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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.
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.
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:
I may be a pirate, but I do it with class and comfort.
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.
Only way to watch good quality content on Linux is pirating. So, fuck 'em media houses. Imma sail my ship to the high seas!
Seriously, I pay for streaming services and Blu Rays and still wind up just pirating the stuff I already own half the time because that's somehow more convenient...
Same here. Subscribed to some streaming services because my family members use them. For me, it's simply much faster and more convenient to pirate. It's not helped by the fact that the stuff I watch are more often than not unavailable on any streaming platform.
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'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.
I think a lot of us are in the same boat. The early days of Spotify and Netflix killed piracy for me.
Convenience and a fair price? Not on my watch! - Greedy corporate assholes
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.
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.
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.
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 🙃
Very similar situation here. Around 2017/2018 I had Netflix and Prime Video. I was able to watch 95% of the content I wanted to watch and only had to download some obscure 90's SciFi series they didn't have.
But the industry had to fuck it up and create too many platforms. We have Netflix, Prime, Disney+, HBO, Paramount Plus, Apple TV+ and many more. I am not subscribing to your service because one or two titles might interest me. It's way too much cost for a lot less value I had in 2018.
I even wanted to make an exception for Apple TV+ because their series are absolutely amazing. But they force you to buy an expensive Apple device to watch the content in 4K on the Safari Browser. Go fuck yourself, Apple. It's not even a technical issue, because they play the trailers in 4K but then switch to 480p with a terrible bitrate.
Don't go to the big media outlets and start crying that piracy is too damn high if you make it more inconvenient to watch your programs legally than just downloading an MKV file from somewhere.
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.
Even when I subbed to netflix, I still downloaded what I enjoyed.
I like having an offline copy of my media.
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.
Too many shitty streaming services. Just pay for a reliable VPN and torrent to your heart content. I'm using qbittorrent and transmission.
Same, got tired of shit service.
If a fucking piracy website is better than the cooperate that should make people question why they even pay a single cent to them.
Same here. I was actually pretty okay with just going with Netflix and then maybe HBO. But then every one of their mothers has their own streaming service.
Back to the salty seas for me
welcome back, still using 1337x now
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 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.
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.
Make sure you aren't downloading things manually unless you have to. Radarr, Sonarr, and Lidarr can be configured to download the latest media for you automatically. It's not 2004 anymore :)
Shit, I never stopped.
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 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!
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.
Been pirating movies for many years. At the beggining it was PirateBay, then kickass torrents, now it is a combination of 1337x and torrentgalaxy
Qbittorrent has search engines as plugins, just google it and choose which ones you want
https://torrentgalaxy.to/ is a public tracker that has some decent stuff.
https://torrentleech.org is a good private tracker that has frequent open invites. All their boxsets are freeleech so it's pretty easy to build up a good ratio
I started using illegal streams last year after also getting tired paying out of the ass for multiple streaming services. Now I pay only for Spotify and Crunchyroll, and HBO when House of the Dragon starts airing (then I cancel when that's over). Movie/show companies turning online streaming back into cable over greed don't realize they're biting their own faces off. I may pay for Netflix again for the final Stranger Things season, but I won't be keeping it afterwards.
Oh, and if an anime isn't on Crunchyroll, it gets torrented.
Also the constant canceling/dropping shows and movies is maddening and is only pissing people off more.
Got caught torrenting a decade ago by my ISP and haven’t since.
PIA for a vpn good enough to hop back in?
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.
I see a lot of mixed people between piracy and paying for streaming services.
I use a starr stack with custom scripts and shell out more money then if I just payed for services.
For those that don’t want to dive super deep into piracy and want good access to content. Use the Streamio + Torrentio or Real Debrid they’re honestly great and make things easy.