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.
tlhunter
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.
Interesting
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.
sparkle
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.
Grumble4681
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.
unkz
For video games, there's just no question. I would never trust a blackbox binary from an untrusted vendor.
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.
Oxalis
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.
Sunbutt23
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.
paris
For music, I highly recommend Soulseek.
paris
Ooh, really? I would love an invite!
cloud_loud
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.
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.
redbearsam
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.
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!
Nsutdwa
Nicotine plus is soulseek, isn't it? I looked into this years ago but ended up not getting into it.
Balketh
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.
Nsutdwa
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).
knocklessmonster
My take is pretty simple. Do what you gotta, don't BS yourself and everybody by justifying it beyond "I just don't want to pay." You don't want to pay Paramount? Still don't wanna pay. Don't want to pay a problematic author? Don't wanna pay.
I try not to pirate independent artists (movies, games), try to support where I can, but I stream so much music anyway it's basically piracy.
I use ultracc for a seedbox so I don't have to worry about securing my home connection, but I can't upload so I'm pretty sure nobody wants me in their private trackers for that. I'm cool with finding random torrents as I have a buffer. Not going to go into actual content sites publicly, and the ones I used to use for anime and cartoons are shut down.
zonk
I don't use Usenet myself, but it's fairly straightforward and streamlined nowadays. You need a provider, that you pay a few bucks a month to (I'm sure there are reviews and spreadsheets comparing many of them), they support SSL, too. Some of them also support anonymous payments. After that, you need a so-called indexer. There are public and private ones, and they're the places where you find your nzb files (which contain a list of download links for usenet basically). It's a bit similar to torrents, where private indexers are a tad better organized and I guess you can file requests, etc.
Once that is done, you just need a nzb downloader which eats the nzb file and starts downloading, done. You can automate most of this with the *darr stack in combination with good indexers.
Barney
It is, yes.
mordae
Our household has Netflix, Apple TV and HBO Max subscriptions. I still download the shows elsewhere since those won't let me play it inside my custom mpv-based player on Linux, running on a NUC by my (untuned) TV.
All those companies know the shows are widely available on torrents without DRM, in 4K, but they still insist on 720p for Linux because otherwise I might share them. I mean... as opposed to sending a magnet link?
Pavouk106
Sorry in advance if you view my comment as offtopic.
I pirated in my younger years. Eaither for.me or people around me (having CD burner, you know...). I grew up, started working, having money and nowadays I don't pirate anymore. There is no need to.
I don't pay for any subscriptions of the big media domes. I pay for Nebula and LTT on Floatplane (their own platform) as I believe that my money go right to the creators (after paying for the platforms to run, of course). I like supporting the authors directly like that.
I may be lacking on new hot TV series and whatnots, but I'm kinda old school, maybe conservative. I love movies from my childhood starring Louis de Funes, Al Pacino, Terence Hill & Bud Spencer, 80's and 90's action movies, Police Academy... Even heavy weight movies like Godfather.
Given my favorites, I tend to buy DVDs and Blu rays of those.movies and rip them to my Jellyfin media server. This way I legally own the movie and I just don't watch it from the media it was delivered on. This may not be legally right but it is in my mind. I also still own the discs, have them stashed in the closet, I don't rip and resell them.
If something new and great comes along, I gladly buy Blu ray. From the latest movies, this is probably Dune part 2. If the movie or series I'm interested in doesn't come out on physical media, I'm not paying for it (and obviously I will not watch it). Either the studio makes it in physical or I'm not interested at all. I know I'm in absolute minority here, but these are my principles.
Back to piracy - I don't pirate anymore. And even though some lawyer somewhere might look at my usage of the copyrighted content from other angle, my mind is clear on that. And if somebody around me.pirates things? Well, that's their "problem", I'm not judging. And with current state of subscriprions and mergers, I can even understand why they do it...
winther
I am not a saint, but I have barely pirated anything in many years. General media access is on all accounts pretty great and substantially cheaper than 20-30 years ago. I paid around €25 for new movies on VHS and DVD 25 years ago, and that is about the same a 4K UHD disc costs today - not even considering inflation. And despite price increases in streaming, it is still comparatively cheap - depending on your usage of course.
Not to say I am still annoyed at the general unpredictability of availability of stuff, where things move around all the time. And I don't understand why regional agreements is still a thing in this day and age. Why isn't a streaming catalogue by default global.
I don't mind paying for what I consume. I also mostly read and watch niche stuff, so if I want the stuff I like to exist in the future, I need to actually pay for it. It is one thing to say that Disney or Tom Cruise has enough money, but on every production there is hundreds if not thousands of working class people living paycheck to paycheck like everyone else.
What annoys me most is the length of copyright. I like to watch older movies, and it really shouldn't be this difficult to find movies from the 30s, 40s or 50s. Everyone involved in those things are long dead and things should be in public a lot sooner. With one caveat though that older movies also need restorations and it is valuable work to have old films newly scanned from the original negative and getting a proper quality release. I would argue that part of that should to some extent be down to government funding to preserve cultural significant works.
paris
Nicotine is a mac only (i think) client for Soulseek. I personally use Nicotine instead, but functionally they are more or less identical!
sparksbet
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.
Even ignoring the money part, this is already way more work than it's ever taken me to pirate a movie, and I'm not even on any private trackers or anything. I'm sure there's some stuff that would be hard to find with just public trackers but so far the selection has been better than searching streaming services for sure.
I agree about pirating videogames though. The risk is way less worth the reward there, especially when there's so little friction involved in buying PC games these days (wow it's almost like Gabe was right about piracy...)
priw8
Back when I didn't have a source of income (so mostly when I was a kid) I pirated a whole bunch of stuff since there was no way I could afford all the things I wanted. Now I pay for stuff where possible, but I avoid all subscription based services. Rather than pirating stuff from them though I'm simply fine not getting that content. There's so many things I want to be doing that there's not enough time anyway, I'm not going to run out of things to play or watch.
Occasionally I still pirate some retro games though, or just content that's not available for purchase at all. I also very much agree with what Gabe Newell said in an interview many years ago (that piracy is a customer service problem).
vord
Thankfully, papers just straight up being open access is getting more common.
Turns out pirating the shit out of things turns the dial a good bit. Especially since, best I can tell, the actual researchers hate dealing with paygates.
vord
You can get an Anna's Archive plugin for KOReader and search/download right from your kindle if you're so inclined.
Lacks the good management of Calibre, but great on the go.
vord
Piracy is the ultimate voting with your wallet. If you don't consume the content, producers just assume you didn't like the content. And not 'fuck audible.'
I want DRM-free audiobooks. I buy from here, but I pirate if it's audible exclusive.
I want DRM-free music, I buy from Bandcamp. If it's not there...fuck it.
I want to make a 3-episode tv playlist without having to switch apps three times. I can do that easily pirating, so I pirate even if I pay for the service.
I stopped pirating games with the debut of Steam's store. I even went back and bought a bunch I did before.
Piracy is solving a service problem. I won't lie and say that I'd be willing to pay $15 to watch Fast Times in Ridgmont High one time, or to track down the app of the week it can be played on. I'll click three buttons, watch it,and move on with my life.
And the big thing is, is once you've entered the piracy rabbithole, that convienience is as hard to give up as switching from watching live TV to streaming was.
DynamoSunshirt
I always buy whenever I can buy the product in a way that:
rewards the original artist
allows me to consume the product how and when I want
hasn't compromised the product
The first goal applies mostly to music: Spotify (and most streaming services) pay artists so little that even if I buy a single album a year from an artist on Bandcamp; they're probably coming out ahead.
Unfortunately, surveillance capitalism and enshittification are directly at odds with the second goal, constantly shoving shit in my face when I'm just trying to watch a favorite show on a streaming service. If Spotify allowed users to remove podcasts and audiobooks and opt out of their payola recommendation system, it might be tempting. But their offline experience is also trash, as is most of their UX, and you can tell their goal is not to make a good music player. But of course you basically have no choice but to use their crappy, nonperformant app, especially on mobile, and exclusively if you want any level of offline playback support (inferior as it may be).
The third goal mostly has issues in older TV shows: when shows lose the rights to their original music, the replacement is... not correct. When you have your own copy, it can't change out from under you. The same logic applies to scenes: while I don't approve of the use of blackface in certain sketches in Scrubs, it doesn't feel right to me to just... erase those things. Sometimes whole episodes disappear! I think a disclaimer on the episode description, or maybe a footnote subtitle on problematic scenes, would be a better way to say "we don't approve of this; learn from it" while not disrespecting the original artist.
Used blurays and CDs are remarkably cheap these days. bandcamp provides a way to pay artists with minimal carveouts right from your home. Streaming services have garbage UIs that disrespect you no matter how much you pay for the Ultra Premium 4K Family Plus tier. Jellyfin is so superior it's laughable.
CptBluebear
And the big thing is, is once you've entered the piracy rabbithole, that convienience is as hard to give up as switching from watching live TV to streaming was.
Truly this is the crux. I happily paid for Netflix when it was frictionless to see what you wanted. I turned back to piracy when the streaming environment fractured into... gestures broadly this mess.
Games have been solved. Even if Steam would disappear tomorrow, the market has plenty of alternatives that have the same or similar frictionless experiences. I can buy nearly all games in any online storefront, not just a select few that happen to hold the rights for that week.
widedub
I was playing around on Soulseek chats as a teen nearly 15 years ago. I cant believe it's still around!
sparksbet
Actual researchers often have to pay the publisher to make their papers open access.
Sage
Hey, so I've been really looking into this lately. Even more now with streaming services raising their prices to be greedy more and more.
Do I need a dedicated PC? Would it make it easier? I have one sitting around that's not too old since I upgraded recently.
gary
I want DRM-free music, I buy from Bandcamp. If it's not there...fuck it
iTunes and Amazon both have DRM-free music and a far wider selection.
I won't lie and say that I'd be willing to pay $15 to watch Fast Times in Ridgmont High one time, or to track down the app of the week it can be played on. I'll click three buttons, watch it,and move on with my life.
I Googled the movie, looked at the providers, saw Google and Apple as options to rent the movie for $3.99. It doesn't seem that much slower than piracy. This doesn't seem like a service problem at this point. Piracy is just so easy today and it has the price benefit that if someone knows how to pirate, I think it's quite hard for a legitimate business to compete.
Protected
I pay for most things, but attempts to avoid contributing to the profits of certain horrifying companies might lead me to choose a different way sometimes.
(I don't seem to be able to avoid them when it comes to book purchases, but that industry is uniquely fucked.)
Flashfall
In the words of Gabe Newell, "piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem". I pay for convenience and a good user experience, and if I'm not getting that then I don't pay.
I don't pirate ANY games anymore because Steam is just incredibly convenient (plus I like multiplayer co-op stuff and that just doesn't work with pirated copies). It also helps that I know the publisher/devs get a sizeable cut of my purchase there so I'm actually supporting them.
For shows and movies, the only streaming service I use is Prime Video but that's only because it comes with Prime, and even then I still need to put up with ads. Anything on any other streaming platform that I really want to see can usually be found on a free streaming site within a few minutes (though you have to be careful not to click on ads with those).
For anime, the only major anime streaming platform for the West is Crunchyroll, but their selection's limited and the streaming quality's mid and the subtitles aren't always good and very little if any of the money they make goes back to the anime studios. Plus, they've been working with Japanese publishers to very aggressively crack down on unaffiliated anime streaming sites, which is understandable from a business perspective but still rankles the Western anime community. After the last streaming site I was using went down last month I've just decided to torrent all the things I want to watch, and I've set it up so that I automatically download the latest episodes as they're uploaded so it's still pretty convenient. I'll support anime studios more directly by buying merch for shows I'm really into, but Crunchyroll isn't getting shit from me.
thenetnetofthenet
Do I need a dedicated PC? Would it make it easier?
one of the other benefits of the Android TV boxes like NVIDIA Shield TV Pro, Onn, and Homatics is that they take care of some of the UI / UX things you would have to figure out for a PC.
A lot of things would be pretty easy to figure out, but it's one less thing to worry about. Stuff like a TV like remote control, what do you see when you turn it on, what does it look like to find, navigate through, and play the stuff you want to see or listen to? How do you watch YT without ads?
It's not that difficult on PC, especially with cross platform software like Stremio and Kodi, and keyboard + mouse + TV remote will be fine.
But for me, even as someone who likes to tinker with stuff, I found the user experience and workflow much easier with an Android TV box.
Much much easier for anyone else that comes over that wants to use it - mostly just point and click.
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.
tlhunter
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.
Interesting
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.
sparkle
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.
Grumble4681
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.
unkz
For video games, there's just no question. I would never trust a blackbox binary from an untrusted vendor.
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.
Oxalis
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.
Sunbutt23
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.
paris
For music, I highly recommend Soulseek.
paris
Ooh, really? I would love an invite!
cloud_loud
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.
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.
redbearsam
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.
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!
Nsutdwa
Nicotine plus is soulseek, isn't it? I looked into this years ago but ended up not getting into it.
Balketh
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.
Nsutdwa
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).
knocklessmonster
My take is pretty simple. Do what you gotta, don't BS yourself and everybody by justifying it beyond "I just don't want to pay." You don't want to pay Paramount? Still don't wanna pay. Don't want to pay a problematic author? Don't wanna pay.
I try not to pirate independent artists (movies, games), try to support where I can, but I stream so much music anyway it's basically piracy.
I use ultracc for a seedbox so I don't have to worry about securing my home connection, but I can't upload so I'm pretty sure nobody wants me in their private trackers for that. I'm cool with finding random torrents as I have a buffer. Not going to go into actual content sites publicly, and the ones I used to use for anime and cartoons are shut down.
zonk
I don't use Usenet myself, but it's fairly straightforward and streamlined nowadays. You need a provider, that you pay a few bucks a month to (I'm sure there are reviews and spreadsheets comparing many of them), they support SSL, too. Some of them also support anonymous payments. After that, you need a so-called indexer. There are public and private ones, and they're the places where you find your nzb files (which contain a list of download links for usenet basically). It's a bit similar to torrents, where private indexers are a tad better organized and I guess you can file requests, etc.
Once that is done, you just need a nzb downloader which eats the nzb file and starts downloading, done. You can automate most of this with the *darr stack in combination with good indexers.
Barney
It is, yes.
mordae
Our household has Netflix, Apple TV and HBO Max subscriptions. I still download the shows elsewhere since those won't let me play it inside my custom mpv-based player on Linux, running on a NUC by my (untuned) TV.
All those companies know the shows are widely available on torrents without DRM, in 4K, but they still insist on 720p for Linux because otherwise I might share them. I mean... as opposed to sending a magnet link?
Pavouk106
Sorry in advance if you view my comment as offtopic.
I pirated in my younger years. Eaither for.me or people around me (having CD burner, you know...). I grew up, started working, having money and nowadays I don't pirate anymore. There is no need to.
I don't pay for any subscriptions of the big media domes. I pay for Nebula and LTT on Floatplane (their own platform) as I believe that my money go right to the creators (after paying for the platforms to run, of course). I like supporting the authors directly like that.
I may be lacking on new hot TV series and whatnots, but I'm kinda old school, maybe conservative. I love movies from my childhood starring Louis de Funes, Al Pacino, Terence Hill & Bud Spencer, 80's and 90's action movies, Police Academy... Even heavy weight movies like Godfather.
Given my favorites, I tend to buy DVDs and Blu rays of those.movies and rip them to my Jellyfin media server. This way I legally own the movie and I just don't watch it from the media it was delivered on. This may not be legally right but it is in my mind. I also still own the discs, have them stashed in the closet, I don't rip and resell them.
If something new and great comes along, I gladly buy Blu ray. From the latest movies, this is probably Dune part 2. If the movie or series I'm interested in doesn't come out on physical media, I'm not paying for it (and obviously I will not watch it). Either the studio makes it in physical or I'm not interested at all. I know I'm in absolute minority here, but these are my principles.
Back to piracy - I don't pirate anymore. And even though some lawyer somewhere might look at my usage of the copyrighted content from other angle, my mind is clear on that. And if somebody around me.pirates things? Well, that's their "problem", I'm not judging. And with current state of subscriprions and mergers, I can even understand why they do it...
winther
I am not a saint, but I have barely pirated anything in many years. General media access is on all accounts pretty great and substantially cheaper than 20-30 years ago. I paid around €25 for new movies on VHS and DVD 25 years ago, and that is about the same a 4K UHD disc costs today - not even considering inflation. And despite price increases in streaming, it is still comparatively cheap - depending on your usage of course.
Not to say I am still annoyed at the general unpredictability of availability of stuff, where things move around all the time. And I don't understand why regional agreements is still a thing in this day and age. Why isn't a streaming catalogue by default global.
I don't mind paying for what I consume. I also mostly read and watch niche stuff, so if I want the stuff I like to exist in the future, I need to actually pay for it. It is one thing to say that Disney or Tom Cruise has enough money, but on every production there is hundreds if not thousands of working class people living paycheck to paycheck like everyone else.
What annoys me most is the length of copyright. I like to watch older movies, and it really shouldn't be this difficult to find movies from the 30s, 40s or 50s. Everyone involved in those things are long dead and things should be in public a lot sooner. With one caveat though that older movies also need restorations and it is valuable work to have old films newly scanned from the original negative and getting a proper quality release. I would argue that part of that should to some extent be down to government funding to preserve cultural significant works.
paris
Nicotine is a mac only (i think) client for Soulseek. I personally use Nicotine instead, but functionally they are more or less identical!
sparksbet
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.
Even ignoring the money part, this is already way more work than it's ever taken me to pirate a movie, and I'm not even on any private trackers or anything. I'm sure there's some stuff that would be hard to find with just public trackers but so far the selection has been better than searching streaming services for sure.
I agree about pirating videogames though. The risk is way less worth the reward there, especially when there's so little friction involved in buying PC games these days (wow it's almost like Gabe was right about piracy...)
priw8
Back when I didn't have a source of income (so mostly when I was a kid) I pirated a whole bunch of stuff since there was no way I could afford all the things I wanted. Now I pay for stuff where possible, but I avoid all subscription based services. Rather than pirating stuff from them though I'm simply fine not getting that content. There's so many things I want to be doing that there's not enough time anyway, I'm not going to run out of things to play or watch.
Occasionally I still pirate some retro games though, or just content that's not available for purchase at all. I also very much agree with what Gabe Newell said in an interview many years ago (that piracy is a customer service problem).
vord
Thankfully, papers just straight up being open access is getting more common.
Turns out pirating the shit out of things turns the dial a good bit. Especially since, best I can tell, the actual researchers hate dealing with paygates.
vord
You can get an Anna's Archive plugin for KOReader and search/download right from your kindle if you're so inclined.
Lacks the good management of Calibre, but great on the go.
vord
Piracy is the ultimate voting with your wallet. If you don't consume the content, producers just assume you didn't like the content. And not 'fuck audible.'
I want DRM-free audiobooks. I buy from here, but I pirate if it's audible exclusive.
I want DRM-free music, I buy from Bandcamp. If it's not there...fuck it.
I want to make a 3-episode tv playlist without having to switch apps three times. I can do that easily pirating, so I pirate even if I pay for the service.
I stopped pirating games with the debut of Steam's store. I even went back and bought a bunch I did before.
Piracy is solving a service problem. I won't lie and say that I'd be willing to pay $15 to watch Fast Times in Ridgmont High one time, or to track down the app of the week it can be played on. I'll click three buttons, watch it,and move on with my life.
And the big thing is, is once you've entered the piracy rabbithole, that convienience is as hard to give up as switching from watching live TV to streaming was.
DynamoSunshirt
I always buy whenever I can buy the product in a way that:
rewards the original artist
allows me to consume the product how and when I want
hasn't compromised the product
The first goal applies mostly to music: Spotify (and most streaming services) pay artists so little that even if I buy a single album a year from an artist on Bandcamp; they're probably coming out ahead.
Unfortunately, surveillance capitalism and enshittification are directly at odds with the second goal, constantly shoving shit in my face when I'm just trying to watch a favorite show on a streaming service. If Spotify allowed users to remove podcasts and audiobooks and opt out of their payola recommendation system, it might be tempting. But their offline experience is also trash, as is most of their UX, and you can tell their goal is not to make a good music player. But of course you basically have no choice but to use their crappy, nonperformant app, especially on mobile, and exclusively if you want any level of offline playback support (inferior as it may be).
The third goal mostly has issues in older TV shows: when shows lose the rights to their original music, the replacement is... not correct. When you have your own copy, it can't change out from under you. The same logic applies to scenes: while I don't approve of the use of blackface in certain sketches in Scrubs, it doesn't feel right to me to just... erase those things. Sometimes whole episodes disappear! I think a disclaimer on the episode description, or maybe a footnote subtitle on problematic scenes, would be a better way to say "we don't approve of this; learn from it" while not disrespecting the original artist.
Used blurays and CDs are remarkably cheap these days. bandcamp provides a way to pay artists with minimal carveouts right from your home. Streaming services have garbage UIs that disrespect you no matter how much you pay for the Ultra Premium 4K Family Plus tier. Jellyfin is so superior it's laughable.
CptBluebear
And the big thing is, is once you've entered the piracy rabbithole, that convienience is as hard to give up as switching from watching live TV to streaming was.
Truly this is the crux. I happily paid for Netflix when it was frictionless to see what you wanted. I turned back to piracy when the streaming environment fractured into... gestures broadly this mess.
Games have been solved. Even if Steam would disappear tomorrow, the market has plenty of alternatives that have the same or similar frictionless experiences. I can buy nearly all games in any online storefront, not just a select few that happen to hold the rights for that week.
widedub
I was playing around on Soulseek chats as a teen nearly 15 years ago. I cant believe it's still around!
sparksbet
Actual researchers often have to pay the publisher to make their papers open access.
Sage
Hey, so I've been really looking into this lately. Even more now with streaming services raising their prices to be greedy more and more.
Do I need a dedicated PC? Would it make it easier? I have one sitting around that's not too old since I upgraded recently.
gary
I want DRM-free music, I buy from Bandcamp. If it's not there...fuck it
iTunes and Amazon both have DRM-free music and a far wider selection.
I won't lie and say that I'd be willing to pay $15 to watch Fast Times in Ridgmont High one time, or to track down the app of the week it can be played on. I'll click three buttons, watch it,and move on with my life.
I Googled the movie, looked at the providers, saw Google and Apple as options to rent the movie for $3.99. It doesn't seem that much slower than piracy. This doesn't seem like a service problem at this point. Piracy is just so easy today and it has the price benefit that if someone knows how to pirate, I think it's quite hard for a legitimate business to compete.
Protected
I pay for most things, but attempts to avoid contributing to the profits of certain horrifying companies might lead me to choose a different way sometimes.
(I don't seem to be able to avoid them when it comes to book purchases, but that industry is uniquely fucked.)
Flashfall
In the words of Gabe Newell, "piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem". I pay for convenience and a good user experience, and if I'm not getting that then I don't pay.
I don't pirate ANY games anymore because Steam is just incredibly convenient (plus I like multiplayer co-op stuff and that just doesn't work with pirated copies). It also helps that I know the publisher/devs get a sizeable cut of my purchase there so I'm actually supporting them.
For shows and movies, the only streaming service I use is Prime Video but that's only because it comes with Prime, and even then I still need to put up with ads. Anything on any other streaming platform that I really want to see can usually be found on a free streaming site within a few minutes (though you have to be careful not to click on ads with those).
For anime, the only major anime streaming platform for the West is Crunchyroll, but their selection's limited and the streaming quality's mid and the subtitles aren't always good and very little if any of the money they make goes back to the anime studios. Plus, they've been working with Japanese publishers to very aggressively crack down on unaffiliated anime streaming sites, which is understandable from a business perspective but still rankles the Western anime community. After the last streaming site I was using went down last month I've just decided to torrent all the things I want to watch, and I've set it up so that I automatically download the latest episodes as they're uploaded so it's still pretty convenient. I'll support anime studios more directly by buying merch for shows I'm really into, but Crunchyroll isn't getting shit from me.
thenetnetofthenet
Do I need a dedicated PC? Would it make it easier?
one of the other benefits of the Android TV boxes like NVIDIA Shield TV Pro, Onn, and Homatics is that they take care of some of the UI / UX things you would have to figure out for a PC.
A lot of things would be pretty easy to figure out, but it's one less thing to worry about. Stuff like a TV like remote control, what do you see when you turn it on, what does it look like to find, navigate through, and play the stuff you want to see or listen to? How do you watch YT without ads?
It's not that difficult on PC, especially with cross platform software like Stremio and Kodi, and keyboard + mouse + TV remote will be fine.
But for me, even as someone who likes to tinker with stuff, I found the user experience and workflow much easier with an Android TV box.
Much much easier for anyone else that comes over that wants to use it - mostly just point and click.
*cough*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVXCr6upWUo
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For music, I highly recommend Soulseek.
Ooh, really? I would love an invite!
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.
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'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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU8VPQsTqFU
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!
Nicotine plus is soulseek, isn't it? I looked into this years ago but ended up not getting into it.
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).
My take is pretty simple. Do what you gotta, don't BS yourself and everybody by justifying it beyond "I just don't want to pay." You don't want to pay Paramount? Still don't wanna pay. Don't want to pay a problematic author? Don't wanna pay.
I try not to pirate independent artists (movies, games), try to support where I can, but I stream so much music anyway it's basically piracy.
I use ultracc for a seedbox so I don't have to worry about securing my home connection, but I can't upload so I'm pretty sure nobody wants me in their private trackers for that. I'm cool with finding random torrents as I have a buffer. Not going to go into actual content sites publicly, and the ones I used to use for anime and cartoons are shut down.
I don't use Usenet myself, but it's fairly straightforward and streamlined nowadays. You need a provider, that you pay a few bucks a month to (I'm sure there are reviews and spreadsheets comparing many of them), they support SSL, too. Some of them also support anonymous payments. After that, you need a so-called indexer. There are public and private ones, and they're the places where you find your nzb files (which contain a list of download links for usenet basically). It's a bit similar to torrents, where private indexers are a tad better organized and I guess you can file requests, etc.
Once that is done, you just need a nzb downloader which eats the nzb file and starts downloading, done. You can automate most of this with the *darr stack in combination with good indexers.
It is, yes.
Our household has Netflix, Apple TV and HBO Max subscriptions. I still download the shows elsewhere since those won't let me play it inside my custom mpv-based player on Linux, running on a NUC by my (untuned) TV.
All those companies know the shows are widely available on torrents without DRM, in 4K, but they still insist on 720p for Linux because otherwise I might share them. I mean... as opposed to sending a magnet link?
Sorry in advance if you view my comment as offtopic.
I pirated in my younger years. Eaither for.me or people around me (having CD burner, you know...). I grew up, started working, having money and nowadays I don't pirate anymore. There is no need to.
I don't pay for any subscriptions of the big media domes. I pay for Nebula and LTT on Floatplane (their own platform) as I believe that my money go right to the creators (after paying for the platforms to run, of course). I like supporting the authors directly like that.
I may be lacking on new hot TV series and whatnots, but I'm kinda old school, maybe conservative. I love movies from my childhood starring Louis de Funes, Al Pacino, Terence Hill & Bud Spencer, 80's and 90's action movies, Police Academy... Even heavy weight movies like Godfather.
Given my favorites, I tend to buy DVDs and Blu rays of those.movies and rip them to my Jellyfin media server. This way I legally own the movie and I just don't watch it from the media it was delivered on. This may not be legally right but it is in my mind. I also still own the discs, have them stashed in the closet, I don't rip and resell them.
If something new and great comes along, I gladly buy Blu ray. From the latest movies, this is probably Dune part 2. If the movie or series I'm interested in doesn't come out on physical media, I'm not paying for it (and obviously I will not watch it). Either the studio makes it in physical or I'm not interested at all. I know I'm in absolute minority here, but these are my principles.
Back to piracy - I don't pirate anymore. And even though some lawyer somewhere might look at my usage of the copyrighted content from other angle, my mind is clear on that. And if somebody around me.pirates things? Well, that's their "problem", I'm not judging. And with current state of subscriprions and mergers, I can even understand why they do it...
I am not a saint, but I have barely pirated anything in many years. General media access is on all accounts pretty great and substantially cheaper than 20-30 years ago. I paid around €25 for new movies on VHS and DVD 25 years ago, and that is about the same a 4K UHD disc costs today - not even considering inflation. And despite price increases in streaming, it is still comparatively cheap - depending on your usage of course.
Not to say I am still annoyed at the general unpredictability of availability of stuff, where things move around all the time. And I don't understand why regional agreements is still a thing in this day and age. Why isn't a streaming catalogue by default global.
I don't mind paying for what I consume. I also mostly read and watch niche stuff, so if I want the stuff I like to exist in the future, I need to actually pay for it. It is one thing to say that Disney or Tom Cruise has enough money, but on every production there is hundreds if not thousands of working class people living paycheck to paycheck like everyone else.
What annoys me most is the length of copyright. I like to watch older movies, and it really shouldn't be this difficult to find movies from the 30s, 40s or 50s. Everyone involved in those things are long dead and things should be in public a lot sooner. With one caveat though that older movies also need restorations and it is valuable work to have old films newly scanned from the original negative and getting a proper quality release. I would argue that part of that should to some extent be down to government funding to preserve cultural significant works.
Nicotine is a mac only (i think) client for Soulseek. I personally use Nicotine instead, but functionally they are more or less identical!
Even ignoring the money part, this is already way more work than it's ever taken me to pirate a movie, and I'm not even on any private trackers or anything. I'm sure there's some stuff that would be hard to find with just public trackers but so far the selection has been better than searching streaming services for sure.
I agree about pirating videogames though. The risk is way less worth the reward there, especially when there's so little friction involved in buying PC games these days (wow it's almost like Gabe was right about piracy...)
Back when I didn't have a source of income (so mostly when I was a kid) I pirated a whole bunch of stuff since there was no way I could afford all the things I wanted. Now I pay for stuff where possible, but I avoid all subscription based services. Rather than pirating stuff from them though I'm simply fine not getting that content. There's so many things I want to be doing that there's not enough time anyway, I'm not going to run out of things to play or watch.
Occasionally I still pirate some retro games though, or just content that's not available for purchase at all. I also very much agree with what Gabe Newell said in an interview many years ago (that piracy is a customer service problem).
Turns out pirating the shit out of things turns the dial a good bit. Especially since, best I can tell, the actual researchers hate dealing with paygates.
You can get an Anna's Archive plugin for KOReader and search/download right from your kindle if you're so inclined.
Lacks the good management of Calibre, but great on the go.
Piracy is the ultimate voting with your wallet. If you don't consume the content, producers just assume you didn't like the content. And not 'fuck audible.'
I want DRM-free audiobooks. I buy from here, but I pirate if it's audible exclusive.
I want DRM-free music, I buy from Bandcamp. If it's not there...fuck it.
I want to make a 3-episode tv playlist without having to switch apps three times. I can do that easily pirating, so I pirate even if I pay for the service.
I stopped pirating games with the debut of Steam's store. I even went back and bought a bunch I did before.
Piracy is solving a service problem. I won't lie and say that I'd be willing to pay $15 to watch Fast Times in Ridgmont High one time, or to track down the app of the week it can be played on. I'll click three buttons, watch it,and move on with my life.
And the big thing is, is once you've entered the piracy rabbithole, that convienience is as hard to give up as switching from watching live TV to streaming was.
I always buy whenever I can buy the product in a way that:
The first goal applies mostly to music: Spotify (and most streaming services) pay artists so little that even if I buy a single album a year from an artist on Bandcamp; they're probably coming out ahead.
Unfortunately, surveillance capitalism and enshittification are directly at odds with the second goal, constantly shoving shit in my face when I'm just trying to watch a favorite show on a streaming service. If Spotify allowed users to remove podcasts and audiobooks and opt out of their payola recommendation system, it might be tempting. But their offline experience is also trash, as is most of their UX, and you can tell their goal is not to make a good music player. But of course you basically have no choice but to use their crappy, nonperformant app, especially on mobile, and exclusively if you want any level of offline playback support (inferior as it may be).
The third goal mostly has issues in older TV shows: when shows lose the rights to their original music, the replacement is... not correct. When you have your own copy, it can't change out from under you. The same logic applies to scenes: while I don't approve of the use of blackface in certain sketches in Scrubs, it doesn't feel right to me to just... erase those things. Sometimes whole episodes disappear! I think a disclaimer on the episode description, or maybe a footnote subtitle on problematic scenes, would be a better way to say "we don't approve of this; learn from it" while not disrespecting the original artist.
Used blurays and CDs are remarkably cheap these days. bandcamp provides a way to pay artists with minimal carveouts right from your home. Streaming services have garbage UIs that disrespect you no matter how much you pay for the Ultra Premium 4K Family Plus tier. Jellyfin is so superior it's laughable.
Truly this is the crux. I happily paid for Netflix when it was frictionless to see what you wanted. I turned back to piracy when the streaming environment fractured into... gestures broadly this mess.
Games have been solved. Even if Steam would disappear tomorrow, the market has plenty of alternatives that have the same or similar frictionless experiences. I can buy nearly all games in any online storefront, not just a select few that happen to hold the rights for that week.
I was playing around on Soulseek chats as a teen nearly 15 years ago. I cant believe it's still around!
Actual researchers often have to pay the publisher to make their papers open access.
Hey, so I've been really looking into this lately. Even more now with streaming services raising their prices to be greedy more and more.
Do I need a dedicated PC? Would it make it easier? I have one sitting around that's not too old since I upgraded recently.
iTunes and Amazon both have DRM-free music and a far wider selection.
I Googled the movie, looked at the providers, saw Google and Apple as options to rent the movie for $3.99. It doesn't seem that much slower than piracy. This doesn't seem like a service problem at this point. Piracy is just so easy today and it has the price benefit that if someone knows how to pirate, I think it's quite hard for a legitimate business to compete.
I pay for most things, but attempts to avoid contributing to the profits of certain horrifying companies might lead me to choose a different way sometimes.
(I don't seem to be able to avoid them when it comes to book purchases, but that industry is uniquely fucked.)
In the words of Gabe Newell, "piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem". I pay for convenience and a good user experience, and if I'm not getting that then I don't pay.
I don't pirate ANY games anymore because Steam is just incredibly convenient (plus I like multiplayer co-op stuff and that just doesn't work with pirated copies). It also helps that I know the publisher/devs get a sizeable cut of my purchase there so I'm actually supporting them.
For shows and movies, the only streaming service I use is Prime Video but that's only because it comes with Prime, and even then I still need to put up with ads. Anything on any other streaming platform that I really want to see can usually be found on a free streaming site within a few minutes (though you have to be careful not to click on ads with those).
For anime, the only major anime streaming platform for the West is Crunchyroll, but their selection's limited and the streaming quality's mid and the subtitles aren't always good and very little if any of the money they make goes back to the anime studios. Plus, they've been working with Japanese publishers to very aggressively crack down on unaffiliated anime streaming sites, which is understandable from a business perspective but still rankles the Western anime community. After the last streaming site I was using went down last month I've just decided to torrent all the things I want to watch, and I've set it up so that I automatically download the latest episodes as they're uploaded so it's still pretty convenient. I'll support anime studios more directly by buying merch for shows I'm really into, but Crunchyroll isn't getting shit from me.
one of the other benefits of the Android TV boxes like NVIDIA Shield TV Pro, Onn, and Homatics is that they take care of some of the UI / UX things you would have to figure out for a PC.
A lot of things would be pretty easy to figure out, but it's one less thing to worry about. Stuff like a TV like remote control, what do you see when you turn it on, what does it look like to find, navigate through, and play the stuff you want to see or listen to? How do you watch YT without ads?
It's not that difficult on PC, especially with cross platform software like Stremio and Kodi, and keyboard + mouse + TV remote will be fine.
But for me, even as someone who likes to tinker with stuff, I found the user experience and workflow much easier with an Android TV box.
Much much easier for anyone else that comes over that wants to use it - mostly just point and click.
*cough*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVXCr6upWUo
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For music, I highly recommend Soulseek.
Ooh, really? I would love an invite!
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.
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'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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU8VPQsTqFU
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!
Nicotine plus is soulseek, isn't it? I looked into this years ago but ended up not getting into it.
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).
My take is pretty simple. Do what you gotta, don't BS yourself and everybody by justifying it beyond "I just don't want to pay." You don't want to pay Paramount? Still don't wanna pay. Don't want to pay a problematic author? Don't wanna pay.
I try not to pirate independent artists (movies, games), try to support where I can, but I stream so much music anyway it's basically piracy.
I use ultracc for a seedbox so I don't have to worry about securing my home connection, but I can't upload so I'm pretty sure nobody wants me in their private trackers for that. I'm cool with finding random torrents as I have a buffer. Not going to go into actual content sites publicly, and the ones I used to use for anime and cartoons are shut down.
I don't use Usenet myself, but it's fairly straightforward and streamlined nowadays. You need a provider, that you pay a few bucks a month to (I'm sure there are reviews and spreadsheets comparing many of them), they support SSL, too. Some of them also support anonymous payments. After that, you need a so-called indexer. There are public and private ones, and they're the places where you find your nzb files (which contain a list of download links for usenet basically). It's a bit similar to torrents, where private indexers are a tad better organized and I guess you can file requests, etc.
Once that is done, you just need a nzb downloader which eats the nzb file and starts downloading, done. You can automate most of this with the *darr stack in combination with good indexers.
It is, yes.
Our household has Netflix, Apple TV and HBO Max subscriptions. I still download the shows elsewhere since those won't let me play it inside my custom mpv-based player on Linux, running on a NUC by my (untuned) TV.
All those companies know the shows are widely available on torrents without DRM, in 4K, but they still insist on 720p for Linux because otherwise I might share them. I mean... as opposed to sending a magnet link?
Sorry in advance if you view my comment as offtopic.
I pirated in my younger years. Eaither for.me or people around me (having CD burner, you know...). I grew up, started working, having money and nowadays I don't pirate anymore. There is no need to.
I don't pay for any subscriptions of the big media domes. I pay for Nebula and LTT on Floatplane (their own platform) as I believe that my money go right to the creators (after paying for the platforms to run, of course). I like supporting the authors directly like that.
I may be lacking on new hot TV series and whatnots, but I'm kinda old school, maybe conservative. I love movies from my childhood starring Louis de Funes, Al Pacino, Terence Hill & Bud Spencer, 80's and 90's action movies, Police Academy... Even heavy weight movies like Godfather.
Given my favorites, I tend to buy DVDs and Blu rays of those.movies and rip them to my Jellyfin media server. This way I legally own the movie and I just don't watch it from the media it was delivered on. This may not be legally right but it is in my mind. I also still own the discs, have them stashed in the closet, I don't rip and resell them.
If something new and great comes along, I gladly buy Blu ray. From the latest movies, this is probably Dune part 2. If the movie or series I'm interested in doesn't come out on physical media, I'm not paying for it (and obviously I will not watch it). Either the studio makes it in physical or I'm not interested at all. I know I'm in absolute minority here, but these are my principles.
Back to piracy - I don't pirate anymore. And even though some lawyer somewhere might look at my usage of the copyrighted content from other angle, my mind is clear on that. And if somebody around me.pirates things? Well, that's their "problem", I'm not judging. And with current state of subscriprions and mergers, I can even understand why they do it...
I am not a saint, but I have barely pirated anything in many years. General media access is on all accounts pretty great and substantially cheaper than 20-30 years ago. I paid around €25 for new movies on VHS and DVD 25 years ago, and that is about the same a 4K UHD disc costs today - not even considering inflation. And despite price increases in streaming, it is still comparatively cheap - depending on your usage of course.
Not to say I am still annoyed at the general unpredictability of availability of stuff, where things move around all the time. And I don't understand why regional agreements is still a thing in this day and age. Why isn't a streaming catalogue by default global.
I don't mind paying for what I consume. I also mostly read and watch niche stuff, so if I want the stuff I like to exist in the future, I need to actually pay for it. It is one thing to say that Disney or Tom Cruise has enough money, but on every production there is hundreds if not thousands of working class people living paycheck to paycheck like everyone else.
What annoys me most is the length of copyright. I like to watch older movies, and it really shouldn't be this difficult to find movies from the 30s, 40s or 50s. Everyone involved in those things are long dead and things should be in public a lot sooner. With one caveat though that older movies also need restorations and it is valuable work to have old films newly scanned from the original negative and getting a proper quality release. I would argue that part of that should to some extent be down to government funding to preserve cultural significant works.
Nicotine is a mac only (i think) client for Soulseek. I personally use Nicotine instead, but functionally they are more or less identical!
Even ignoring the money part, this is already way more work than it's ever taken me to pirate a movie, and I'm not even on any private trackers or anything. I'm sure there's some stuff that would be hard to find with just public trackers but so far the selection has been better than searching streaming services for sure.
I agree about pirating videogames though. The risk is way less worth the reward there, especially when there's so little friction involved in buying PC games these days (wow it's almost like Gabe was right about piracy...)
Back when I didn't have a source of income (so mostly when I was a kid) I pirated a whole bunch of stuff since there was no way I could afford all the things I wanted. Now I pay for stuff where possible, but I avoid all subscription based services. Rather than pirating stuff from them though I'm simply fine not getting that content. There's so many things I want to be doing that there's not enough time anyway, I'm not going to run out of things to play or watch.
Occasionally I still pirate some retro games though, or just content that's not available for purchase at all. I also very much agree with what Gabe Newell said in an interview many years ago (that piracy is a customer service problem).
Turns out pirating the shit out of things turns the dial a good bit. Especially since, best I can tell, the actual researchers hate dealing with paygates.
You can get an Anna's Archive plugin for KOReader and search/download right from your kindle if you're so inclined.
Lacks the good management of Calibre, but great on the go.
Piracy is the ultimate voting with your wallet. If you don't consume the content, producers just assume you didn't like the content. And not 'fuck audible.'
I want DRM-free audiobooks. I buy from here, but I pirate if it's audible exclusive.
I want DRM-free music, I buy from Bandcamp. If it's not there...fuck it.
I want to make a 3-episode tv playlist without having to switch apps three times. I can do that easily pirating, so I pirate even if I pay for the service.
I stopped pirating games with the debut of Steam's store. I even went back and bought a bunch I did before.
Piracy is solving a service problem. I won't lie and say that I'd be willing to pay $15 to watch Fast Times in Ridgmont High one time, or to track down the app of the week it can be played on. I'll click three buttons, watch it,and move on with my life.
And the big thing is, is once you've entered the piracy rabbithole, that convienience is as hard to give up as switching from watching live TV to streaming was.
I always buy whenever I can buy the product in a way that:
The first goal applies mostly to music: Spotify (and most streaming services) pay artists so little that even if I buy a single album a year from an artist on Bandcamp; they're probably coming out ahead.
Unfortunately, surveillance capitalism and enshittification are directly at odds with the second goal, constantly shoving shit in my face when I'm just trying to watch a favorite show on a streaming service. If Spotify allowed users to remove podcasts and audiobooks and opt out of their payola recommendation system, it might be tempting. But their offline experience is also trash, as is most of their UX, and you can tell their goal is not to make a good music player. But of course you basically have no choice but to use their crappy, nonperformant app, especially on mobile, and exclusively if you want any level of offline playback support (inferior as it may be).
The third goal mostly has issues in older TV shows: when shows lose the rights to their original music, the replacement is... not correct. When you have your own copy, it can't change out from under you. The same logic applies to scenes: while I don't approve of the use of blackface in certain sketches in Scrubs, it doesn't feel right to me to just... erase those things. Sometimes whole episodes disappear! I think a disclaimer on the episode description, or maybe a footnote subtitle on problematic scenes, would be a better way to say "we don't approve of this; learn from it" while not disrespecting the original artist.
Used blurays and CDs are remarkably cheap these days. bandcamp provides a way to pay artists with minimal carveouts right from your home. Streaming services have garbage UIs that disrespect you no matter how much you pay for the Ultra Premium 4K Family Plus tier. Jellyfin is so superior it's laughable.
Truly this is the crux. I happily paid for Netflix when it was frictionless to see what you wanted. I turned back to piracy when the streaming environment fractured into... gestures broadly this mess.
Games have been solved. Even if Steam would disappear tomorrow, the market has plenty of alternatives that have the same or similar frictionless experiences. I can buy nearly all games in any online storefront, not just a select few that happen to hold the rights for that week.
I was playing around on Soulseek chats as a teen nearly 15 years ago. I cant believe it's still around!
Actual researchers often have to pay the publisher to make their papers open access.
Hey, so I've been really looking into this lately. Even more now with streaming services raising their prices to be greedy more and more.
Do I need a dedicated PC? Would it make it easier? I have one sitting around that's not too old since I upgraded recently.
iTunes and Amazon both have DRM-free music and a far wider selection.
I Googled the movie, looked at the providers, saw Google and Apple as options to rent the movie for $3.99. It doesn't seem that much slower than piracy. This doesn't seem like a service problem at this point. Piracy is just so easy today and it has the price benefit that if someone knows how to pirate, I think it's quite hard for a legitimate business to compete.
I pay for most things, but attempts to avoid contributing to the profits of certain horrifying companies might lead me to choose a different way sometimes.
(I don't seem to be able to avoid them when it comes to book purchases, but that industry is uniquely fucked.)
In the words of Gabe Newell, "piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem". I pay for convenience and a good user experience, and if I'm not getting that then I don't pay.
I don't pirate ANY games anymore because Steam is just incredibly convenient (plus I like multiplayer co-op stuff and that just doesn't work with pirated copies). It also helps that I know the publisher/devs get a sizeable cut of my purchase there so I'm actually supporting them.
For shows and movies, the only streaming service I use is Prime Video but that's only because it comes with Prime, and even then I still need to put up with ads. Anything on any other streaming platform that I really want to see can usually be found on a free streaming site within a few minutes (though you have to be careful not to click on ads with those).
For anime, the only major anime streaming platform for the West is Crunchyroll, but their selection's limited and the streaming quality's mid and the subtitles aren't always good and very little if any of the money they make goes back to the anime studios. Plus, they've been working with Japanese publishers to very aggressively crack down on unaffiliated anime streaming sites, which is understandable from a business perspective but still rankles the Western anime community. After the last streaming site I was using went down last month I've just decided to torrent all the things I want to watch, and I've set it up so that I automatically download the latest episodes as they're uploaded so it's still pretty convenient. I'll support anime studios more directly by buying merch for shows I'm really into, but Crunchyroll isn't getting shit from me.
one of the other benefits of the Android TV boxes like NVIDIA Shield TV Pro, Onn, and Homatics is that they take care of some of the UI / UX things you would have to figure out for a PC.
A lot of things would be pretty easy to figure out, but it's one less thing to worry about. Stuff like a TV like remote control, what do you see when you turn it on, what does it look like to find, navigate through, and play the stuff you want to see or listen to? How do you watch YT without ads?
It's not that difficult on PC, especially with cross platform software like Stremio and Kodi, and keyboard + mouse + TV remote will be fine.
But for me, even as someone who likes to tinker with stuff, I found the user experience and workflow much easier with an Android TV box.
Much much easier for anyone else that comes over that wants to use it - mostly just point and click.