5 ms·

I've mostly gone back to using torrents. Too many different services, most of the new content sucks, and the software isn't always good. VLC always works, and I

I've mostly gone back to using torrents. Too many different services, most of the new content sucks, and the software isn't always good. VLC always works, and I can rewatch old shows I've downloaded as many times as I want without having to worry about the platform revoking access.

hos234 7y ago
It does seem a bit oversaturated. You could probably sell a Terabyte hard disk with the best shows and movies ever made and probably keep people entertained for quite a while.
- henryfjordan 7y ago
  Apparently this is a thing in Cuba: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33816655 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33816655
  - arbitrary_name 7y ago
    Very popular in south america. In Peru you could go to the local mercado and some dude would give you a binder full of music, movies and shows - you would pick all the stuff you wanted and return in a few hours and buy a fully loaded thumb/hard drive from him. I have an incredible archive of traditional 'charango' music from Bolivia and Peru through these fine gents, but they had all the latest HBO and Hollywood stuff as well.
    - jumelles 7y ago
      What format does the music come in?
edgarvaldes 7y ago
And you can also have Plex and similar to manage your library, if you need it.
- DoingIsLearning 7y ago
  Can anyone link 'good practices' tutorials on how to _securely_ setup a NAS+Plex? Also can a NAS be easily setup without using the manufacturer's software? (e.g Synology) There is a whole world of info out there. But for someone with little network experience it's hard to know what's good advice or not.
  - blaser-waffle 7y ago
    The Arch wiki generally has good, up to date stuff -- it's replaced the old Gentoo wiki as a solid source of info, even if you're not running Gentoo or Arch. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Plex https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Plex They even have sections about security, albeit fairly short.
    - DoingIsLearning 7y ago
      Thanks!
jeromegv 7y ago
The reasons to pirate shows used to be that "cable is all or nothing and cost so much, let me pay only for what i want to watch". So now you can signup to services for only 10$/piece instead of a $100 bundle, takes less than 5 minutes to unsubscribe and switch. And now the new reason to pirate is "there are too many services" This was never about availability, it was always about not paying.
- judge2020 7y ago
  A "plex" for shows/streaming services would be great; I know Apple TV and Fire TV try to do it seems adoption of this is low (such as Apple TV showing HBO GO shows, but YouTube TV not reporting to either Apple/Fire TV) and there's not a "you don't have access this show, but here's a list of services that you could subscribe to" (Google search results does show streaming services available for shows and movies, but it's not integrated anywhere).
  - scarface74 7y ago
    AT&T Now and Hulu both integrate with the TV app and reportedly as will Disney+. For reference, here all of the apps that integrate with the TV app. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208083 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208083
- brenden2 7y ago
  Paying $10/month for the rest of my life is not worth it unless I'm actually getting $10/month worth of value out of the service. I don't spend that much time watching TV.
  - cdubzzz 7y ago
    As GP states, these services largely have very easy cancellation processes. There is no need to pay for the “rest of your life” if you don’t feel the content is worth the price long term.
- lkramer 7y ago
  Not sure I agree. I have Netflix, but I even torrent their shows so I can watch if my internet craps out. There are also numerous annoyances, such as shows split across multiple services, lots of exclusive shows, and of course a lot of older films can be hard to find on streaming services. Gabe Newell was right, pirating is a service problem. I pay for content, but I find is desirable to supplement it with the occasional torrent.
onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
I pirate everything out of principal. I used to pay for HBO because, you know, they had good content and weren't completely fucking evil. But then they sold to Ma Bell ️
tstrimple 7y ago
I've gone back to pirating content, but via usenet instead of torrents. Once you've got Sonarr, Radarr, Omni, NZBget and Plex all playing happily together, it's a sublime experience compared to dealing with multiple streaming sources. I have a web portal (Ombi) my family can use to request content that we don't have downloaded. From there it gets pushed over to Sonarr / Radarr depending on whether it is a movie or tv show. Those then search for the show or movie you're interested in via usenet indexers. If the content isn't available yet (hasn't released on streaming / bluray to get a quality rip) it will track it and download as soon as it is available. This goes for ongoing tv shows too. Usually less than a couple hours after a show has been aired, it will be found and downloaded automatically. These tools also take care of moving the content around to the right location for Plex to find it and renames them so it's all consistent. I can request a movie from my Ombi website and have downloaded and ready to stream on all my devices in less than 10 minutes. TV shows download at around 1-2 minutes per episode. The other huge benefit over streaming services is that Plex allows you to cache media on mobile devices which has been crucial for road trips with three kids. It's really not about the money aspect for me. I pay for usenet connections and indexers. I pay for the Plex Pass. I pay for the gigabit internet connection to facilitate those download speeds. I paid for the NAS and disks to store terrabytes of content and host all the software I need to get it. I'm okay paying. I just want a better experience and switching between half a dozen streaming services without a consistent search mechanism or offline viewing option just isn't cutting it.
- darkwizard42 7y ago
  I’m trying to set this kind of thing up. Any guides you can share? Plex is all setup but all the other stuff (integrating torrenting safely) I’m having trouble with!
  - tstrimple 7y ago
    I don't have much advice in the way of torrents. As I said, I am using usenet now instead. It's a direct download instead of p2p, so you're not seeding and you don't need a VPN to hide you as long as you're using SSL connections to usenet. Since it's a direct download and I pay for the connection to usenet provider, I can almost saturate my gigabit fiber connection pulling new content instead of waiting for enough peers to trickle kbps to me. To get started, you'll need at least one Usenet provider (paid) and at least one usenet indexer (usually paid) to help you find content. I'd recommend checking out the /r/usenet subreddit for more details. Especially their FAQ (https://www.reddit.com/r/Usenet/wiki/faq https://www.reddit.com/r/Usenet/wiki/faq). For my stack, I've got a Synology NAS device which is running docker versions of the download managers Sonarr and Radarr, the download client NZBget, Ombi for user requests and Plex for streaming to devices.

hos234 7y ago

It does seem a bit oversaturated. You could probably sell a Terabyte hard disk with the best shows and movies ever made and probably keep people entertained for quite a while.

henryfjordan 7y ago
Apparently this is a thing in Cuba: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33816655 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33816655
- arbitrary_name 7y ago
  Very popular in south america. In Peru you could go to the local mercado and some dude would give you a binder full of music, movies and shows - you would pick all the stuff you wanted and return in a few hours and buy a fully loaded thumb/hard drive from him. I have an incredible archive of traditional 'charango' music from Bolivia and Peru through these fine gents, but they had all the latest HBO and Hollywood stuff as well.
  - jumelles 7y ago
    What format does the music come in?

edgarvaldes 7y ago

And you can also have Plex and similar to manage your library, if you need it.

DoingIsLearning 7y ago
Can anyone link 'good practices' tutorials on how to _securely_ setup a NAS+Plex? Also can a NAS be easily setup without using the manufacturer's software? (e.g Synology) There is a whole world of info out there. But for someone with little network experience it's hard to know what's good advice or not.
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  The Arch wiki generally has good, up to date stuff -- it's replaced the old Gentoo wiki as a solid source of info, even if you're not running Gentoo or Arch. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Plex https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Plex They even have sections about security, albeit fairly short.
  - DoingIsLearning 7y ago
    Thanks!

jeromegv 7y ago

The reasons to pirate shows used to be that "cable is all or nothing and cost so much, let me pay only for what i want to watch". So now you can signup to services for only 10$/piece instead of a $100 bundle, takes less than 5 minutes to unsubscribe and switch. And now the new reason to pirate is "there are too many services" This was never about availability, it was always about not paying.

judge2020 7y ago
A "plex" for shows/streaming services would be great; I know Apple TV and Fire TV try to do it seems adoption of this is low (such as Apple TV showing HBO GO shows, but YouTube TV not reporting to either Apple/Fire TV) and there's not a "you don't have access this show, but here's a list of services that you could subscribe to" (Google search results does show streaming services available for shows and movies, but it's not integrated anywhere).
- scarface74 7y ago
  AT&T Now and Hulu both integrate with the TV app and reportedly as will Disney+. For reference, here all of the apps that integrate with the TV app. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208083 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208083
brenden2 7y ago
Paying $10/month for the rest of my life is not worth it unless I'm actually getting $10/month worth of value out of the service. I don't spend that much time watching TV.
- cdubzzz 7y ago
  As GP states, these services largely have very easy cancellation processes. There is no need to pay for the “rest of your life” if you don’t feel the content is worth the price long term.
lkramer 7y ago
Not sure I agree. I have Netflix, but I even torrent their shows so I can watch if my internet craps out. There are also numerous annoyances, such as shows split across multiple services, lots of exclusive shows, and of course a lot of older films can be hard to find on streaming services. Gabe Newell was right, pirating is a service problem. I pay for content, but I find is desirable to supplement it with the occasional torrent.

onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago

I pirate everything out of principal. I used to pay for HBO because, you know, they had good content and weren't completely fucking evil. But then they sold to Ma Bell ️

tstrimple 7y ago

I've gone back to pirating content, but via usenet instead of torrents. Once you've got Sonarr, Radarr, Omni, NZBget and Plex all playing happily together, it's a sublime experience compared to dealing with multiple streaming sources. I have a web portal (Ombi) my family can use to request content that we don't have downloaded. From there it gets pushed over to Sonarr / Radarr depending on whether it is a movie or tv show. Those then search for the show or movie you're interested in via usenet indexers. If the content isn't available yet (hasn't released on streaming / bluray to get a quality rip) it will track it and download as soon as it is available. This goes for ongoing tv shows too. Usually less than a couple hours after a show has been aired, it will be found and downloaded automatically. These tools also take care of moving the content around to the right location for Plex to find it and renames them so it's all consistent. I can request a movie from my Ombi website and have downloaded and ready to stream on all my devices in less than 10 minutes. TV shows download at around 1-2 minutes per episode. The other huge benefit over streaming services is that Plex allows you to cache media on mobile devices which has been crucial for road trips with three kids. It's really not about the money aspect for me. I pay for usenet connections and indexers. I pay for the Plex Pass. I pay for the gigabit internet connection to facilitate those download speeds. I paid for the NAS and disks to store terrabytes of content and host all the software I need to get it. I'm okay paying. I just want a better experience and switching between half a dozen streaming services without a consistent search mechanism or offline viewing option just isn't cutting it.

darkwizard42 7y ago
I’m trying to set this kind of thing up. Any guides you can share? Plex is all setup but all the other stuff (integrating torrenting safely) I’m having trouble with!
- tstrimple 7y ago
  I don't have much advice in the way of torrents. As I said, I am using usenet now instead. It's a direct download instead of p2p, so you're not seeding and you don't need a VPN to hide you as long as you're using SSL connections to usenet. Since it's a direct download and I pay for the connection to usenet provider, I can almost saturate my gigabit fiber connection pulling new content instead of waiting for enough peers to trickle kbps to me. To get started, you'll need at least one Usenet provider (paid) and at least one usenet indexer (usually paid) to help you find content. I'd recommend checking out the /r/usenet subreddit for more details. Especially their FAQ (https://www.reddit.com/r/Usenet/wiki/faq https://www.reddit.com/r/Usenet/wiki/faq). For my stack, I've got a Synology NAS device which is running docker versions of the download managers Sonarr and Radarr, the download client NZBget, Ombi for user requests and Plex for streaming to devices.