i stopped pirating movies and started streaming over internet on pirate website.
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.
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 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.
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.
How do you join a private site?
Aren’t they all invite only?
You can visit this site and they show which private trackers have open signups. You can also buy an invite to certain private trackers. https://www.invitescene.com/forum/34-open-trackers/
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.
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!
Add Nzb360 to this and your pirate life will truly be class
Or LunaSea on iOS
Forgot all about LunaSea, thanks for the reminder!
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
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
