89
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2024
89 points (98.9% liked)
Ars Technica - All Content
79 readers
22 users here now
All Ars Technica stories
founded 4 months ago
MODERATORS
To be fair, none are an alternative. They're all only front ends to the torrents you downloaded.
They're not frontends for torrents though. They're media servers just as they all advertise themselves to be. They make media files available to a network of consuming clients. Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Disney+, all of these services also do the same. They host media on centralized servers that consuming clients can playback. In that regard, these are all self-hosted alternatives to the aforementioned.
It should also be noted that the media in question doesn't have to be torrents, they can be legitimately purchased songs that you playback via Plexamp or Jellyamp on your phone, or all the books you've gotten from HumbleBundle. They're media servers, so they're not limited to hosting just TV shows or movies.
I didn't say front end for the torrent but the torrents you have downloaded.
Jellyfin has no content. As such, by itself it isn't a replacement for a streaming service
Don't forget nzbs! Can't get hit up for sharing pirated content if you're only downloading it!
How do you get started on this? Everything has ads and price hikes all over. I'm already out, I want to get my partner out also.
Look at Sonarr, Radar, and Sabnzbd. There are a bunch of guides out there, but running via docker is probably the easiest. Then swing by the newsgroups subreddit wiki https://old.reddit.com/r/usenet/wiki/index (I'm sorry it still has the most comprehensive details for this stuff).
Basically, Sonarr/Radar finds the nzb files, then Sabnzbd downloads them.
I need emby to mature. I like it over Plex but for somethings it's just doesn't measure.
Pirates stay winning
I cut D+ loose last Oct when they doubled prices and dusted off the ol' sloop. I'm just sorry I can't protest similarly a second time.
I like that unlike Reddit, one can advocate for piracy on Lemmy without a permanban. Old Reddit was pro-piracy but Reddit in the last 10 years has been brutal with anti-piracy garbage.
Apparently the instance I’m on banned the piracy subreddit… so how does that work? Am I still allowed to talk about it or will they ban me too? New to Lemmy.
Fuck it. I don’t really care. $3/mo for Real-Debrid to watch high quality, ad free streams of anything I want on Stremio is a no brainer.
One of the lessons of the old AOL era is that people will subscribe to a thing and then just forget they have it. So you can keep raising their prices over and over again, and they'll pay it unwittingly, until they finally bother to check their credit card statement and asking where their $96/mo is going.
Hulu and Live TV with ads: $77/month
Genuinely shocking that people would sign up for this.
One of the lessons of the old AOL era is that people will subscribe to a thing and then just forget they have it.
Gyms started taking advantage of this before AOL was a thing.
Hulu is the cable TV companies. They bought out the board seats to have a place where they could monetize their stuff and kill the concept of streaming your favorite show for cheaper.
This is Business 101. Get rid of your low-value customers, keep the high-value subscribers. Would you rather support 10 people paying $1/mo. for your service, or 2 people paying you $5?
Hiking the price retains the people willing to pay, or forgot they're paying, and ditches the rest. This saves on a myriad of costs; Customer service, tech support, bandwidth, infrastructure, staffing, much more.
It's a no-brainer from a corporate perspective. It's also a no-brainer for me to continue piracy. $6/mo. and I get a VPN bouncing out of Amsterdam on a Digital Ocean droplet I spun up years ago.
Fewer customers at a lower price seems safer; you lose one, no big deal, you don't lose half of your revenue stream.
Netflix did it, many people stayed, they made more money. Now other services are just doing the same. If you stay, it's your fault 🤷♂
Bro, streaming services have been steadily increasing prices for years.
"now" doesn't mean right this femtosecond.
Based on McDonald's earnings, there is a chance peasants will do the thing
McDonald's has been seeing a decrease in customers due to their prices.
Yes... That's called people voting with their feet ;)
It is beautiful and helps fight "inflation"
thanks for reminding me to cancel my Spotify. fuckers raised the price AGAIN, i feel like they juust did that. fuck all these corps, I'll stick to Libby and a free podcast player until something else comes along.
0 for me
My girlfriend pays for Netflix even though we pirate everything at home because she flies and wants to be able to easily download stuff to her phone when she's at the airport
Plex will do downloads too ya’ know?
Yeah but that's way way more labor and inconvenience. Even after the server is setup (which was actually very tricky to make it work when i tried it a year ago), and even then you still have to manually download all the content you want ahead of time. Thanks for the suggestion though
I mean you do you but I don’t find it that difficult.
- download your files, put tv shows in one directory and movies in another
- install Plex Media Server, create an account and point it to directories you set up in step 1
- install whatever clients on your smart TV or tablets or whatever, sign in with the same account that you setup in step 2 and you should be good to go
You don’t need to automate downloading files (although it can be really nice when you do!) just grab what you want from a decent private torrent site.
Yea, Netflix and Disney are easier but Plex doesn’t constantly increase their prices.
Friendly tip: If you're committed to sailing the seas, you can (and should) always rent a Seedbox. A lot of seedbox services also provide a way to throw up rudimentary services alongside their torrent webclient.
Both of these services for example, just have a single button to start up a Plex server alongside all the files you've already downloaded so you don't even need to set anything up other than the Plex libraries. Plus since it's already hosted, you could just share the link if you wanted friends to have access.