Title, I haven’t Yo ho ho’d in forever in internet time… What/where do I need to start again? I’m tired of ads and 3+ streaming services to watch stuff that’s interesting. Running windows. Thanks dudes and dudettes.

  • Why pay someone else to run a service that you’d have been paying Netflix for.

    That’s how I feel about Usenet tbh. If you’re going to pay, actually pay to support the shows you’re watching. IMO.

    Otherwise you build a server PC and set it up for the *arr suite, Radarr, Sonarr and the rest. It’s the cost of your internet and your electricity after the upfront cost of your server.

    Bonus: you have it when your internet is down, since they’re downloaded to the hard drive.

  •  histic   ( @histic@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) 
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    10 hours ago

    If you want it done simply for relatively low cost ~$40usd/year Stremio + torrentio + realdebrid is what I use and it’s fast simple and works on basically anything although with the debrid you can only have one simultaneous stream if you were to use it on multiple devices You can skip the debrid if you choose to use a vpn instead unless you are in a country that doesn’t care

    •  dan   ( @dan@upvote.au ) 
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      8 hours ago

      Also consider Weyd or Syncler instead of Stremio + Torrentio, and Premiumize in addition to Real Debrid. Premiumize can download from Usenet too.

    • This, I used to use Kodi+Serena+realdebrid but it was not as user friendly. Stremio is by far the best option if you just want to watch shows without making a server/ having to actually manage downloads or making it into a project.

      You just set it up and use it like any other streaming app

      No reason to self host unless you find joy in maintaining a server/ library

  • My main suggestion is to search whatever you want with Yandex.com - unlike Google, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Brave, etc etc, Yandex doesn’t delist piracy sites. So, “bookname pdf” will almost always return a good result. “some anime or movie name watch online” will also work.

    Oh, and use uBlockOrigin. Ditch Chrome, use Firefox or anything that still makes uBlock works in full capacity.

  • The strong bias seems to be toward Torrents instead of USENET? Why? Cost of providers with decent retention?

    I always assume that Usenet (with anonymous payment and a separate VPN) is a safer option than torrenting since I’m not the one publishing / sharing content. A copyright holder would have to go after that Usenet host (with a general court order), extract logs from them (if they exist), figure out who was actually infringing on copyright, then go after the VPN provider, to deanonymize me.

    •  dan   ( @dan@upvote.au ) 
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      8 hours ago

      Usenet is great, but it’s a client-server model, and things can be deleted from the servers (e.g. due to DMCA requests). The copyright agencies for very popular content automatically send DMCA and NTD takedowns for them.

      On the other hand, torrents are peer-to-peer. They’re practically impossible to shut down since there’s no central server in control of everything. You don’t even need a torrent file, just a magnet URI, which can be generated by anyone that already has the torrent.

      Usenet is much better for rare/unpopular/uncommon content, since good providers have thousands of days of retention, whereas an unpopular torrent from 5 years ago would likely have 0 seeds left.

    • Works great for me. Definitely not as many seeders as they were during it’s heyday, but still a decent number. I’ve downloaded a couple semi-obscure films in the past couple of months and they downloaded just fine in an hour-or-two even with only one seed.

  •  Sibbo   ( @Sibbo@sopuli.xyz ) 
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    51 day ago

    Well, you can stop wearing those weird clothes for once. Nowadays we pirate from home. No sailor suit required anymore. I recommend you start by buying a laptop. But those are quite hard to use if you have skipped a century or two. Can you even read? Do you speak modern English?

    Anyways, maybe go to some adult education center first and learn how to read and write. Yes you got that right. Piracy requires education nowadays. Who would have thought?

  • Go to a host like feralhost and rent a seed box. This gives you a webhosted transmission to paste magnet links in from any torrent site. Then you connect with filezilla over sftp, no vpn or nonsense needed and its all super fast because the torrenting is done from a data center and you download only from there over encrypted ssh at max speed when its finished.

  •  Mr_Blott   ( @Mr_Blott@feddit.uk ) 
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    2 days ago

    Right, reading through the comments, you say you’ve got a couple of kids. I’m guessing that means you’re a bit older and don’t have that much time to binge-watch long pointless series etc

    To pare it down, ignore the comments about Sonarr and Radarr etc, they’re for people who are addicted to downloading as much media as humanly possible, or folks in the US with 1990s internet speed. I’ve tried them and didn’t find much benefit to them.

    If you just want to quickly download a film or a series, setup is very simple.

    In twenty years of torrenting, I’ve never needed more than a good VPN, a good BitTorrent client, and a good website for magnets. Plus a PC hooked up to the TV with the screen extended.

    Torrent client - Use Qbittorrent, for reasons explained later

    VPN - As others say, port forwarding is necessary. Use Proton, when you start it up, it gives you a different port number each time. In Qbittorrent, click options then connection, and change the port number to the one Proton gave you. Bit of a fucking about each time but worth it

    As for torrenting sites, I rarely need anything more than 1337x.to

    BUT, as stated, the search function on QBT is amazing for finding obscure stuff. You need to install Python on your PC first, then there are plenty guides online for installing the search plugins. It sounds complicated but is incredibly easy and stable once installed.

    That’s it. That’s all I use and have done for decades. With fibre optic nowadays, a 1.5gb film takes about two minutes to download, you don’t need an entire hard disk full of media, just plan ahead

    • Setting up Sonarr and Radar with docker isn’t all that complex. If you set up Prowlarr as well then you can still get the instant search and download aspect you mention except you can search ALL the good websites at once and (most importantly for my stress level) avoid all the bullshit ads and malware you’ve got to worry about blocking while browsing those sites through the web. Sonarr is perfect for following any show, not just those you might binge watch. Topical shows like SNL and last week tonight get picked up automatically. Long term favorites with unpredictable release cycles (looking at you Doctor Who) get snapped up when they’re most popular and download super fast. Cleaning up old seasons to clear out space is as simple as navigating a web page. Both radarr and sonarr can connect to other services like that.tv so less tech savvy household members can add a show or movie to their watchlist and it will automatically get added, searched, downloaded, and hosted without any extra interaction from me. You can even set up profiles so that certain lists meet quality standards, so for example the kids cartoons aren’t downloaded at the same high a quality as the adult shows.

      My point is this, make the switch to automating the searching and downloading, not so that you can hoarde everything, but so that you can’t stop spending as much time being the home video librarian and more time enjoying it. On more than one occasion I’ve been out with friends and somebody mentions a movie they liked, I’ve taken a minute to add it to my list, and the movie is ready and waiting on my Plex (and/or Jellyfin) before I get home.

    • ignore the comments about Sonarr and Radarr etc, they’re for people who are addicted to downloading as much media as humanly possible, or folks in the US with 1990s internet speed. I’ve tried them and didn’t find much benefit to them.

      This I really disagree with. Sonarr is absolutely terrible for backfilling shows with many seasons, it’s not at all what its for and you’re much better off manually finding season packs and downloading those and then binge. Sonarr is for monitoring shows with continuous releases and automatically download the new episodes so they’re ready for watching when they drop. I love not having to manually track when the few shows I do follow release new episodes and then add them to my client, because they’re just there in my library when they’re available.

  • qBittorrent is probably the best torrent client for Windows

    Mullvad is a relatively cheap and trustworthy VPN provider (they unfortunately removed port forwarding, which is important for torrenting)

    AirVPN and Proton VPN are trustworthy VPN providers that support port forwarding

    Servarr is the way to go if you want to set up a server that automates everything for you

    Jellyfin is the best media server, far ahead of Plex and fully FOSS

    FMHY and the Champagne Piracy Wiki have lots of valuable information

    • I know sharing is caring but it should be said that if you dont plan on seeding anyway, mullvad is perfectly fine for torrenting.

      I also think its worth mentioning that proton only supports ephemeral remote port forwarding which is objectively worse then airvpns implementation, if port forwarding is super important to you.

    • You can’t say jellyfin is far ahead of plex when it doesn’t have nearly as many clients as plex does. I’ll agree that in the free tier jellyfin is better, but as of now it’s not as fully featured as plex pro. Even non pro plex just makes it easier to share outside your home too.

    •  emhl   ( @emhl@feddit.org ) 
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      2 days ago

      A bit of topic but why the hell does the champagne wiki reccomend Edge as a browser citing it’s AI capabilities? Is this copied directly from MS marketing material?

      Edit: I am starting to read through it and there Is so much bad, outdated and just wrong information there:

      • they recommend to set a DNS level adblocker using an app that isn’t supported on the android version the guide is for and completely forget that you can just set the DNS server without any additional app on any modern android version (what is what the provider of the Dns server they recommend reccomends)
      • they tell you protonVPN doesn’t support Torrenting (maybe just bad wording) and recommended mullvad because of that

      I don’t really want to continue beyond before-you-begin

      Edit2: Uh why is there an extensive article on how to deal with addiction and how to do meditation in the piracy section?

      I don’t think I should continue any further

      Edit3: you can contribute to the wiki by sending markdown files in a discord channel. Wikipedia should switch to this model as well imo

          • To my understanding, it works like this: your client talks to the torrent tracker, then it sends you the data about seeders and leechers. Then your client tries to connect to them, but if neither you nor the other peer have port forwarding, you cannot connect to each other. This is not a problem for popular torrents with lots of peers, but when there are not so many it can be a problem because the other peers might as well not have port forwarding, so peers cannot connect to each other and the torrent will eventually die.

            That’s why it is recommended to use a VPN with port forwarding. When not using a VPN, if your router supports uPnP you are already port forwarded (with the default settings in qbittorrent).

  • if you’re in Australia ignore all VPN advice. Companies can only come after you for the cost of a single copy of whatever you pirate making it functionally legal here.

    Torrents are your best bet for now because they are super easy.

    Usenet is a paid service, absolutely worth it but you’re paying for at least 2 different services to make it work and setting up a whole bunch of software. Just steer clear of the Arr suite until torrents fail you (and they will)

  • On a side note I’ve been using Google to find streaming sites by typing “free full stream” and then the title I want, and scrolling down the search to the DMCA Complaints. They have a lovely list of sites that have your movies and shows, thanks Google!