I cancelled all my content subscriptions and I'm back to torrenting. I barely watch anything made my Netflix regardless. I think either Dark or the 3rd season of Stranger Things was the last time. Snyder's SciFi movie wasn't much good either. By now the streaming services are en route to become as terrible as whatever they were set out to replace. Once one of them started heavily advertising their own productions everywhere inside their apps I would've cancelled any remaining subscription at the latest.
Real-debrid == imagine a huge cloud storage service. You have 1000 people trying to download Burgonia.4k.mkv. it downloads the torrent once to the shared server, then gives each user their own access to it via a WebDAV mount.
WebDAV == trick you server into thinking a cloud server is a local folder. You use RClone to mount this and it's accessible from your local drive so you can stream all your stuff directly.
What this means: you add a show in Sonarr or a movie in Radarr. Prowlarr searches Torrentio or Zilean for torrents. The best match is chosen. It sends to Decypharr (or black hole) to say "download this torrent to my real debrid box". It finds the cached version of the file, which is instantly available in your drive. It's symlinked so Plex can pick up the file.
Basically the lead time from requesting a movie/series to watching it on your tv is about 10 seconds, with no storage overhead required.
Having figured it out myself, I agree. And it's not obvious that you need both a Usenet _indexer_ (who tells you what content is available) and a Usenet provider (who actually serves you the content).
FWIW, and I'm not sure if this is against terms here, but I use newsgeek for the former and giganews for the latter. Both are paid services but reasonably priced imo. When I can find something on Usenet, it typically downloads with speeds > 10MBps vs. torrenting which can exceed that but is usually much slower.
You can use whatever client you want. I have the *arr stack mentioned elsewhere in this thread as well and SABnzbd is the recommended option there.
Between you and your provider the downloads are over HTTP. The distribution of content between the Usenet providers is over the Usenet protocol which predates HTTP and the WWW.
When we first moved to our rural area here the high speed wireless situation was atrocious and we found that because of that the local gas station & convenience stores still had a pretty active business renting DVD/BluRay movies. Until we could finally get decent high speed Internet without caps, we did that (and bought BluRay discs as well) which was only about 5, 6 years ago.
There was something quite nice and nostalgic about it.
In a society that’s built on the foundations of perpetual profit growth it is. Sometimes you just can’t innovate, so instead of improving the product you cut the costs and enshittify. We’re in an enshittification regime right now.
Why are there alternating cycles of innovation and enshittification? I think it’s because investors are always trying to pull forward profit, but because they only have a 10 year horizon on investment strategy they tend to create cycles that are around that same period. If there was less investment, the innovation would be slower but the reactionary enshittification would be lessened too.
I torrent too, but I think it makes sense to buy/rent or sub to a service in many cases. Companies look at views and revenue to decide what content to actually make. So, especially for ongoing series that I'm enjoying I want them to keep renewing it.
I subscribe to ad-free versions of services so I don't really run into ads a lot unless I'm trying to watch something live on TV.
Irrelevant to me. The amount of TV shows I enjoyed that got canned after S01 has burnt me so much that I wait until I know if there's a sensible finale at the end or if it ends on a cliffhanger that'll never be resolved before I even dive into a new show.
> I torrent too, but I think it makes sense to buy/rent or sub to a service in many cases. Companies look at views and revenue to decide what content to actually make. So, especially for ongoing series that I'm enjoying I want them to keep renewing it.
I wonder if any of them track torrent metrics for this reason.
If it's not already on a streaming platform it might help them sell it to Netflix or something. But I think they ultimately are a lot more interested in effect on revenue than popularity among pirates.
I also collect discarded physical media, there's still lots of people who want to get rid of their collections for nothing because of "Dude, there's streaming now, duh."
Buying used media could also a viable option. My kid likes to watch the same thing over and over, subscription content does not make sense for her. You just have to buy it slowly.
It’s better than ever with stuff like jellyfin/plex and all the sonarr/radarr… apps. I’ve been running bitmagnet too which has been great for actually finding torrents.
I do the following:
www.yandex.com
MOVIENAME direct streaming
And that is it... I have prime + netflix + hulu and such, but I use "yandex.com" as it does not have ads - even if sometimes it takes a bit to load and rarely it gets stuck for a second, it is less time than the stupid ads.
yeah I'm back to Torrenting too. I was more than happy to pay for Prime, Netflix, and maybe Apple TV+ a few times a year but now they expect me to pay for HBO & Crave & x & y & z & a... I might as well get a cable package.
The funny thing is, between a NAS & a monthly VPN subscription & usenet subscriptions I probably could have paid for all those streaming services for a few years :D
We're going to see something like the way Boeing was hollowed out by taking over McDonnell Douglas I'd guess. I have no insider knowledge but WB doesn't seem like a poison pill you can take without adverse impact.
One only has to look at the word of mouth reputation of Plex these days to know what's going on. I'd say more of my circle knows about it than doesn't, and a solid 15% run one or use someone else's, including my non-techie friends.
Shoutout to Jellyfin it's great, but it is not nearly as turnkey, so Plex is clearly the dominant player for folks hosting their own media.
Yes, I think Plex was an XBMC fork and Kodi is the new name of XBMC. Jellyfin forked from Emby, I think when it became closed source. I never used Emby. Plex always seemed to cost money in confusing ways and that turned me off. My initial TV just used NFS shares on a unix machine and a Netgear NeoTV box (~2009) but eventually the codec support was too poor so I moved to XBMC on the Shield and then a number of years later to Jellyfin server on Linux with Jellyfin client on the Shield.
I think what trips people up with jellyfin is making sure they aren’t exposing their network. Getting it to work at home is one thing, getting it to work outside your home is a different beast
Ah, I have no use/interest in remote access to my library. I just have one tv in the house with an NVidia shield that accesses the Jellfin library on a miniPC on the network.
