I was a happy Netflix user until 2018, before that I haven’t really pirated any movies (with very rare exceptions) for almost a decade but I recently started again. I’m was doing my monthly budgeting and realized I was paying for too many subscription services. Netflix, Amazon Prime, Shudder, Disney+, Hulu and Crunchyroll. My family likes to watch different types of content that is distributed on many different platforms.
I was never subscribed to these many services until a couple years ago. I was thinking which service I should cancel when I realized I had the option to cancel all of them this entire time. I’m torrenting again and I started saving a considerate amount.
The only service I’m paying for is Spotify which I think it’s fairly priced and offers all the music my family listens too (and it’s convenient). All the competitors pretty much offer the same content and that’s how streaming services should be.
I remember back in the day using eMule and BitChe (to look for torrents). Now I’m using Deluge as my torrent client and I I get my torrents from 1337x. What sites are you guys using?
I wish streaming companies would take notes from Spotify. It’s not too expensive, non-exclusive, acceptable quality even on higher end gear.
Doesn’t shove idiotic recommendations on my face, doesn’t bug me about my address, doesn’t randomly drop in quality because my neighbour is taking a piss. Looking at you, Netflix, you expensive useless piece of shit.
(I’m fact, Spotify’s recommendations are so good that I’m constantly finding new stuff I actually like.)
Personally I find the recommendations really bad lol, I never stray outside of my library or playlists. I find music looking at artists I like then seeing other songs they wrote, or search what I hear playing in the world around me, or what I’m watching.
I use an AI playlist creator called songslikex.com which builds a Spotify playlist based on one song. Think it’s better than Spotify recommendations and I have found a few new artists that I really like with it.
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There’s also, everynoise.com. you can find any genre of music and it will link to a Spotify playlist. I’ve found so much cool stuff on there.
Must try. Thanks for suggesting.
Thank you so much! I read about this a couple weeks ago and was trying to remember the name last night. Et voilà!
This is amazing. Thanks
It‘s probably going to be the other way around if anything, Spotify eventually doing various moves worsening the experience in an effort for more money. It‘s surprising how long it is holding out (and I‘m still using and enjoying it too), but ever since I learned about Enshittification, I‘m expecting it to worsen eventually.
3 companies own like 90% of all music copyrights and they are getting a fucking sweet deal from Spotify.
Artists are starting to get screwed and it’s only a matter of time before they come for the customers.
Buy CDs, use Bandcamp, install Nicotine+ (preferably in that order)
Oh it’s gonna enshittify, that’s for sure. It just hasn’t yet.
The “exclusive content war” already started with podcasts. Wait a few years and let’s say Miley Cyrus will sign an exclusive contract with Apple Music and there you have it.
My spotify recommends are hilarious. I played a track white noise that went for like 6 hours. Spotify recommended ai has all white noise tracks ignoring music choices.
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Only way to watch good quality content on Linux is pirating. So, fuck 'em media houses. Imma sail my ship to the high seas!
Seriously, I pay for streaming services and Blu Rays and still wind up just pirating the stuff I already own half the time because that’s somehow more convenient…
Same here. Subscribed to some streaming services because my family members use them. For me, it’s simply much faster and more convenient to pirate. It’s not helped by the fact that the stuff I watch are more often than not unavailable on any streaming platform.
Expanding from just torrents - I highly recommend looking into usenet! Downside, you have to pay for a good indexer. You can get a one time purchase depending on what site you go to, mine is ~$80 per year. After that, set up your nzb/Usenet download client (I recommend sabnzb, these are all free), then you can troll through that for movies, tv, etc like a torrent site. Generally it’s more reliable, and if you find something on there you can download it and it’ll max out your download speed (if you let it) instead of getting single seeder torrents that get stalled.
Want to get (slightly) techier but much better? Get Radarr for movies, Sonarr for TV shows, lidarr for music, and readarr for books. (There’s also whisparr for porn, mylar3 for comics, Bazarr for subtitles and others, but I haven’t felt a need to run these yet) Basically you can find movies, tv, etc that you want and “monitor” them, and let the program do the rest. They scan multiple sources (Usenet and torrent sites) that you setup for the content you want, compare it to filters you put in place (quality, number of seeders, age, number of other downloads, etc) and download it for you. New movie that isn’t hd yet? It can grab a webrip or lower def version for you, and automatically replace it with a 1080p version when it’s available. You can also grab prowlarr to manage your indexers (nzb site torrent sites) across all of your apps so you have one source of truth.
My setup:
- Indexers in prowlarr Nzbgeek (paid, mentioned above) 1337x Pirate bay (Some other misc torrent sites)
- Download clients Qbittorrent (for torrents) Sabnzb (for usenet)
- Frontend apps Radarr - movie manager Sonarr - tv manager Readarr - book manager Lidarr - music manager - no longer use, switched to paying for Tidal Plex - media server to aggregate and stream the video files from above Calibre - media server for ebooks only
I may be a pirate, but I do it with class and comfort.
Add Nzb360 to this and your pirate life will truly be class
Or LunaSea on iOS
Forgot all about LunaSea, thanks for the reminder!
What did you use as your music manager before Tidal?
I used lidarr for getting and maintaining the music, and Plex for streaming it. I switched to tidal since the effort of individually selecting songs/albums to download before I could listen to them was far more than the $9/month cost of streaming the music. If you don’t like expanding your music library then downloading it is fine (like if you only listen to a few artists and it doesn’t change) but my taste in music changes with my mood so I was having to download classic rock, blues and jazz, pop, and classical. Steaming is just a hell of a lot easier than downloading, at least for discovering new music
thank you!
Do you have a good guide for setting up your qbittorrent with the arrs? Ive had NZBget working flawlessly for about a year now but haven’t had the time/focus to figure out the right way to handle the torrent side of things.
I didn’t use a guide actually, but here are the steps!
Get qbittorrent configured for normal use (up/down limit, root folder, etc
Enable the webui in qbittorrent. Once done, you should be able to access it at localhost:{port} from your browser, or from {host_ip}.{port} from any other device on your network
Add qbittorrent as a download client for your arr apps just like your nzb downloader (but selecting torrent). I can’t remember if you have to do this individually or if prowlarr can handle it, I think prowlarr can handle it so you don’t have to do it multiple times though.
Pass in localhost or the IP of the host machine and the port when you’re setting it up so it knows where to connect it. You may also need the username and password you made (unless you use bypass on localhost or whitelisted ips)
And that’s about it! It will submit the torrent downloads to qbittorrent for you and manage them like sabnzb/nzbget do for nzb.
Hope this helps! It is a super easy process to setup thankfully, if you run into any roadblocks that a basic Google can’t solve I’d be happy to try to help
Comfort is so easy. I’v only started using Plex, which is not much effort at all, but it gives so much comfort. My subtitles are always in sync now!
1337x is my favorite right now for TV/movies and Nyaa for anime. Between that and Usenet, I can get 99.5% of what I want.
I use qbittorent and Sabnzb for downloads.
Since you’ve been out of the piracy game for awhile you may consider looking into *arr apps (radarr, sonarr, prowlarr, etc). They can auto download movies/tv you want and format them in a way that Plex/Jellyfin like, so you can get a whole library of content with just a few clicks. There’s a bit of a learning curve to the setup though.
What do you find on Usenet thats not on torrents?
It’s not so much that I can’t find things on torrents, it’s that I don’t have to worry about something not having seeders so it’s more reliable for old uploads. In addition I’ve found it to be better for single episodes, multiple release groups that I use seem to only use Usenet.
As for things that aren’t movies/tv, I think Usenet is better for slightly more obscure content, such as comic books.
I think it depends on the country and language content. If i want german movies, i dont find them on torrents.
Torrents are kind of risky here and usenet seems to be far safer. So a lot of uploaders use OCHs or Usenet.
Since you are looking for German movies you might be interested in my German DL Sonarr & Radarr guide:
https://github.com/PCJones/radarr-sonarr-german-dual-language
OCHs?
OneClickHoster like uploaded…and whatever cames up new in this way 😆 so you dont share anything and just download
welcome again… and i stopped pirating movies and started streaming over internet on pirate website.
Even when I subbed to netflix, I still downloaded what I enjoyed.
I like having an offline copy of my media.
Online content always seems to provide sub-par quality, even on good connections. Don’t need to worry about that with downloaded media.
Plus, if the internet goes down for whatever reason? External HDD > Laptop > HDMI > TV. Boom. Offline Netflix.
It’s also nice for traveling and staying in hotels. Most hotel TVs have at least one accessible HDMI port, and that’s all you need.
https://torrentgalaxy.to/ is a public tracker that has some decent stuff.
https://torrentleech.org is a good private tracker that has frequent open invites. All their boxsets are freeleech so it’s pretty easy to build up a good ratio
Been torrenting all through with 1337x and yts.mx despite paying for Netflix. The occasional piratebay for more obscure movies. RARBG was my favorite tracker, but sadly, they are no more.
Luckily I live in China where nobody bothers about copyright laws, so I can max out my 1gbit connection that costs me 2 full dollars a month 🙃
a rarbg copycat group popped up here: https://therarbg.com/ not quite the same but I figure it’s worth following and using as a drop-in replacement for rarbg.
Did you grab the rarbg database of magnets that’s floating around?
Ah nice, thanks a lot!
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Same here. I was actually pretty okay with just going with Netflix and then maybe HBO. But then every one of their mothers has their own streaming service.
Back to the salty seas for me
I think the phrase you were looking for was “everyone and their mothers” 😅
Make sure you aren’t downloading things manually unless you have to. Radarr, Sonarr, and Lidarr can be configured to download the latest media for you automatically. It’s not 2004 anymore :)
Thank you, I needed this! Now I need to get these set up
welcome back, still using 1337x now
If I actually cared about watching stuff, I probably would be to. Right now all of my entertainment is YouTube/Twitch with AdBlock, so kind of pirating? Maybe when I actually bring a girl home I’ll pirate something to watch if I can’t just steal my parents Netflix login still lol. I have zero intentions of ever subscribing to streaming services.
I would suggest getting a seedbox and joining a private torrent site like torrentleech. That’s what I use and then upload to my NAS that runs Plex and can view from anywhere on any device.
How do you join a private site?
Aren’t they all invite only?
That is the definition of private tracker, yeah. Doesn’t require much work to join some entry level ones though, and is worth it. Keen an eye out for open signups.
You can visit this site and they show which private trackers have open signups. You can also buy an invite to certain private trackers. https://www.invitescene.com/forum/34-open-trackers/
Some, like torrentleech, do open invites on a regular basis. But most do not and you’ll need an invite to get in
I tried private trackers a while back (namely for music with what.cd) and it really wasn’t worth it. the stuff they had on there was all just stuff you could find anywhere. and they’re so tryhard about ratio that you really couldn’t download anything. and any attempts to seed just resulted in larger/faster seedboxes doing the work most of the time.
I started using illegal streams last year after also getting tired paying out of the ass for multiple streaming services. Now I pay only for Spotify and Crunchyroll, and HBO when House of the Dragon starts airing (then I cancel when that’s over). Movie/show companies turning online streaming back into cable over greed don’t realize they’re biting their own faces off. I may pay for Netflix again for the final Stranger Things season, but I won’t be keeping it afterwards.
Oh, and if an anime isn’t on Crunchyroll, it gets torrented.
Also the constant canceling/dropping shows and movies is maddening and is only pissing people off more.
Yep, pretty much same here. I cut it down to just Spotify and Crunchyroll, and now just Crunchyroll then torrenting/usenet if it’s not on Crunchyroll.
I cancelled Nowtv because it added adverts and you have to pay extra for 1080 which is ridiculous.
So I started watching some of their stuff on Beetv… Then I started looking at my other streaming services.
I stopped torrenting because streaming services made it more convenient. It no longer is.
