How are we all feeling about piracy these days?
So with the Paramount acquisition, all the new HP content, and the general state of both TV and Movie ownership are people returning to the high seas?
I was an eager participant of the first and second wave of piracy in the early and late 00s, and considering the re-consolidation of the entertainment industry and the seemingly nefarious acquisitions of late, I am considering hoisting the black flag once again. I guess this post has two objectives: 1. how are other people navigating our changing media landscape, and 2. for those who have stayed immersed in piracy or have returned to it how have things changed in the last decade or so. Obviously Megavideo and Putlocker are no more, so are there directions to point folks who are just getting back to it. This can be streaming, torrenting, anything really.
Caveat: Let's not even give the horrible human that is JK airtime. I mentioned HP because folks might want to indulge without supporting but if we can keep the discussion to piracy that would be awesome!
Feels like more effort than it's worth. Usually, when I want to see something, I just find the streaming site it's on, subscribe for 1 month, immediately cancel - this means that it won't automatically renew, and I effectively just get one month. IMO it's pretty solid price for what you get - if you adjust Blockbuster prices for today, it was $9-$15 for just one rental.
Last time I looked, it seemed like a lot of the public torrent trackers have been decimated, and all the stuff is on private trackers, and I just could not possibly be arsed to actually go through the rigamorole to join a private tracker even if I wanted to.
For video games, there's just no question. I would never trust a blackbox binary from an untrusted vendor.
I'm not sure it's that much effort. I know people who use only public trackers, and unless they're looking for something very old or highly specific, it's basically never an issue to find it. Certainly no more difficult than finding things on streaming sites.
I'm not sure how much can be said on Tildes, but sonarr and radarr can be set up to subscribe to things you like so that stuff auto torrents when it's initially released. Generally the folks I know will just have their torrent client's Web interface on their phone - also not hard to set up. Theb they can trivially set things to download from anywhere, by remote, upon recommendation.
For a new TV show episode, in maybe 4GB size, things can usually be pulled down and ready to watch in maybe 10 minutes off a public tracker, so I'd not describe the delay as often bothersome, myself.
Honestly, it's almost as easy to pirate just about anything off public trackers nowadays as it is to acquire it legitimately AND own the files - if not easier.
I've been on the high seas since pre-2000s. It's much easier and safer now than it used to be, and for the (sometimes rightfully) paranoid, VMs or even running a whole separate box you can scorched earth if need be is ultimately cheaper than paying the frankly exhorbitant prices companies charge nowadays.
Personally, in terms of running games? It's basically never been safer, so long as you're pulling from more reliable places. Grab a Fitgirl repack from her .site page (that's the real one, there are fakes), or go make a cs.rin.ru account and find whatever game thread you're after, and see people actively troubleshooting and talking about the process in real time. Get as close to real confirmation about what you're downloading as you need to feel safe. The warez/scene communities have existed and been about as reliable as one could hope for as long as piracy has been a thing, and there are more people interested in producing actually accessible media than there are bad actors, so with some knowledge and precaution, even public trackers will get you everything you want.
It's been more than 20 years. A little precaution and knowledge, and I've never downloaded a single thing that has been compromised.
The worst thing I've ever downloaded has literally been someone uploading hue-shifted copies of HDR shows, either because of encoding errors, or just trolling.
Sure, you might have to find a different public tracker when the previous 'good' ones go down - jumping from RARBG to EXT.to took a while to find, and there's always some sketchy looking stuff, but hundreds of thousands of people do it every day, and don't get fucked over, so there's a safe(ish) way to do it all, you've just gotta get out and learn, really.
Stuff not in English is way harder to find in good quality, I gather. If you're generally looking in English, you're probably in quite a convenience bubble. Portuguese/Spanish content is often in quite low quality (720 at most).
It’s the only way for some retro experiences though. If that’s the only way I can play a game, I’ll VM it.
*cough*
Yeah that service seems to be pretty good for just streaming movies/shows if that's what you want. I've tried it and it's not terribly difficult to set up and it's got just about anything.
Personally, I already invested in storage and whatnot many years ago and I just prefer to download the content that I want, so I just go with Usenet and Sonarr/Radarr setup and supplement that with a semi-private torrent site. I mostly like to watch my go to media and perhaps some new stuff here or there, so it makes sense for me to just download and keep what I want. Does come in handy on occasion when I don't have internet access, or good internet access anyhow, as I still have access to the content I want.
I'd also strongly suggest if you're getting into any of this, for simplicity you may be better off getting a cheap Android TV box. The Walmart ONN 4k versions in the past were the best deal around, but they recently retired a lineup of those and are just beginning to replace them with new versions which I suspect will be slightly higher priced and verdict is out on the quality of the hardware itself compared to the past lineup. I believe the service mentioned in the linked post (not mentioning the name directly in my comment in case for whatever reason Deimos ends up deleting various posts/comments because this topic is iffy to discuss on here).
The reason for Android TV is that you can sideload on it, and Amazon is cracking down on sideloading some apps on Fire devices, and eventually they're moving the OS away from Android, or something along those lines. Naturally, piracy apps and such may lend towards being banned from official app stores, which is where Android TV boxes are more useful than others. It's also the case that if you're not a multi-billion dollar corporation building a streaming app, you probably don't want to invest resources into building apps for every single smart TV and platform out there, Android TV ends up being a decent baseline for app developers to target.
For ebooks, it is literally a faster and better experience to pull them off of libgen (or worse case, zlibrary or Anna's Archive) than deal with buying them from Amazon, though that's half because I share an Amazon account, and for some bizzare reason, Amazon won't let you pick your payment method if what you are buying is an ebook. There are so many books I have read that I never, ever would have touched if I had needed to pay for them first. And many I paid for afterwards 🤷♀️.
With Audiobookshelf, hosting and obtaining the the media is a bit of a pain (I mostly torrent from audiobookbay), but in exchange, I get to have it organized, catalogued, tagged and exactly as I like it, using my preferred covers, whatever. If I ever have the time, I'm going to go through my whole library there and grab epubs for everything too.
I do a decent amount of scientific paper piracy. Of course, there is Sci-hub, but that only covers papers up to 2022-ish. Anything after that is a pain... There is this very weird forum-like website where you can request papers with a bounty of "points", and you get some points by clicking a button each day (enough for 3 or so papers) . I would have to dig through my bookmarks to remember the name. I only really need it for papers that are both paywalled and don't have a preprint available now. Thankfully, papers just straight up being open access is getting more common.
Jailbreaking my kindle, installing koreader and finally just reading epubs on it has been such a breath of fresh air. No more faffing around in Calibre (to its credit, it did it as quietly/seamlessly as possible) to convert and having duplicates in my library. Just download a book, stick it on the server, download it on the kindle. As for audiobookshelf, I run it too and really like it!
I'm loving physical media and have been curating my music and movie collection again. The library has tons of stuff and of course it's all high bit rate.
When Spotify came out it was so affordable and convenient that I basically threw away my music library. But the price hikes and subpar Linux experience left me happily sailing the high seas.
Being told by Netflix that I can't stream 4k because I'm on Linux also makes this an easy decision.
Fwiw I'm not really into bleeding edge stuff, like HP, and can't speak to ease of acquisition. Nicotine+ is fine for most of my needs.
For music, I highly recommend Soulseek.
Nicotine plus is soulseek, isn't it? I looked into this years ago but ended up not getting into it.
I've been into it in one sense or another since the warez days of yore. Though lately as public trackers have been getting harder and harder to access and automate, I've been considering usenet but I honestly have no idea where to start. Last I remember of usenet, it was for newsgroups like alt.2600 and I had no idea there were organized repositories of data available through it.
If you're a huge nerd with insomnia like me, setting up the stack to automate trackers or usenet can be a lot of fun.
And if you're a hardcore fan of some type of media, getting into a private tracker can be a unique process. Once in, you'll find a community of very like-minded fans and a social network that's very much of the vein of the old internet; IRC channels and forums.
I stream from Netflix and Hulu. If it’s not there, I torrent it. I’ve got invites to iptorrents if anyone wants into a pretty good private tracker.
I'll take one, please, could come in handy.
I guess I should reciprocate by offering invites to bakabt, a really good private tracker for all things anime and manga, usually focusing on best quality fansubs. But I must insist that any takers are well behaved seeders.
Ooh, really? I would love an invite!
If any invites are left, I’d love to join.
Hi, any invites left?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVXCr6upWUo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU8VPQsTqFU
To call back to my youth....
Do what you want cause a pirate is free, you are a pirate!
this took WAY too long to find
I’ve been pirating movies since the early 2010s. I was a teenager without any money and without any of the streaming services that were then available. Now I have all streaming services but that doesn’t mean every movie is available there so when there’s something I have to rent to watch I try to pirate it first. I only rent it if i really want to watch it and there’s no good torrents for it.
I still use PB and YIFY and qBitTorrent which might be considered outdated but at least it still works.