22 ms·

Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content

• dfxm12 4y ago
  You use your computer only for piracy? You could have gotten a much cheaper, probably less power hungry machine... You may also have a local copy without pirating, if that's your main concern. I don't get paying for access to pirated content. It's a total sucker move.
• Jensson 4y ago
  If you deleted the movies after you watched like you do in streaming services them then you wouldn't need all that storage.
  • paranoidrobot 4y ago
    Then you'd be back to the 'availability' thing.
• nickstinemates 4y ago
  I also appreciate local copies and created a seedbox recently. Torrents still seems better for TV. But I delete shows after I watch them so no need to have such a large amount of space for media.
  • ycuser2 4y ago
    What do you mean by TOR for TV? Watching foreign TV thorugh Tor network?
    • nickstinemates 4y ago
      Just jetlagged, I meant torrents.
• FrenchDevRemote 4y ago
  I haven't paid for 90-95% of the content I consumed in the past 12 years. I've never spent a cent on it.(and I used to spend many hours watching new movies/shows every single day+Music+AAA games) Maybe try not hoarding all the half-decent movies on earth in 4K bluray version? at this point you have more data than a small piracy site...
  • JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
    Do you ever feel guilty that if everyone did what you did none of the content would exist? That you are stealing from all the hard working artists and tradespeople that made the content you love?
    • ipaddr 4y ago
      Do you ever feel guilty the money you give them for entertainment could be going to a hungry mother? I don't lose sleep over the blockbuster superhero movie that is geared towards the Chinese market changing because something I did. If I had that power I would shut it down and not spend 100 million.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • dangerface 4y ago
      If I lift food out of the bin at a michelin star restaurant am I stealing from all the hard working chefs and waiters that made the food? nope. If every one I know joined me in eating from the bin would the michelin star restaurant go out of business? nope.
    • FrenchDevRemote 4y ago
      No. For multiple reasons. First of all when you have a negative net worth you don't care about the royalties of some hollywood rockstars. 2nd of all, I'm not ready to pay 10 different monthly subscriptions while not even being able to watch 100% of what I want. 3rd of all, even though I appreciate the content, I don't necessarily approve the actions of the artist/producer/developer. I don't want to give a cent to a company that ask its underpaid workers for 100 hour work week during crunch time. I don't want to fund a rapist/abuser producer, I don't to fund anyone's yacht or Ferrari. Even though I absolutely love his movies, I don't want to fund a guy like tarantino who willingly endangered someones life for one scene. I mostly consume mainstream stuff so most of the money I'd spent would go to people who already are 1000x richer than me. I don't really enjoy indie games/movies/music, if I were, maybe I'd act differently.
• groffee 4y ago
  Piracy: you're doing it wrong
• Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
  Are you also subscribed to private torrent trackers by chance?
  • nickthegreek 4y ago
    Sounds like they are using usenet+nzb indexer. Probably an nzbget+sonarr+radarr setup.
  • Ruthalas 4y ago
    Seems unlikely, given how heavily they are relying on Usenet.
• timonoko 4y ago
  Swedish author Wilderäng made a good move. First book of a Trilogy was on Pirate Bay. And then goddämn, I had to buy rest of those books with my own precious money, because it was important to know what happens to Sweden under zombie apocalypse.
  • npteljes 4y ago
    In Japan, they also use this tactic to sell other media with anime. There's a certain IP in manga, light novel, or video game form, and it gets a season of anime which presents just a sliver of the full story.
• BatteryMountain 4y ago
  Piracy and data-hoarding are two different hobbies. One cost next to nothing, the cost of the other one you are quite familiar with.. Jokes aside, would you consider deleting your entire collection and then also cancel subscriptions and possibly give away or sell any tech equipment you do not use for work? And then find something else to do with the newly-freed time? Can you do it for 6 or 12 months? If not, why not? Try to figure out why you are doing it to begin with.
  • ntauthority 4y ago
    Piracy and such hoarding are inextricably intertwined. If you want a particularly uncommon variant of some pirate content (like an obscure movie in any quality, or a somewhat popular movie in original BD format), you better grab it when it's available, as further down the line getting the exact same such content may be more and more difficult. Streaming services have a similar issue (re-encoding, bad rereleases due to licensing issues, delistings, crappy format choices in the first place) but generally a bit better SLA-like and a longer timeframe to watch certain content.
    • voisin 4y ago
      > If you want a particularly uncommon variant of some pirate content (like an obscure movie in any quality, or a somewhat popular movie in original BD format), you better grab it when it's available, as further down the line getting the exact same such content may be more and more difficult. The constant availability of the pirated content is a big driver of the cost here. For some of the obscure stuff, this could be on a backup, or even on something like Amazon Glacier (I.e. no one is watching 30tb of video content regularly), and the resulting computer needed for pirating could be significantly less expensive, both to build/buy and for monthly electricity costs (like a laptop).
      • imtringued 4y ago
        Amazon Glacier assumes that you only retrieve a fraction of the data.
• PaywallBuster 4y ago
  Dump the movies on a backup service, why do you need a full copy locally Golden rule of data: "90% of it is not accessed after 3 months"
  • nickthegreek 4y ago
    Wouldnt this just cost even more?
    • PaywallBuster 4y ago
      Could use personal plan from Backblaze for 7$ a month https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html I'm sure there's alternatives https://www.hetzner.com/de/storage/storage-box https://www.hetzner.com/de/storage/storage-box
  • ipaddr 4y ago
    What's a cheap backup plan here?
    • b3lvedere 4y ago
      If you don't want to store online: Tape, blu-ray, usb harddisk, nas that only gets electricity when backup is runnning. Preferably a combination of those. Don't use sd/ssd/nvram. Do test your backups though.
• honkdaddy 4y ago
  Why not just pay $5/mo for a Plex share with tens of thousands of the most popular movies and TV shows? I haven't torrented or paid for content in years. If I want to watch something and it's not on the server, I message the admin in Bangalore and he adds it. Sure I don't "have" the content in the sense it's not sitting on spinning disks, but I don't care. Life is too short to try to collect widely available digital media.
  • wccrawford 4y ago
    One of the advantages of local storage is that internet outages don't necessarily affect your ability to watch some shows. One of the main advantages that streaming has for me over live TV is the ability to watch things when I want to, without restrictions. Don't even get me started about commercials. Amazon Prime has been putting up movies without commercials, and then adding commercials later. This has bit our movie group a few times lately. Very frustrating.
    • julianlam 4y ago
      > One of the advantages of local storage is that internet outages don't necessarily affect your ability to watch some shows. This came to a head for me not too long ago when my internet went out for a little while. I told my wife we could just watch the antenna TV, and she simply couldn't grok the idea that TV signals were coming to the house without the internet working.
  • nickthegreek 4y ago
    Collecting the media can be almost 100% automated with sonarr and radarr. Getting content can be even easier than messaging an admin.
  • leonhard 4y ago
    Never heard of this. Where would one find such a service?
    • honkdaddy 4y ago
• hardwaresofton 4y ago
  For more of this/more people like OP, see /r/datahoarder
  • pirate-Loo6uoDu 4y ago
    Yep, I'm subscribed. I also do some digital archiving work (I don't want to get into specifics for anonymity sake), but since that's text it only takes up about 12TB right now. If I run out of space I delete some video.
• dimitar 4y ago
  Why do you need 30TB? You can always download again if you need to watch again.
  • theturtletalks 4y ago
    Many countries outside of the US don't have unlimited[0] bandwidth ISPs. So downloading again and again is not feasible everywhere. 0. US ISPs are capped but in the TB range so most people never reach the cap.
    • jvsg_ 4y ago
      and you don't need bandwidth for netflix?
    • BenjiWiebe 4y ago
      Citation for [0]? I've even read the fine print for my current ISP here in the US. Unless you mean cap as in it's not possible to download more than that per month because your download speed is too low.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • theturtletalks 4y ago
        You can see some ISPs at the bottom of this page[0] with caps like Xfinity and CenturyLink. Although it seems like they are soft caps and don't penalize unless you exceed the cap every month. 0. https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/best-internet-providers-with-no-data-caps/ https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/best-internet-providers-w...
  • nickthegreek 4y ago
    not always true for niche content.
  • AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
    Clearly you've never found a torrent that has exactly what you want, but zero seeders.
• paranoidrobot 4y ago
  When Netflix first launched, it was great - they had a massive catalogue of older/pre-existing content, and were making a bunch of their own new, original content that likely wouldn't have been made elsewhere. Their UX was also pretty great - and made finding interesting content easy. They made it dead-easy to sign up, there was no pushy retention teams or hoops to jump through if you wanted to cancel. That's why I paid them. Amazon Video launched here, and they had some content that I was interested in, but their UX from day one has been awful. They insist on adding pre-roll ads, despite that I'm paying them. The video quality was pretty awful and was quite regularly at something like 480p quality on my (4k) TV. Yes their X-Ray tech is neat, but the ads just drive me up the wall. There was a time that I would've happily paid for HBO - they had/have some really great content (at least in the US), but they are or were not available in AU outside of a $120+/month PayTV device that I really didn't want. Now there are dozens of streaming services, with their own $15-30/month fees, which will have (or not) selections of some of the content I want, each with their own uniquely awful and annoying interfaces or quirks of whether they will or won't play on my TV or device.
  • sshagent 4y ago
    I can't imagine anyone at 'Amazon Video' actually uses the service, else they'd realise that the UI is horrific...and whole service is terrible. I only have it as its "free" with my delivery options.
    • bombcar 4y ago
      It works well enough if you’re just playing content you already have and not searching.
    • istjohn 4y ago
      IMO, Amazon is awful at UI design across the board--including the core shopping experience.
      • gonzo41 4y ago
        It's a feature not a bug, familiarity is the feature. It never massively changes on purpose.
• airza 4y ago
  Where are you paying 45$/month for power on a single computer. The moon?
  • snmx999 4y ago
    If we assume the computer consumes 200 Watt in average, the electricity price would be something like 0,32 USD per kWh. So probably Germany, Denmark or Belgium.
    • lostmsu 4y ago
      That's a very pessimistic estimate for idling PC-based storage box. The story looks faked all over the place. 30 TB? I have as much, and the storage price was maybe $600 last year.
      • cmeacham98 4y ago
        The rest of the computer costs money too. They maybe overpaid a bit, but it's not totally unreasonable.
        • lostmsu 4y ago
          If one want cost savings, why do they need a separate computer? And if the need is somehow there, you could always buy a used one.
      • Sakos 4y ago
        I have no idea what HDD prices were like the past few years. I recently bought an 18TB HDD for 280 Euros. Much of it is for pirated stuff. Thing is ... there are benefits to having the content locally that aren't priced into paying for streaming sites. There are things I can't watch on Netflix/Amazon, for example, and I have a consistent level of quality. I would need the storage one way or another, so I don't really count it towards pirating. Electricity? I pay for that either way, whether I'm pirating or not. I'll pay for a seedbox or usenet, but that's still only 50-80 Euros total. If I paid for everything I pirate, that would be hundreds every month on top of electricity and storage.
• throwaway110535 4y ago
  I too tried to get into usenet for downloading shows I wanted to watch, but I couldn't justify the cost (in time) that it would take to build/maintain a system that automatically downloads the latest episodes of select shows. I deal w/ software all day at work. As I've gotten older, the less I want to also deal w/ software at home.
  • jabroni_salad 4y ago
    Aside from the initial fiddling I have not needed to do much of anything to my setup. It's all containerized and unraid's manager keeps them up to date for me.
    • SympleScience 4y ago
      Sounds like a great setup, do you have any references to guides so I can set up my own?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• elzbardico 4y ago
  When I see stuff like this, I wonder where those people find all that time to watch tv shows.
• hotpotamus 4y ago
  Welcome to Hacker News where everyone makes $500k/year and nobody pays for content. Or at least it feels that way sometimes. I don't make that much money but I also don't pay for content.
  • Hamuko 4y ago
    Sometimes you can't even buy (or rent) the content because of georestrictions. At least I often encounter TV shows and movies that are available in some US streaming service, but are not available in our version of the same service, or the entire service is not available.
    • hotpotamus 4y ago
      I mean, you can justify it any way you like - there's no referee, no judge, no one to stop you. I just don't bother with the justifications myself; it is what it is.
      • runesofdoom 4y ago
        There's an easy solution if you want the clear conscience of paying creators but the freedom of actually controlling the content you paid for. Buy, then pirate. Don't even bother with ever accessing your crippled purchase.
    • bombcar 4y ago
      I usually get the DVDs in that case, if possible. Some of the newest content isn’t available on DVD but most of the older stuff is.
      • Sakos 4y ago
        If you're buying secondhand DVD's, and I don't see how you aren't because who's still producing DVD's (or even, who's producing Blurays for older content), then you're on the same level as people who pirate from the eyes of publishers and media conglomerates. You might feel better about yourself, but it's a quirk of history that they haven't been able to make secondhand sales illegal.
• nickthegreek 4y ago
  Interested in how much content you have on those drives. Are you storing full bluray backups (40-100gb each), or are you doing like 10-15gb movies or the 2-6gb versions?
  • pirate-Loo6uoDu 4y ago
    Depends on the content. For popular crap that I'm probably going to delete later I generally go for the 10-15GB option as finding a decent rip at a lower file size can be annoying (Latest marvel movies, etc). If something is sufficiently obscure or visually stunning I'll normally keep it at 10-15GB rips depending on the source material (Obscure horror movies, Dune). For regular stuff that I still want to have a copy of but that is popular enough I'm not worried it's going to disappear I go for the smaller versions (The expanse, adventure time). Right now one of the biggest things on disk are a bunch of Boston Legal episodes. I have family that enjoy it, and I'm too lazy to find a good small release so it's taking up more space than it needs to. I try to get HEVC encoded video where possible, and when I know there's a particular release group that produces high-quality I'll set up tags to prefer them.
• WallyFunk 4y ago
  Plex is trying to solve the `we've reached peak streaming` problem. From their blogpost[0] > Today, we’re proud to be launching an entirely new section of Plex, focused on discovering, searching, and personalizing movies and TV shows across virtually any streaming service—whether it’s Plex’s own free movies and TV, or your other subscriptions like Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max [0] https://www.plex.tv/blog/end-the-streaming-struggle-with-plex/ https://www.plex.tv/blog/end-the-streaming-struggle-with-ple... Worth giving it a shot. I haven't tried it, but it looks promising.
• sergiotapia 4y ago
  On the flip, I just $20 for a plexshare and can watch whatever I like in 4k remux. I recommend instead of having this beast server. Let someone else worry about hardware.
• TacticalCoder 4y ago
  Funniest thing: I've got a home cinema projector and somehow when I stream from Netflix (which I pay), it looks like shit. So I paid for an enhanced subscription, supposedly with better quality. Fiber optic at home: problem is not on my side. Still looks like shit. So I sail the high seas and pirate the very movie I was about to watch: 600 Mbit/s symmetric fiber, download using torrents takes a few minutes tops. Now I don't get it: how do the pirates who "webrip" those have access to the quality stream, when I get a shitty version? I mean: I get it when it's a BRRip (Blu-Ray Rip) but how can they do quality webrips? Why are they getting the quality version streamed when I get bad quality? It may not be noticeable on a regular TV but on the huge diagonal my home cinema projector does, it's night and day. I don't hoard. Pirating costs nothing as I pay for my fiber optic line and downloading a movie takes a few minutes, during which wife makes tea, kid puts pyjamas on and I pour myself some drink. > Streaming services still have significant service problems that need to be addressed. Yup. Pirates makes a better job at providing a quality media compared to the shitty streaming services. Now we plan to drop Netflix and take Disney for a while: I wonder if I'll also need to pirate the very thing they'll be streaming me or not.
  • xnorswap 4y ago
    To watch 4k on a desktop you need either windows 10/11 and Edge or a Mac. My guess is you're either not using that combination or otherwise blocking DRM / features that prevent desktop 4k.
  • interestica 4y ago
    Netflix won't play full quality stream except for on approved devices. If you have a projector that's running older version of Android it may literally be giving you a max 720p stream. Amazon prime video won't give 4k on a PC i believe.
  • cuttysnark 4y ago
    > Now I don't get it: how do the pirates who "webrip" those have access to the quality stream The front-end players (sometimes) have a UI element that allows you to explicitly set which bitrate is streamed. Otherwise, the player is beholden to what the connection speed deems appropriate. Regardless, if the original file was transcoded to include 1080p, 4k stream, they exist even if your player is downgrading based on a poor connection. This can feel like a loss of control, because it is. "But it's for our the user's own good." When using tools like ffmpeg or similar, you can simply target the highest bitrate available. If you ever try to download a ".m3u8" file you'll see it's more or less a manifest that lists all available bitrates.
• eddieroger 4y ago
  I have seen similar thoughts amongst friends who may or may not pirate (I never ask where they get their content), and I think of how my music consumption has changed over the last 20 years. When I got my first iPod, I felt rewarded for having ripped all of the few dozen CDs I owned to my iBook. The idea of having instant access to any song I owned was a feeling I loved, and one I've chased since then. It wasn't until streaming services hit a critical mass and I got back to a reasonable (then unlimited) data plan that I finally took my iPod Classic out of my car. My tastes aren't the same ten albums over and over - sometimes I want rock, sometimes pop, sometimes rap. Who knows. Paying for content is getting really close to that, but I don't think it's there yet, in that I can't just decide to watch Papa's Delicate Condition [0] on Netflix or Disney+ or whatever service I subscribe to. There are a handful of random movies that I love, own on physical media, but can't just immediately consume when the mood hits. When things get there, I think piracy is in trouble. For many people, it's already there. For you, it may be close. Streaming's biggest problems, to me, are that there are still so many, and the content libraries are incomplete. Disney+ is a great, well-stocked service, but there's some content that Disney has decided doesn't exist anymore (Song of the South - problematic as hell, for sure, but it existed), and for things like that, I wouldn't ever assume them to be available. Same for the unaltered versions of Star Wars. And if Netflix and Peloton have taught me anything, it's that content can go away over time (see my earlier argument about wanting access to content at random times). And of course, offline support - I fly on planes sometimes, or go places without Internet, and I'd like to take a little bit of content with me to be occupied. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papa%27s_Delicate_Condition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papa%27s_Delicate_Condition
• silicon2401 4y ago
  > I built a computer with ~30TB of hard drive space. That, conservatively, cost me $1200. I think that's reasonable (unfortunately). Storage isn't cheap. > it's probably costing me around $45 per month in power You don't need your PC running 24/7, and you don't need all your hard drives in your PC. I have one 12TB in my PC and two 12TB external HDDs for backup. Personally I think piracy is incredibly frugal, the main cost comes from storage. I've almost maxed out my current setup of 12TB backed up across 3 hard drives, so I have to wait until a good price for >=12TB external HDDs before I can upgrade. Other than that, the ~10 bucks a month I pay for a seedbox less than a movie ticket lol.
• jcelerier 4y ago
  > and it's probably costing me around $45 per month in power where do you live that I don't move there ? I rarely ever paid more than 20-25€ / month for electricity for my whole appartment, with multiple computers running 24/7 lol
  • pph 4y ago
    In some North/West European countries paying above 0.30€/kWh has been the norm for years. Anecdotally: In Germany I pay about 100€/month for an apartment (with normal homeoffice PC usage). 3500-4000 kWh/year.
    • jcelerier 4y ago
      wild... here it's hovering around .17€/kWh
• hemantv 4y ago
  All of this usually stem from lack of passion or goal in other areas of life. Once you find right goal you won't have time for all this. Speaking from personal experience
  • oaththrowaway 4y ago
    I wouldn't say that. I have a similar setup and just find it easier for my parents, friends, kids, ect. to just have everything they need available through 1 app in Plex.
• Jedd 4y ago
  > So if I stopped pirating I'd have saved $1200 ... Only if you stopped pirating before that point, otherwise you're describing a sunk cost fallacy. Which is not to discount your current opex. Though $45 in power, I'm guessing you're in the USA?, does seem very high for a mostly idle CPU and a small volume of spinning rust + cooling.
• ubermonkey 4y ago
  I have certainly pirated things, but I never made a real habit or practice of it. Mostly it was because I found there was no way to get what I wanted legally or conveniently, usually because of bullshit "windowing" practices. As an example: at my house, my wife and I mostly only watch things together. We don't spend a lot of time in front of the TV, and so the time we DO spend that way is intentional, and pulls from a list of stuff we BOTH like. Our tastes are not in perfect accord, though, so there are a few things she watches when I'm working late, and there are some movies I save for when she's out of town or otherwise occupied. One of those was the critically acclaimed Sicario. Well, when I sat down to watch it when she was camping with a pal, I discovered that it was no longer available to rent online. Or buy. It had been "windowed" out for some reason. Fuck. That. 20 minutes later, I had it. I wanted to pay for it, but there was no option to do so. Come to think of it, the same thing happened 20 years ago or so with Battlestar Galactica. For some reason, the rightsholder wasn't releasing the prior season on DVD or digitally until substantially AFTER the new season started airing. This meant that for latecomers like us, it was more or less impossible to "catch up" before the last season started, which is crazy. Again, we WOULD have paid, but they weren't taking money, so we got the content anyway so we could watch the current season in sync with everyone else. I do wish we still had the "long tail" that Netflix initially offered, but digital delivery leaves rightsholders with, well, too many rights. Right of first sale meant Netflix could rent a given DVD or BluRay in perpetuity, and the copyright owner couldn't do anything about it. With digital delivery, that's no longer true, and it creates crazy situations like the above.
• antifa 4y ago
  OK but most of us probably get away with just the 1TB drive we might not have otherwise added to our current computer. I'm a life long pirate and honestly never knew about "indexer subscriptions" or that usenet was something you could pay for. Your fiscal problem is data hoarding, not piracy. Your commitment to making sure your favorite TV shows never disappear into the void of indefinitely buffering cloud rentals is commendable.
  • pirate-Loo6uoDu 4y ago
    It's not actually a problem, by any means. I live quite comfortably. The point I'm really trying to make here is that I would pay for things if it was convenient to do so. I'm already spending more money to do this myself, and if the industry was a bit better that money could be going to artists instead of hard drives.
    • esperent 4y ago
      I think the point being made by other people here still stands though. It's not piracy that costs you money. It's your desire to store/hoard huge amounts of data. Whether or not that's a problem is up to you, but if you deleted things after you watched them the costs would go down to nothing except 4the normal costs of running a computer.
      • pirate-Loo6uoDu 4y ago
        I don't disagree with that point, you could probably find everything I've got on sketchy streaming sites if you spent enough time.
        • spicybright 4y ago
          That's pretty much my method now a days. Used to torrent a lot, but realized I'd forget what I actually had and ended up re-downloading a lot. So now I just go on sketchy streaming sites. I have 2 that are good for movies/ty, 1 for animated content. Maybe once a year something will go down and I'll find a new site, but it really is as easy as clicking through the first 10 links when googling "watch $movie online free" and picking the most reliable one. In the extremely rare case I can't find something, I'll drop the 4 bucks or whatever on youtube movies or amazon prime. Probably only happens a few times a year. ~~~ Unrelated to the discussion, but still HN worthy, is how interesting these sites are when they operate. Websites will constantly lift not just content but entire pages from each other. A lot of the time they'll even just change a X.com to an X.biz and add a banner saying "THIS IS THE REAL X, UPDATE YOUR BOOKMARKS!". What are they going to do, take legal action? I'm also suspecting everyone sources their movies from a very small set of places. I tried watching the movie Multiplicity on one of these sites, but every single site hosted the first 4 minutes 27-ish seconds of it, exact same cut. It makes sense content propagates out, likely by automation. Everysite is a race to get the most ad clicks before getting shutdown. A very interesting "industry"!
• bedast 4y ago
  I think there should be a distinction between data hoarding and piracy. One can consume pirated content without keeping it around, effectively looking a bit like just paying for a streaming service, since that's effectively what you get. One could also buy blurays and rip them, keeping the result around, and having the same cost to "hoard" that content on top of paying for the content itself. For a while, I was in the camp of purchasing my content with the intent to hoard it. So I had the same problem with what it cost to do so. I ended up getting a dedicated NAS appliance specifically for this, and paying for better hardware to do the encoding I wanted faster. You could look at your usenet and indexer subscriptions as your "streaming service" counterpart. But I think the point you wanted to make is you do this because the preferred legitimate method of consuming media is onerous because licensing causes content to be kept from you, but piracy doesn't care. The idea being you're willing to pay for it if the legitimate means made it easier, or in some cases, made the content you want available at all. But none of that matters in the case of hoarding. And hoarding will always have a much higher cost.
  • oceanplexian 4y ago
    It's not only onerous, but streaming services just suck. It's all hot garbage in AV1 or VP9 at a 10Mbps bitrate, which looks like crap. I know because I worked in this industry, how management would literally wet themselves over a slightly more efficient codec, so that they could dial down bitrates further while distracting people from terrible video compression artifacts. They also have problems keeping their services up, and few actually understand how to deliver video with adequate QoS (Netflix sort of gets it, but the rest just bolt on a generic CDN with terrible results). The average consumer doesn't notice because, well, they're blind and have crap AV equipment. Anyway, if there was such thing as a "streaming service" that could stream high bitrate content, reliably, like uncompressed digital cinema or, at the very least, an Bluray that hasn't been transcoded, I would throw money at them hand over fist. But that is not the case, so I have to rely on alternatives.
    • automatic6131 4y ago
      > they're blind and have crap AV equipment We notice, but what are we going to do? Buy the Blu-ray?
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  There is no way to control your own media and not pirate these days. Other than music, find me legit DRM free media.
• trh0awayman 4y ago
  At least where I live in Europe, it's almost impossible to not pirate. The government has strict controls on media and so it's impossible to even get access to most movies. Netflix, Amazon Prime and other streaming sites have been completely neutered. HBO Go, Criterion, etc. are completely inaccessible. In the US, it's a different story. Everything outside of Karagarga is available to be streamed, or at least purchased on Bluray/DVD. The only big thing is quality. Streaming has atrocious quality for the most part.
  • zagrebian 4y ago
    I watched a lot of X-files on German free TV in the ’90s, and I only found out later that it was edited to remove the most graphic scenes. Imagine paying for streaming and not even getting the full content.
    • tashbarg 4y ago
      Most if not all of the editing in German free TV is done by the station to fit the show to the schedule (ad breaks, fixed time budget, afternoon slot requiring removal of graphic scenes, etc.) Streaming should not have these problems.
  • fy20 4y ago
    Same with me. I watched the first seasons of Star Trek: Discovery on Netflix, but this year their contract ended. There is no service available in my country where I can legally watch it. On the other hand nobody cares about torrents here, so at least I don't need to pay for usenet access to get it :-)
    • 72deluxe 4y ago
      You're not missing much if you can't get series 2 onwards! The crew of all Star Trek ships now appear to need to have a group hug and good cry every episode and tell each staff member how important and unique they are rather than just solving problems in an interesting way.
  • deleted 4y ago
• bryans 4y ago
  As a 5TB MP3 hoarder myself (along with ~50GB/day of movie/TV pirating), I was curious as to how much content 30TB actually is, so I checked the average file size for my last 300 downloads of mostly 1080p shows and 2160p movies. They averaged 3GB, so that's roughly 10,000 pieces of long form video. Presuming an average bitrate of 14Mbps, 30TB is ~4,760 hours. The average adult watches 3 hours per day. Given the OP's hobby-level interest in collecting the content, we can probably double that to 6 hours per day, which makes for 2.5 years worth of content. Even though I'm squarely in the 6+ hour category, there are maybe 100 or so favorite movies that I've watched more than once, and once per year I'll re-watch a TV series (this year's revisit was Halt And Catch Fire). But even adding all of that together, we're talking about maybe 500 unique videos over ~20 years. I can't wrap my head around needing to store 10,000 videos forever for the tiny chance that you might want to watch one that isn't still available through Usenet, private trackers or reasonable paid means.
  • dangerface 4y ago
    Why do you have 5tb of mp3? Im the exact opposite I hoard all my video but stream all my music. Im curious why not use a streaming service for music? Is there a reason to use a streaming service for video but not music?
    • bryans 4y ago
      I'm definitely an edge case for music. I've been obsessed with metal since the mid-90s, and have downloaded quite literally every release. Unfortunately, the streaming services don't seem to care much about having a complete (or even particularly good) catalog of metal, so some of my favorite bands and albums don't exist on those platforms. This is made worse due to a significant portion of metal bands being off the grid, with little-to-zero web presence outside of a Metal Archives[1] listing. This obsession has led to developing a system for filtering releases into lists of albums that I actually enjoy, so I don't miss anything good. I download 100% of releases and throw all of them into Winamp, then play the second track -- there are a lot of atmospheric intro tracks in metal. If the first 1s doesn't grab me, I skip to about 0:30 and give it another 2-3s. If nothing grabs my attention or it's a sub-genre that I'm not interested in, the album gets removed from the playlist. Anything remaining at the end gets a full track 2 play, and if the whole song meets my approval, I'll listen to the whole album. If the album is something I'd listen to more than a few times, it goes on the permanent playlist -- currently at ~450 albums and another ~500 random tracks. [1] https://www.metal-archives.com/ https://www.metal-archives.com/
• fxtentacle 4y ago
  I agree on the issues. There's no legal way to watch TV shows without granting blanket internet access to apps where everyone knows that they shit on your privacy, spy on you, and sell the data to multiple advertisement networks. The only way how I can keep my TV offline and put content on a USB stick is by breaking the DRM. It's literally necessary for privacy-preserving content consumption. Plus the market has really weird incentives. I have disposable income and I'm happy to pay for ad-free content. And precisely because of that, they try extra hard to shove ads into my face.
• brk 4y ago
  I'm guessing you may be a bit older than the average demographic here, from a time when owning movies was expensive and thus the content was implied as being very exclusive and valuable. In others, I have seen this lead to the digital hoarding tendencies, wanting to keep all that content on hand. Though I am from the same era, I don't generally find many movies or TV series that I really want to watch more than once. I have no desire to keep a large library of movies, they have almost zero value after the first watch (music is an entirely different thing though). As others have pointed out, your costs are more due to the long term retention of the content, not the initial acquisition. Personally, I prefer the path of least resistance, but the content has to be of decent quality and value. Thus, I am not interested in 5+ ~20/mo subscriptions to get access to the maybe 10 things I watch per month.
  • pmoriarty 4y ago
    "I don't generally find many movies or TV series that I really want to watch more than once. I have no desire to keep a large library of movies, they have almost zero value after the first watch" I used to almost never rewatch movies, but I have kept track of what my favorite movies were, and when I've made friends with someone who was interested in seeing some of the movies that I liked then I'd find myself rewatching these movies with them (especially if it's been a really long time since I saw these movies and forgotten most of the details). Also, some of my favorite movies are kind of obscure, so there's no guarantee they'd be available through streaming. Because of that it does make sense for me to archive films. Even when the movies I like are available, why pay twice (or more) to watch them again?
    • pc86 4y ago
      I just watched Margin Call for probably the 5th or 6th time over the weekend. I love the movie, it's not particularly great in an objective sense, but Zach Quinto and Simon Baker in particular do great jobs in their roles. And some of the scenes are fantastic even in isolation.[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Elyfo1DIlzs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Elyfo1DIlzs (6m 23s)
    • brk 4y ago
• anonu 4y ago
  The added benefit of streaming services is there's an app for almost every device: all TVs, phones, iPads, computers, etc.. That alone is a killer feature you can't really replicate on your own.
  • skydhash 4y ago
    Search Plex
  • dangerface 4y ago
    Theres an app for that. Plex turns any computer into a streaming service and there are apps for almost every device including old smart tvs. https://plex.tv/ https://plex.tv/
• philistine 4y ago
  What you’re describing is data hoarding. I pirate a ton too, but you know what I do with a movie or TV show after I’ve watched it? I delete it. Poof, gone. But it’s still in the most important dataset I have. My memory. To help with the metadata of my own memory, I write down a list of the films I’ve seen. I only keep the movies I really love and want to rewatch (Robocop). That TV show I just finished that was great but I won’t rewatch. Boom, gonzo. Your piracy is an excuse for data hoarding, which is a problem.
  • sophacles 4y ago
    > Your piracy is an excuse for data hoarding, which is a problem. Your fake concern an excuse for busy-bodying, which is a problem.
    • moffkalast 4y ago
      I mean, what's wrong with data hoarding? People always say you should have backups, but when you make some proper ones it's suddenly "hoarding" and "a problem" smh.
      • dubswithus 4y ago
        Who is claiming that you must have backups of pirated content?
        • moffkalast 4y ago
          People. It's written right there.
    • dubswithus 4y ago
      How is it that? OP is the one that shared. No one is forcing him to post here.
      • sophacles 4y ago
        Did OP ask if it was a problem? Did OP state it was a problem? Not that I see - AFAICT the only people declaring it a problem are the busybodies latching on to OP spending the same amount on this hobby as they would dining out at a decent restaurant once a month.
• 1970-01-01 4y ago
  Torrents continue to thanklessly fill the gaps these services leave behind. Historic news and sports broadcasts are good examples. Regular season games are simply scrubbed after a few months, and the evening news archives stop after a few weeks. If I want to see an event unfold as it did, I need to download and serve myself before it's gone.
• kyledrake 4y ago
  None of the streaming services allow you to watch purchased content at HD quality with Linux, and DRM is evil, so I don't use them. I don't really watch TV so it's not the end of the world for me, but they shouldn't be surprised at all that there's rampant piracy when you take the most high-skilled tech people and force them to pirate content to be able to watch it at all. It's ironic to me that we caved and let them put dangerous EME DRM crap (looking directly at you, W3C) in browsers and they still just locked out Linux users anyways. They've learned absolutely nothing from the DeCSS days, and the results are predictable: https://torrentfreak.com/google-takes-down-repositories-that-circumvent-its-widevine-drm-201113/ https://torrentfreak.com/google-takes-down-repositories-that... RE the morality of it, as of right now, piracy is just a political act of resistance against this broken system to me. It's not about the cost, it's about not enabling this bad behavior to continue. I keep repeating the same thing over and over: as long as your eyeballs are made of flesh, the DRM protections will never stop piracy. Their only logical objective is violence: to throw my heroes in cages for doing things like legitimate security research, porting software to linux, etc.. and I don't want to support that (but again, I don't really watch TV so it's not much of a conundrum for me, but my condolences if "Is It Cake?" is something someone can't live without).
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • _gabe_ 4y ago
    I forgot about how much services absolutely suck on Linux even if you legally paid for them! I paid for Disney+ to watch Mandalorian and I spent an hour trying to watch it on my Linux device because I don't have a smart TV. Apparently Disney just outright blocks any Linux devices from using their service. I really hate piracy, but I hate DRM so so much more. I never did get it to work either so I just cancelled the subscription
• captainmuon 4y ago
  Here in Germany, it is almost impossible to pirate for free. If you download shows via BitTorrent you almost immediately get a fine ("Abmahnung"). There are some illegal streaming sites, but quality and reliability is poor in my experience. But you can get a subscription to a VPN for about the same price as a Netflix subscription (~10€/month), that will allow you to torrent without worring about getting caught. Strangely, they manage to have an exit node in Frankfurt, and take credit card, although it is clear that they are frequently used for pirating. Alternatively, for a similar price you can get a premium "sharehoster" account, and then download all the shows using JDownloader. I am firmly convinced that this is at least tolerated, if not even condoned by the film industry. The goal is to make pirating a bit inconvenient, and about as expensive as legal streaming. It is like a pressure valve. If it weren't for this "good enough" system, people would be motivated to build a P2P "Pirates' Netflix" (maybe with a friend-of-a-friend architecture, like RetroShare, where the lawers cannot get your IP). And that would really be a problem for the IP holders.
  • wil421 4y ago
    Torrents have been out of favor for a while. The pros are using Usenet subscriptions and a Usenet indexer (search engine) combined with Plex and automated tools such as NZBGet and Sonarr. I doubt the Usenet subscription would trigger any fines. This isn’t like torrents where some seeder could be giving IPs to whoever sends you the Abmahnung fines.
    • Loughla 4y ago
      >Torrents have been out of favor for a while. Have they? Because it seems to me from my sample size of friends (say 20) that torrent+VPN is definitely the preferred method, way over usenet. Usenet seems to be for people who are trying to download EVERYTHING (like OP was originally complaining about) instead of just watch movies occasionally.
    • nicolapcweek94 4y ago
      Actual pros are just doing it for free with the same setup but added Prowlarr/Jackett and private trackers, so it's all free without having to pay for usenet. The issue then becomes getting access to the tracker, but it's not that hard, especially for general purpose ones.
• wollsmoth 4y ago
  Frankly? Why bother pirating stuff if you're not even going to watch it. I don't know how many hours 30TB of content is, but I can tell you I can only really watch a few shows at a time and the occasional movie. This really breaks down to a TV sub, a couple streaming services and the occasional movie rental fee. Which feels extremely reasonable to me. I do still occasionally pirate. Stuff that is free OTA, very old or just difficult to find. My piracy days are mostly behind me but sometimes it's handy.
• kgwxd 4y ago
  If I can buy a high quality digital file without DRM, built in ads, and other extra garbage, at a reasonable price, I happily pay for it. If I can't, I download it elsewhere. Music industry figured this out decades ago, I'm not sure why other media hasn't. I used to be mostly happy with streaming services, I still have most of the big ones, but selection and quality is very hit or miss, I sometimes go over a month without using any of them. And "no ads" tiers have become a lie. Showing me a trailer for anything before the thing I chose to watch, even if it's for a show on the same service, is an ad. Stop it, you have a whole app/website to shove shit in my face, once I make a selection, leave me the fuck alone.
  • MrGilbert 4y ago
    > Music industry figured this out decades ago, I'm not sure why other media hasn't. It's a learning process. Remember the "old times" were CDs had DRM? It took quite a while to get high quality digital files without DRM - talking about FLAC here.
• Thristle 4y ago
  If you stop pirating you would still have 30TB of disk space. you might not need it but you would still have it. Anyway, it would be much easier to download stuff on demand than to hoard the entire movie archive on your disks An idle computer (just disk IO) shouldn't cost 45$ a month in electricity unless your prices are much much higher then the average you don't a 40$ subscription to pirate. just buy an invite to a couple of private trackers and you are done
• Copenjin 4y ago
  Considering the quality of the content that I've seen in the last decade, I expect that your need for space will steeply decrease over time. What has been worth storing/saving the last 3-4 years? I mean really store, because you'll want to watch/play it again some day. The only things worth keeping are those hard to find with other means, some rare movies for example that are not available in any other form other than some avi found somewhere from an old vhs/dvd, but the rest...
• oaththrowaway 4y ago
  I have a similar setup. One extra step I've done is convert all my video media to HEVC after it downloads and that saves me a pretty solid amount of hard drive space.
• Asooka 4y ago
  That's pretty much the case for any member of r/datahoarder . It is impossible to actually own any media you buy these days, the only way you can own the data is if you pirate.
• dml2135 4y ago
  I'm in the same boat. I really don't have an issue with paying for content, but I want to have full control over my media files and build a big library, and there is absolutely no way I could afford to pay for every piece of media. Nor would doing so even make sense. For the majority of media I save, the creators are long since dead. So why go out of my way to make a tithe to some giant media conglomerate that owns the rights? I'd much rather support filmmakers by going to the theater once in a while. And when I say library, I mean that in the sense that I save all this stuff because I want to be able to curate it and share it decades down the line. Our current era of seemingly infinite connection and availability may not last forever. I feel a bit like Noah filling the ark sometimes.
• NikolaNovak 4y ago
  I've quit pirating content a decade ago - combination of time, safety, priorities, and availability of legit content. I've considered getting back into it occasionally. Why: Convenience and access. From having everything on Netflix a decade ago, to now having almost as many subscriptions as I used to have cable channels, it's a pain (let alone a cost) to install dozen apps on my phone tablet TV roku etc. Their quality varies WILDLY. The user experience ranges from pretty decent to seemingly user hostile. I've recently watched a set of seasons of a show pirated a decade ago, then last two seasons on actual subscription service, and it sucked: app would not let me download to SD card, had to take precious phone storage. Subtitles were 2 seconds behind with NO way to adjust. Fast forwarding was wonky and basically unusable. And best of all, it auto deleted itself 48hrs after downloading so I had to keep redownloading same stuff over and over. Brutal! Why Not: As explained above - It's pricey and time consuming, there's a fair amount of risk in pirating, and technology seems to keep changing. I made a post about that a while ago, but I'm no longer at a point in my life where every 6 months I can spare the time to fully rebuild and reconfigure and troubleshoot a stack from sabnzbd and nsbmatrix to udirwioay and fewiap and fdsjei, and then 6 months later again to fdwjieo and wearp routed through wefheio and zxcnzxcv. I have a friend who keeps urging me to set it up because it's so easy - oblivious that whenever I try to use his helpful "how to", a) It's 3 pages long b) it is missing about 10 pages of details and c) It's already out of date so it's "do that, but none of that actually because these days now the cool thing is ____" :D
  • gaspard234 4y ago
    My NAS has a torrent downloading software and an app for my Samsung TV. I just visit my local network web address, add the torrent in the NAS dashboard, and am able to play it from the TV within a few minutes. Most content is great, occasionally there are audio issues or missing subtitles.
    • NikolaNovak 4y ago
      Right, but there are I think a few assumptions there: 1. You need to set up NAS and downloading software - that is not as trivial or common as HN audience assumes :) 2. You need a reliable and safe source of torrents. They may be paid or invite only, or may be super scammy and unrealiable and mine crypto etc etc 3. How safe do you feel in your jurisdiction/location at running plain torrents. Here you get notices and sometimes strikes / actions pretty quickly, so now we are talking at least a VPN, which is next layer of setup, configuration, possibly price, possibly its own threat vector as commercial VPNs are scammy, your own VPN is non-trivial to setup correctly. etc etc etc :)
• rg111 4y ago
  You are just hoarding data which is a different "hobby" and piracy is merely a component of it. And, yes, this hobby is expensive. Do not go around saying that piracy is expensive. There is also a similar side to it. You are _storing_ a lot of data. What if you decided to _play_ (games) instead? You would have needed more expensive hardwares. And a lot of power. Here _gaming_ would be more expensive. What is expensive is your datahoarding habits, and not piracy. You are also comparing apples to oranges here (watching movies vis-a-vis storing them). A more obvious a-to-o comparison is buying a Spotify subscription versus playing CoD: WW2 from a pirated source. You see, the second is more expensive than the first. So, 1. Piracy is not expensive, your datahoarding habits are (plenty of people watch pirated content on 300-400$ laptops and 200$ phones.) 2. You are comparing apples to oranges.
• axilmar 4y ago
  In the 80s/90s, I pirated a lot of software for Amiga/PC, because it was either unavailable or expensive for me. Nowadays I don't bother pirating anything, for two reasons: a) I don't feel comfortable any more to steal money from others, b) there is nothing out there to make me want it so badly. Everything looks so mediocre...
• coffeeblack 4y ago
  > There are some must-have shows Not really.
• anon9191 4y ago
  Reasons (TV/Movie) piracy is better than any paid service: * All in one place/App/UI. Be it Plex/Jellyfin/Emby/Kodi/etc, you only have 1 app UI/UX to deal with. No more wondering "What network was that on?", "Wait, it's on 2 services but which one has my watched status?", "What does clicking forward/back do in this App?", "How do I turn on subtitles?", etc * Local playback. You never have to wait on your internet or deal with lower quality if something goes amiss. * More features. Ability to download a show/movie to your iPad for travel (Yes, this has improved on the streaming platforms but is not always easy or ubiquitous) * Access forever. If you hoard at least. You cannot find certain shows online anymore. The Daily Show or The Colbert Report are good examples. I know some people might find watching old episodes of daily news shows to be odd but I find them interesting and still humorous. All you can find is scattered clips online. Also shows that were never super popular can be impossible to find on streaming and often impossible to buy. * No Ads. Zero. Zilch. Nada. * Tech/Job improvement Aspect. This is less about piracy directly and the skills you are forced to learn to maintain an *arr+plex+UnRaid/FreeNAS/Debian/etc box. You are correct that the cost is not cheap, I've probably sunk $5K+ into my servers but I find the process to be both informative and enjoyable. Lastly, I would happily pay $100-150+ a month for a service that gave me all of the above (aside from server management experience). 1 App, offline/local caching, no ads, all content. But it will never happen. Netflix gave us some golden years where they had almost everything someone would want but then the content providers started to pull back their content to their own "platforms" and now it's a mess. Even things like Amazon Channels, Apple TV (no, not the device, no, not the service, the app :rolleyes:), or now even Plex (with their newest release) that attempt to serve as directory that can either play the content directly or bounce you directly into the app to play are a far cry from what you get from an only-Plex (or insert other media server) setup.
  • moffkalast 4y ago
    The interesting thing is that for gaming Gabe Newell has figured this out decades ago i.e. "piracy is an issue of service, not price" and today Steam fulfils practically all of those reasons you listed. All games in one store, offline play, hosting mods and support forums, cross-machine save sync, access even if the game gets removed from the store entirely later on, etc. GoG for example goes a step further with the ownership principle, making games DRM free, and yet when it comes down to it their service offers less practical features to the average user than Steam and its ecosystem does. Of course the monetization approach is different, since you pay per game and not per month for access. I wonder if streaming networks would have more success with a similar pay-to-own approach. Making the service free by default, with some stuff free to view and the rest requiring a small fee each to own the right to view it infinite times. The approach that has worked reasonably well with VHS and DVD in the past. Then on the other hand most games have more replayability than your average TV show...
• delecti 4y ago
  Sounds like piracy is a hobby for you rather than a means to an end. I've "recreationally pirated" before, and now I only pirate as a means to an end (and usually only when "necessary"). I don't regret either era. If you are enjoying the time you spend recreationally pirating and hoarding media, then it seems fine to me, as long as you're aware of any potential legal issues in your jurisdiction.
• karaterobot 4y ago
  > Streaming services still have significant service problems that need to be addressed. This is true. I spend a lot on media, but also pirate things too, because it's often a better experience. One search engine for everything, and I don't need to sign up for 10 different services?! Wow!
• yboris 4y ago
  A subreddit for you: /r/DataHoarder - "It's A Digital Disease!" https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ You can reduce electricity use if you can keep your content stored in a powered-off state and run a low-power device for your pirating; when needed, boot up your server to watch things or to transfer out your new downloads. Finally, you might like the software I created to browse your collection: Video Hub App https://videohubapp.com/ https://videohubapp.com/ & https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App (MIT open source)
• klibertp 4y ago
  Stop with all the watching (and to a lesser extent listening) and start reading and hoarding books instead. 99% of downloaded content you will never read, but at 0.5~4.0Mb per book just two cheap, but RAIDed with ZFS for safety, 1Tb 3.5" HDDs will last you a lifetime. And that's before turning any kind of compression on!
  • xaedes 4y ago
    If I might add, hoarding physical books is also a worthwhile hobby.
  • pirate-Loo6uoDu 4y ago
    I've already downloaded all the books. Now the challenge is indexing and sorting them.
• DantesKite 4y ago
  You remind me of squirrel storing nuts for a winter that’ll never come.
• DaSpood 4y ago
  I don't think piracy is what is costing you. Data hoarding is. Even if you wanted to keep a library of all watched movies or series from the past year you'd sit at much lower than 30TB. Do you really need to keep all this data ? How many times in your life will you rewatch all those movies and would it not be faster to find a new download then with the slight risk that it won't be available anymore ? You can probably safely remove/redownload the most popular shows and only keep the more niche ones that may become hard to find, or purge your movie library every few months for stuff that you never rewatch (you can probably even automate that). With decent internet and preferences for popular movies you could even argue that you'd just have to keep around the torrents and re-download your movies on the fly, trading a few minutes of waiting for a much cheaper setup. There's also ways to optimize the uptime of your server which is essentially a NAS for movies. You could have the big machine off most of the time and use a Raspberry Pi to send Wake On Lan packets when you need it. It's may take an extra minute before it's usable but you would lower your bills significantly. That $1200 upfront and $55/month sound like at least double what it should be. For a server that may double as a backup for your own files the upfront investment can be seen as worth it. And with the many streaming platforms relying more and more on exclusives, region-locked content that require VPNs that may not even work, time-limited content and increasing pricings your reduced electricity bill may not be far off from what legally viewing the content might cost you.
• AlwaysRock 4y ago
  Do you think your computer actually cost $45 a month in electricity costs?
• anon2020dot00 4y ago
  Only keep data or metadata of important stuff is a better strategy I think. Why would one need to keep a copy of a film like the Lord of the Rings movie when it is so easy to download? Why would one need to keep metadata of having watched LoTR? Forgetting is a feature since it allows our minds to disregard insignificant stuff.
• boredumb 4y ago
  You have a really immense archive of pop culture that is priceless. If I wanted to scroll through endless junk I'd never watch or wouldn't want to watch again, i'd rather it be my own 30TB catalog.
• TameAntelope 4y ago
  There's no way that computer costs you $45/mo in power, unless power is insanely expensive where you live.
• __ryan__ 4y ago
  This doesn’t even include the rent, mortgage, or other payment to house you, or how much it costs to feed or clothe you and otherwise keep the piracy operation running.
• parenthesis 4y ago
  Why isn't there a streaming service that has basically every movie and tv show ever made before, let's say, 2000. Netflix etc. can keep on having their own new stuff exclusive to them, and fair enough if some `special' older content with a high ongoing value was kept off the `everything old' service (Star Wars, Star Trek, James Bond or whatever). The streaming services have become too much like tv: you can only watch `what's on'.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• whoomp12342 4y ago
  ads, and the ever changing pricing plans. thats why. if you dont own the content, they own your fun.
• birdyrooster 4y ago
  Same except everything is commercial equipment (rack hardware, UPS, PDU, 10GBE between NAS boxes and servers). I am at 120TB capacity of RAID10 currently. I have spent tens of thousands on my Plex setup. It’s not about the economy, its about never worrying about copyright licensing windows again. I don’t trust streaming platforms to maintain licenses for the stuff I like. The fragmentation is maddening and I wouldn’t even watch tv or movies if I had to use streaming services. It’s funny Plex has an office in Los Gatos literally down the road from Netflix. They are literally the scrappy pirate ship plundering the booty of the incumbent.
• dmantis 4y ago
  Pirate services often are actually better. I pay monthly for pirate streaming service because the pirate service provide me well-maintained open-source Kodi plugin on RPI, no espionage and telemetry, no DRM on my devices. And linux web version works flawlessly. Top 1 official streaming (netflix) always has issues with linux desktop browsers and don't want to provide me the way to consume content without been hooked . Others even worse. Not talking about the fact that pirate service has everything in one place and copyright guys can't even agree on content sharing (like music streaming, where I can access the same music on different services).
• VikingCoder 4y ago
  I've always been interested in the Zappiti Streaming DVD Blu-Ray Ripping Media Player. Like, if someone went to Redbox and rented several movies...
• t0bia_s 4y ago
  Streaming services should abandon monthly subscription paying method and let me pay just for time I actually spend on consuming their products. It is ridiculous to pay multiple streaming services for content that I consume rarely. I'm able to watch 5 feature films in month, which means approximately one film from one streaming service (HBO, Netflix, Apple, Disney...). Together it is around 55 USD (11 USD per feature film) in my country. Not to mention that about half o films I have in my watch list are not on any streaming services. Sorry, that is not acceptable. It is actually stupid business model. If that films are not in local cinemas around, I'm not able to watch them legally.
• greenglass 4y ago
  Stop watching so much tv! Piracy is one thing, but wasting your life watching all of those “must have shows” makes it sound like your brain has been co-opted by the content producers. Maybe put down the remote and pick up a book?
  • pirate-Loo6uoDu 4y ago
    I have already downloaded all of the books. Text compresses very well.
  • shabier 4y ago
    > wasting your life watching all of those “must have shows” makes it sound like your brain has been co-opted by the content producers. >Maybe put down the remote and pick up a book? Isn't that the same thing?
    • greenglass 4y ago
      Libraries are free so no. And, the selection is wider and better given the historical economics of literature vs streaming (steaming?) content production.
      • brador 4y ago
        Don't sell your brain time to the lowest bidder.
• c54 4y ago
  It might feel cool to use your hardware for helping the internet at large, via something like the good karma kit or an auto-archiving tool: https://archivebox.io/ https://archivebox.io/ https://github.com/ArchiveBox/good-karma-kit https://github.com/ArchiveBox/good-karma-kit
  • pirate-Loo6uoDu 4y ago
    I already run archiveteam-warrior. I've actually contributed some code to a few things on that list.
• rektide 4y ago
  Three 16TB (for raid5) drives (Seagate Exos) are $690, plus the pc you probably already have. There's an amazing chorus of protests against data-hoarding. With wonders like this, I say go for it!
• hestefisk 4y ago
  Just delete it … no need to keep 30TB of data… you can probably automate it too by querying Plex stats with a cron job, rm, and a bit of Perl magic …
• PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  Hoard because a) You never know when the content will be removed, b) you never know when you will be stuck without internet, c) you never know when you will feel like exercising your right as a customer to not barter with a business for whatever reason you desire, d) want to stream the content via your own software whatever that may be, e) because the corporations got greedy and the customer is paying.
• omoikane 4y ago
  Besides availability, sometimes piracy leads to a better experience, as explained by this graphic: https://i0.wp.com/farm5.static.flickr.com/4032/4369403959_fe90464b27_o.jpg https://i0.wp.com/farm5.static.flickr.com/4032/4369403959_fe... https://www.techdirt.com/2010/02/19/reminder-you-dont-compete-with-piracy-by-being-lame-the-dvd-edition/ https://www.techdirt.com/2010/02/19/reminder-you-dont-compet... ("If you are a pirate this is what you get ... but if you are a paying customer, this is what you get") This is a very old meme, modern experience with streaming services is generally much better.
• colechristensen 4y ago
  US vs. Paramount (1948) prevented movie production companies from owning theaters or entering into exclusivity arrangements for exhibition. I think we need to go back to this, codify it into law, and make it apply to streaming services. i.e. companies that offer streaming services and companies that produce content should not be allowed to be owned by the same entity. Beyond that I think there should be forced syndication after an initial lockout period for the first run (say, a year). It would be a much more consumer friendly environment if 20 year old shows couldn't be sold for billions and any niche streaming service could license for a reasonable fee and we wouldn't be forced to shuffle services around playing exclusivity games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....
  • oneoff786 4y ago
    That’s a great pitch
• jccalhoun 4y ago
  I am partially a data hoarder. I am an academic so I try to get copies of documentaries, videos, and such about my topic. I also pirate a decent amount of stuff but most of it is things I can't legally get in the USA.
• dmos62 4y ago
  So, the $10 a month for subscribing to usenet I get, though I personally just use public torrent trackers. What's with the ~30TB server and how is that related? Do you want to be able to come back to anything you've ever downloaded anytime?
• WhompingWindows 4y ago
  For a long time, a friend recorded TV shows and movies on multiple VCRs. I went to their house, it was literally stacks of video casettes on every wall surface, thousands of them. They even used to mail them back and forth to other countries in trades for other English content. Nowadays, they digitized all of it onto 12 2 TB harddrives. They take a different one out every evening and organize and share, get more things, etc. While the cost may be comparable, the fact that they could regain their house walls was a huge boon.
• deleted 4y ago
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• gigel82 4y ago
  $45 / month for power seems excessive. I have a home server where I selfhost a bunch of services and am using an 1080Ti GPU on it to mine Ethereum (65% or 125W) and it's costing me $18 / month in electricity to run 24/7 (the Ethereum I mine pays for all of it even now with the crashed crypto prices).
  • aidenn0 4y ago
    at 125W it would be ~$0.50/kWh which is not totally ridiculous of for the top marginal rate for electricity (so if you add it on top of other usage it's somewhat feasible). An older rig with lots of 3.5" spinning disks can exceed 125W (it's ~8W per disk if they never spin down).
• deleted 4y ago
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• pirxxx 4y ago
• ecef9-8c0f-4374 4y ago
  A couple of games, films and music I loved are lost or hard to come by these days. It's out of print or no one cares (b-track on singles for example) Sometimes the artist changes "the original" (star wars for example). The companies don't want to sell the original (GTA for example) or can't sell it for legal reasons. And of course there is always someone offended (Community - Advanced Dungeons and Dragons for example)
• oneoff786 4y ago
  I don’t get the pirating mentality I see on HN. People say Netflix was good but the catalog is the problem, then point to alternatives in piracy that are not streaming sites. Why is this? Put locker and solar movie and sflix seem like the best available option. What’s up with that?
• tiborsaas 4y ago
  The ultimate streaming service would be the one created by IMDB. I feel half of my watchlist is unavailable or hard to track down.
• vmception 4y ago
  Have you considered a residential IP for VPN and just using the streaming services? Slightly more expensive than normal VPN, and less likely to be blocked by the streaming services.
• markus_zhang 4y ago
  I just watch online. Few movies and TV shows are worth hoarding anyway.
• oversocialized 4y ago
• midasuni 4y ago
  I download content against copyright law - specifically Strange New Worlds Paramount literally won’t sell it to me, thus I have no moral objections to it.
• jjav 4y ago
  What this is describing is a file server. Nothing to do with pirating. I have all my movies on my local fileserver but they are not pirated. I buy the DVDs and I rip them for storage.
• gaurangagg 4y ago
  Same goes with downloading youtube videos - which gets deleted randomly by the owner. I used to have YouTube playlists and after 3 years 4 out of 10 videos were gone. Downloading content helps if you want to revisit them without the fear of them getting deleted.
• scyzoryk_xyz 4y ago
  Do you have a plex server? I wouldn’t mind perusing your hoard :)
• incel 4y ago
• masteruvpuppetz 4y ago
  Does anyone feel bad using pirated Adobe products in a commercial project? or is it me only?
• fareesh 4y ago
  You could pay for the subscription services and rip the content - there are some technical limitations but I'm sure someone has figured out how to do it
• Bromskloss 4y ago
  > I pay a usenet subscription, and subscription to indexers Wait! You can get Usenet these days? Is it only for piracy or other things as well? Where can I sign up? Also, what is an indexer in this context? Is it something you need only for piracy, or is it about Usenet in general?
• fellellor 4y ago
  I used to hoard data too until I realised that most movies and TV shows are crap most of the time.