Title, I haven’t Yo ho ho’d in forever in internet time… What/where do I need to start again? I’m tired of ads and 3+ streaming services to watch stuff that’s interesting. Running windows. Thanks dudes and dudettes.

    • Yodan@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      3 months ago

      My guy, I am 2 kids deep since I last hit the high seas, I am absolutely lost on what plugins or sites or programs I need to even begin. Maybe be a bit helpful instead of insulting lost people? I’ll use the megathread link the other people posted.

      • Bronzie@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        You’ll be fine mate.

        I re-hoisted the flag after a decade and two minions myself this year. The old ways still work fine, but there’s also a ton of new things to make life easier.

        Check out the .arr suite, burn uTorrent and get Qbittorrent and try out Jellyfin.

        Feel free to ask me directly if you need some pointers.

    • growsomethinggood ()@reddthat.com
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      3 months ago

      Is this a community, or is this a circlejerk? I don’t think categorizing beginners who don’t know where to start as leeches creates the kind of environment people of all knowledge levels want to spend time in. You don’t personally have to educate them, but telling them off for asking is pretty rude.

  • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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    3 months ago

    My main suggestion is to search whatever you want with Yandex.com - unlike Google, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Brave, etc etc, Yandex doesn’t delist piracy sites. So, “bookname pdf” will almost always return a good result. “some anime or movie name watch online” will also work.

    Oh, and use uBlockOrigin. Ditch Chrome, use Firefox or anything that still makes uBlock works in full capacity.

  • فریدون حسینی@vegantheoryclub.org
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    3 months ago

    Go to a host like feralhost and rent a seed box. This gives you a webhosted transmission to paste magnet links in from any torrent site. Then you connect with filezilla over sftp, no vpn or nonsense needed and its all super fast because the torrenting is done from a data center and you download only from there over encrypted ssh at max speed when its finished.

    • Randomgal@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      You have to do this under the full moon of the longest day of summer too. Otherwise it doesn’t work.

    • BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      Do you trust your seed box provider to not rat you out? Or at the very least not have identifying information on you that will be seized in a raid?

      How do you do this with zero trust towards any provider? I mean unless you hijack a neighbors wifi, any provider can fuck up their OPSEC and get you burned.

      • فریدون حسینی@vegantheoryclub.org
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        3 months ago

        I don’t live in a place that would raid an international hosting provider. In my county no one is ever going to come after me for using a seed box to download tv and movies. I simply do not need to worried about being ratted out.

        • BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works
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          2 months ago

          I don’t know to what extent law enforcement would go to catch a pirate in Denmark. But a guy just got 30days for seeding about 800 movies, so I’m not taking any chances. If I was ever to use p2p, and this is purely theoretical, I would find a public (or open private) wifi, use an external wifi adapter and a virtual machine that doesn’t contain any personal information.

          • فریدون حسینی@vegantheoryclub.org
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            2 months ago

            Seeding is different than downloading though and the seed box service is in another jurisdiction doing that where it is legal. I only connect to a proxy up with ssh and download data to my actual home, never upload. As far as my jurisdiction is concerned I haven’t seeded anything, just downloaded encrypted data from a datacenter ip.

            I live in latam so my government isn’t enforcing pretty much anything though.

    • khorovodoved@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      That’s just VPN with extra steps. Why not just set up a SOCKS5/Shadowsocks/wireguard/whatever on any hosting and get a lot better experience?

      • CoopaLoopa@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 months ago

        Pretty sure most hosting platforms have egress costs on their cheaper VM instances.

        I know Google cloud charges for bandwidth to AUS, and Oracle is 10TB of egress per month before charging (which I think is the most generous of free/cheap hosting platforms).

      • فریدون حسینی@vegantheoryclub.org
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        3 months ago

        In my country I don’t get good upstream internet so I can still have good ratios on torrent sites and the private trackers I use. The prices on the dedicated seed box services can’t be beat for bandwidth and for someone with kids it’s already all set up.

        • lud@lemm.ee
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          3 months ago

          OP is new to this so they won’t have access to private trackers anyway.

        • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          3 months ago

          FWIW if you have a seed box which you can ssh into, you can setup a SOCKS5 proxy to route all traffic through the seed box. It’ll act like a VPN for you and is the best of both worlds in my opinion. This way your ISP and government can’t block your traffic or see that you’re accessing trackers at all (even to get the magnet links).

    • PancakeBrock@lemmy.zip
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      3 months ago

      Been doing this for like 2 years. It’s great and the entire family can easily use it.

      Edit: But have stremio on a Chromecast.

  • sodamnfrolic@lemmy.sdf.org
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    3 months ago

    I recently started paying for debrid services (I use real debrid, but there are others) and couldn’t be happier. Got an app called Stremio on my TV and after adding the credentials, everything just works - easy & fast like the streaming services.

    It also allows you to download torrents much faster than torrenting them, especially if not many people seed them.

    Oh, and if you ever need to download something from Rapidshare or whatever other websites like that it does that too.

    Honestly, I should’ve started paying for it earlier.

  • metaStatic@kbin.earth
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    3 months ago

    if you’re in Australia ignore all VPN advice. Companies can only come after you for the cost of a single copy of whatever you pirate making it functionally legal here.

    Torrents are your best bet for now because they are super easy.

    Usenet is a paid service, absolutely worth it but you’re paying for at least 2 different services to make it work and setting up a whole bunch of software. Just steer clear of the Arr suite until torrents fail you (and they will)

    • r00ty@kbin.life
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      3 months ago

      Well, I would say bittorrent with a good vpn or, usenet with a good indexer and depending on how much you download, block account vs monthly.

      Personally I top up all my block accounts whenever I see a sale. With priority set from cheapest per gig to most expensive (so the pricey ones are only used as fillers).

      But that does involve paying some money, but then doesn’t really require a vpn. In the long term I don’t think I’m paying that much though.

        • lud@lemm.ee
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          3 months ago

          What? Those are used for downloading. Can you even stream using those? (Well you obviously can with Jellyfin but you stream downloaded content so that doesn’t count)

        • dan@upvote.au
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          3 months ago

          IMO music makes more sense to download than movies. You might only watch a movie once or twice. Music files are smaller and you’re much more likely to listen to them multiple times.

          For movies and TV shows, streaming using Real Debrid is way more convenient.

      • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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        3 months ago

        Jellyseer doesn’t have a Windows installer as far as I know.

        Bazarr seemed useful but most stuff comes with subtitles anyway, and every time Bazarr grabs them for me, they’re inevitably out of sync because they’re for a slightly different version. I normally have to go to opensubtitles and grab a few until I find the right one. It’s probably more useful if you require subs in a language other than English.

        • lud@lemm.ee
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          3 months ago

          I use bazarr primarily because the included subs are often vobsub which works very poorly on my TV.

          Also you can adjust the requirements Bazarr uses for downloading subs and automatically sync the subs if need be.

        • overload@sopuli.xyz
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          3 months ago

          Docker can be the install method for windows, and the whole suite of these apps. Probably the neatest way to go? Typically one installs this suite on a NAS that’s running 24/7.

          • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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            3 months ago

            I tried docker for Windows and it was pure pain. Not sure I’d recommend it for a beginner when the windows installers exist for most of it.

            • overload@sopuli.xyz
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              3 months ago

              Yeah sure, the *arr suite in general is a bit advanced to set up, even if it can be done in 30 minutes with experience.

  • Yodan@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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    3 months ago

    On a side note I’ve been using Google to find streaming sites by typing “free full stream” and then the title I want, and scrolling down the search to the DMCA Complaints. They have a lovely list of sites that have your movies and shows, thanks Google!

  • SteveNSFW@yall.theatl.social
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    3 months ago

    Recognize that there may be some costs involved: hard drives, a raspberry pi, VPN/VPS/seedbox, even just electricity.

    Get a good VPN and use it for any torrenting you do from home. Nord is not a good VPN. (unless your government doesn’t care or you use a seed box, then do whatever)

    Use public torrent trackers if you have to but: If you have some private torrent tracker accounts from yore, try to get them re-activated. Surprisingly they may have your old info. This will probably require IRC. If not, look into interviewing with RED, OPS, or MAM to learn the ropes, then use them to get invited into movie/TV/general PTs.

    If you don’t like the sound of torrenting look into newsgroups. This will cost money in two ways: a newsgroup account and a news indexer.

    Check out the arr suite, especially radarr and sonarr, to automatically get what you are interested in.

      • Policeshootout@lemmy.ca
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        3 months ago

        I think it’s mostly to do with their advertising tactics and misleading people in what their service is actually doing.

        They also had a data breach and did not handle it well.

        Maybe there’s other stuff I don’t remember… I’ve never used them, I’ve been on Mullvad for some years now but considering proton next.

        • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          3 months ago

          I’ve been using it for a while and had no idea it didn’t support port forwarding! I know it’s important for torrenting, but my private tracker ratios are all 2:1 or more (my record is 6:1)

          I should read up on why it’s important.

          • ShepherdPie@midwest.social
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            3 months ago

            Because the people in your private trackers have port forwarding enabled so a connection is still made but someone else who hasn’t setup port forwarding won’t be able to connect to you.

          • Klopstock@feddit.org
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            3 months ago

            The Problem with not having Port forwarding is that you can only connect to people which have port forwarding. That means If the seeds are also using no port forwarding you cannot download/upload.

  • averyminya@beehaw.org
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    3 months ago

    Why pay someone else to run a service that you’d have been paying Netflix for.

    That’s how I feel about Usenet tbh. If you’re going to pay, actually pay to support the shows you’re watching. IMO.

    Otherwise you build a server PC and set it up for the *arr suite, Radarr, Sonarr and the rest. It’s the cost of your internet and your electricity after the upfront cost of your server.

    Bonus: you have it when your internet is down, since they’re downloaded to the hard drive.

    • Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 months ago

      I’m of a similar opinion but really it depends on the user’s wants.

      I personally don’t care for an easy app like interface. My set up is literally just wireless keyboard and mouse in the living room and a pc hooked up to my TV. I just stream stuff from ‘free’ sites online. It’s not much effort really. I’m not usually interested in checking out movies and shows the moment they release, I can wait a couple weeks or months for them to pop up in good quality on those sites.

  • oddsignal@eviltoast.org
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    3 months ago

    The strong bias seems to be toward Torrents instead of USENET? Why? Cost of providers with decent retention?

    I always assume that Usenet (with anonymous payment and a separate VPN) is a safer option than torrenting since I’m not the one publishing / sharing content. A copyright holder would have to go after that Usenet host (with a general court order), extract logs from them (if they exist), figure out who was actually infringing on copyright, then go after the VPN provider, to deanonymize me.

    • dan@upvote.au
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      3 months ago

      Usenet is great, but it’s a client-server model, and things can be deleted from the servers (e.g. due to DMCA requests). The copyright agencies for very popular content automatically send DMCA and NTD takedowns for them.

      On the other hand, torrents are peer-to-peer. They’re practically impossible to shut down since there’s no central server in control of everything. You don’t even need a torrent file, just a magnet URI, which can be generated by anyone that already has the torrent.

      Usenet is much better for rare/unpopular/uncommon content, since good providers have thousands of days of retention, whereas an unpopular torrent from 5 years ago would likely have 0 seeds left.