The real winner of the streaming wars.
I have Amazon prime, so I get access to Prime Video.
My family phone plan comes with a Free™ Netflix account per line.
As a student, my Spotify account gives me access to Hulu.
I can use all of these services at zero additional cost to myself and I still ~~steal~~ acquire it through different legal avenues. It takes an extra 2 minutes to make sure that I have it forever and that it'll be easily accessible.
Not to mention, no ads. Guaranteed
What pushed be over the edge was trying to watch some older shows in Prime and getting absolute dogshit quality. When I sail I get guaranteed 1080p, no ads, instant seek.
I got amazon prime mostly for the free games, it's pretty much a steal in my country (if you pay for one year it's about $1 a month) and I still have to pirate things that are available in the prime video. Why? Because I use Linux and amazon won't allow me to play videos in 1080p. Only 480p is available.
I still use UseNet. Almost as often as I use faxes.
Usenet may be old, but it's come a long way. Just about all scene content is there, and I max out my gigabit connection during the download from start to finish every time, without having to care about the quantity/quality of seeders, or needing to seed anything myself after downloading.
Ight that last part is the one that did it for me lmao
I was perfectly happy with streaming services for a couple years when there were only like 2 good ones. I stopped torrenting for a long time and now I'm back to torrenting again
Do you use a VPN? I downloaded a random movie a few years ago and got the email from my cable company stating something along the lines of "we recently notice a download of blah blah blah was detected on our network. Please call to re activate your Internet". So I called and told them "I just got my son a computer I didn't know you could download movies"
But laying for a VPN will cost as much as a streaming service and it's so slow. And I guarantee sooner or later VPNs won't even work in a few years (meaning your ip could be backtracked to the original computer)
The best, most reputable VPN, Mullvad costs $5 USD. Plenty are cheaper than that if you pay in advance for a few years.
The cheapest streaming service will roughly double that.
How fast is it?
When I had Mulkvad my speed test would go from about 335mbit to like 327mbit when connected to a somewhat close server.
Connected to servers across the ocean it'd be like 310.
They got a money-back guarantee if you don't pay with something completely anonymous like cash in the mail.
This, plus self hosting jellyfin and *arr and I basically have a better service, with no ads, nice UI, access from all my devices, offline access, 4K resolution, music streaming. Basically the all-inclusive premium plan, not exactly for free, but for a very reasonable cost.
I dump Blu-rays to my NAS with zero re-encoding. Even for older shows the quality is leaps and bounds superior to any streaming service with plenty of bandwidth.
Laughs in usenet
Yea, torrents. Sure. Lol.
Yeah I run a small service for friends and its almost all Usenet powered now. I still like to seed torrents anyway just as an extra fuck you.
That's the spirit!
Usenet really is miles better. It blew my mind how quick and hassle free downloading was.
Please don't tell us how to access this magical Dreamland or some people might do something unethical towards the streaming providers.
It requires a subscription, which scares off most of the casual “just looking to try it” users. It’s as simple as getting a Usenet subscription. Usenet providers are sort of like ISPs. Each provider will have an umbrella of servers that they sync with, so it’s worth researching which provider you want to go with. Most will have a wide variety of content, but they all follow different policies regarding things like DMCA takedowns. Many people like to get two different subs so they can have a primary and a backup provider.
Subs typically come in both monthly subs and usage subs. For instance, the monthly sub will be unlimited access for a month, while a usage sub will just be like 100GB of download bandwidth, and you don’t get charged again until you use that 100GB. If you’re doing a lot of downloading, you’ll probably want a monthly. So most people will have a monthly subscription for their primary, then a usage sub for their secondary. So they only actually use their secondary if something is missing from their primary, and they’re not constantly maintaining two monthly subscriptions.
Actually using Usenet will require a Usenet reader, which is a program that actually interfaces with the Usenet network. Sort of like how a torrent program is used to download torrents. Most readers will integrate with services like the *arr suite to automatically search for and download content. If that’s something you’d be interested in, look into the suite and see which readers work best.
It requires a subscription, which scares off most of the casual “just looking to try it” users. It’s as simple as getting a Usenet subscription.
Ok, doesn’t sound too bad so far.
[Most people have two subscriptions to Usenet] …the monthly sub will be unlimited access for a month, while a usage sub will just be like 100GB of download bandwidth, and you don’t get charged again until you use that 100GB.
Wait, so I have to pay for access and even then it’s still limited?
You know what works and is unlimited (subject to ISP restrictions that aren’t related to bittorrent)? Torrenting.
Wait, so I have to pay for access and even then it’s still limited?
I mean, all subscriptions are limited in some way. That’s how a subscription works. You either get limited by time (monthly sub) or by usage (data cap). If it were a perpetual/lifetime access license, it wouldn’t be a subscription.
That’s why I said most people keep a monthly subscription for everyday usage, and then only use the secondary subscription when their primary is missing something. The usage doesn’t expire, so it’s not something you need to constantly maintain unless you’re actively using it. So they’re not constantly getting dinged for usage on that second provider, because the monthly doesn’t have a data cap.
The reason people like Usenet is because you don’t need to worry about seeders or dead torrents. You grab the file you want, and it caps out your gigabit download speed every time.
But that would break the first rule of Usenet.
Torrent+ is seriously a great streaming service. Great selection. Affordable prices.
It's just the best.
The bottom right one should be tor-rent, not torr-ent. It's a peer-to-peer media rental service running over the illicit TOR network. TOR is yet another project the notorious criminal hacker Linuxos Torvaldos made and named after himself.
People always told Linuxos to keep his legal name and his illegal software separate but he wouldn't listen. He got caught in a San Francisco public library reading with his wife Stella Richman. What a git.
Torrent in the Disney+ font looks terrible
That’s because it wasn’t originally meant to be a font; It was a stylized version of Walt Disney’s autograph, which they used as a logo. It later got bastardized into a font, because it became so iconic.
Imagine how fucking cursed it would probably look if someone turned your signature into a font.
As a designer, programmer, and music engraver/editor, I've always paid for all media I've consumed because I've strongly believed creators deserve to be paid.
But after the Napster, Ticketmaster, Netflix, and dozens of other egregious examples of corporate sadism, I’m proud to sail the high seas now.
I never stopped. Big corp always lulls us into a false sense of security before springing the trap. I streamed for a little while but always kept me sails dusted.
There was a period of time when streaming video from the official sources was more convenient than piracy and that was worse the price for a lot of people. Their greed eneded this time.
Ooooo I only have Torrent, is Torrent+ better? I rarely use it anyway
Your missing out big time, Torrent+ comes with a few extra files to play with your computer.
Hollywood can get bent, we need open source culture
or nzb, but aye.
I had stopped piracy for probably 12 years? Streaming was easy and cheap and worth it. I have a huge collection of movies I bought on google play. Then everything went to shit and everyone kept hiking the prices while losing anything interesting.
I like my plex server now. To the point where when I had amazon prime for shipping I still torrented the new season of the boys and hazbin.
Rip torrent finder. I miss you.
I use Stremio that plays and streams torrents using sequential downloading. It's like Popcorn time.
The issue is that this only works when the torrent community is healthy. If everyone used Streamio, nobody would be able to actually use it. Because it doesn’t seed the content, it just leeches and deletes it automatically. So if everyone used Streamio, there would be no seeders, and your streams would never actually work.
Streamio is the “fuck you I got mine” of the torrenting world.
It keeps a cache that it seeds back. Whenever the app is running you are seeding. I think the default is 2GB of cache, which is less than the average of 1.3GiB for a movie. Mine is set to 5GB.
I also seed an average of 10 to 1 using qBittorent so I guess I forgot it could be considered a "fuck you" because I always seed.
Use Tribler to avoid (or heavily limit) DMA notices
The gold standard these days is the *arr suite with qBitTorrent and a VPN, and/or a usenet service. Unfortunately the *arr suite doesn’t integrate with Tribler, so you can’t easily automate your downloads.