Torrent system is alive and well. Mega shout out to seedhost.eu for their one-button panel for everything.
VLC will even open media over http, so one doesn't even have to mirror it locally from the Netherlands (although I do for the kids content, just to provide them a curated selection).
Not just alive and well but massively better. Open source software to do everything from watchlisting movies, downloading them when they are available in the highest quality and just seamless media management. Everything is so much better with piracy.
Yeah my Kodi torrent/streaming app on my $50 TV android box has tons of playlists, one each for Netflix/Prime/etc containing every movie/show on them and also trending lists, iMDB lists, etc.
It’s a shame the set up process and UI is typical OSS tier otherwise I’d be telling everyone I know to use it.
>It’s a shame the set up process and UI is typical OSS tier otherwise I’d be telling everyone I know to use it.
Thats why popcorn time was solo great. Too bad theres just not a comparable experience in 2023. Apparently all "rebel" Z and alpha gen kids are busy trying to make some quick buck. There's so fewer idealistic folks willing to share, compared to my generation in the 90s and 2000s.
There is - stremio + torrentio + real debrid is a ~5 minute setup, works on web and android tv, and was easy enough for my parents to setup all by themselves. Real debrid does cost $3 a month but the experience is so much better that it’s well worth it. The money you’re paying goes to a seed box type thing that caches torrents online and lets you stream them to avoid notices from your ISP.
I recently abandoned my jellyfin + radarr + sonarr setup because for the above. After Usenet subscriptions, electricity costs and storage costs, it was much cheaper. And I could watch content on demand rather than having to wait for the whole thing to download.
Wat??? Thats ridiculous. The quality of the video and audio of pirated media is one of the main reasons for pirating. They are superior to every streaming service.
Sounds like setting up a torrenting system is in my future, since my beloved newsgroups are dying a slow death.
The big killer for newsgroups is indexers. Posts of content to the newsgroups have to be obsfucated to avoid near instant DMCA takedowns, which means that only a handful of indexers are given the 'keys' by the pirate release teams. That centralization makes the indexers a big target, and prevents just starting new ones quickly. To add to that, running an indexer still requires fairly decent hardware, especially with all the automated (*arr) tools that hammer APIs for searching. The ones that are left charge pretty high prices for access, especially considering they could (and have) just shut down without warning after you've paid some large yearly/lifetime fee.
I've received plenty of those letters but they never do anything about it. Just toss it in the garbage. I'm pretty sure they are just scare tactics the ISPs volunteer to partake in.
heh this but also a fully configured mini http server of your own with buttons to eg install and run transmission's web ui and make the files show up in your little website/Nginx directory host.
One problem is that nobody is ripping UHD versions of these shows/movies. This is one reason I still pay for Netflix/Prime. After seeing UHD/HDR/DV on a large OLED I can't go back. "Quality" OCD kicks in.
Finding high quality for older or non-english shows might be of some difficulty but they're quite common for shows and movies released for english audiences
This is just a guess but requiring Widevine L1 might be enough deterrence for some groups to wait for highest quality BluRay releases
This isn't true in my experience, but if you'd like to share a couple examples of shows that you weren't able to find, I'd be willing to verify whether UHD rips exist
If I had a good way to distribute money to content creators, I'd probably do it quite often.
But as it is, I have to choose between violating copyright (which has nothing to do with theft) and supporting companies that want turn our devices into telescreens.
Copyright is just not as important as digital autonomy, arr.
Property rights are as at least 5000 years old, probably older. They make perfect sense because when you steal something the other party is now deprived of it.
Copyright appeared only a few hundred years ago because governments and the church felt threatened by information that flowed too freely. When you violate it, the only thing that anybody is deprived of is control.
They're worlds apart. "Intellectual Property" is a propaganda term which has no basis in history or the law. Ask any lawyer.
Imagine a YouTuber who spends 100 hours creating a fantastic video. Shortly after uploading it, an automated scraper program downloads it and re-uploads it. This program has been running a while, and since (in this imaginary society) there is no copyright protection, no one cares that it was shamelessly copied, and thus this re-upload channel has built up 1M subscribers over the past few years. It makes $100K on the re-uploaded video. The original content creator makes $10 on their ?copy?. The original content creator happens to be a churchgoing government worker, thus their plight should be ignored: they're just being controlling.
The original purpose was not to ensure that someone got paid. It was to ensure that certain people didn't get heard.
As for the modern day, we need to find a way to separate the payment channels from the content distribution channels. They have different constraints, and by binding them together the content platforms have no choice but to place artificial constraints on the distribution channels, which means developing technologies that converge on censorship.
Instead I ought to be able to find a chunk of bits lying around on a flash drive, play them, and have my player recognize the few hundred people who contributed to the creation of those bits. After a month or so, I'd have a list of a few thousand people, each with a percentage by their name. Supposing I've allocated $30 for content that months, at the end of the month my money goes directly to those people.
That guy who scraped the video and posted a copy. He's doing one of two things:
- helping propagate the original, so the original people end up getting paid from the file he hosted
- obfuscating the source somehow, in an attempt to prevent the proceeds from going to the original creators
In the former case, we should thank him.
In the latter case, he'll get caught: it's pretty easy to prove that you had access to some bits before someone else did. When we catch him, we'll just annotate his obfuscated copy with a link to the original metadata, so payment flows are restored. This ought to even work retroactively.
It's no more complex than what we're doing, with these third party content platforms trying to put handcuffs on our devices all the time. It's just a different model which we're not exploring because the existing model is in the way.
I pay for four different streaming services. If it's not on one of those, I'm going to pirate it. Also, since I live outside the US various services won't even let me give them money if I wanted to. I assume they are then ok with people pirating their stuff since they don't want to offer any option to give them money.
I already own a car, one which I paid an unfair amount for, and I will very well take this new car I see on the dealership lot that someone seems to have left keys on the seat. Yes, and it is 9pm, the dealership is closed and won't take my cash offer; I would otherwise pay them for it. In fact, I found out after I took the car that the dealership actually closed its doors permanently the next morning, so I wouldn't have been able to buy it even if I had waited.
If you could take a copy of the car, leaving the original at the dealership, and the likelihood of experiencing any penalty were the same as pirating a movie, yes you would. Nice false analogy though.
If it were possible to make infinite perfect reproductions of cars at near zero cost and you were arguing that we shouldn't so car dealership owners can continue to be rich, you're a sucker.
VLC will even open media over http, so one doesn't even have to mirror it locally from the Netherlands (although I do for the kids content, just to provide them a curated selection).