Honestly im not even angery at Facebook for illegally torrenting 81tb of books from Libgen, im pissed that Facebook torrented 81tb of books from libgen and then didnt seed (apperantly they didnt want to be caught but they could have used a vpn like the rest of us).
Streaming services donât sell content, they sell convenient access to content, and itâs been getting less convenient as time goes on. So less people feel like itâs worth paying them.
Also just overall shittier. Every time I stream something these days, it's pretty much guaranteed to pause/buffer or atomatically lower the quality even over fiber. I'm not going to pay for a subpar product.
Watching videos off a PLEX server or other private local network
Watching freemium with ad blockers
I'm sure I'm missing a few more. But there are so many ways to watch - even without explicit piracy - that the MPAA considers should be deemed illegal because they're not getting paid per viewer.
I'm Gen X and I've been pirating since we bought a second VCR when I was a kid and used it to duplicate tapes and then return them to the rental store. Then they added copy protection, so we got a dual-deck VCR that beat it. Then DVDs came out, so we got a dual-deck DVD copier.
Did I mention that my dad was a film historian?
He also would sometimes xerox entire books for himself. And he got himself a CD duplicator and a cassette duplicator later on and started doing the same thing with CDs and audiobooks he got from the library.
Miss you, dad. You would love torrenting if you could figure it out.
I swear I saw an article a while back of someone who set up a multi-SD card reader with an obnoxious number of SD cards as an external drive. I can't find it now but I think that's the only way I could afford that much storage.
Thatâs correct, youâre a âpirateâ matey. Thereâs also a rising trend in using these iptv apps some else is hosting and theyâre desperate to find a bad name to give them, I believe this is what the article is aimed at
For me, piracy isnât about the cost. Iâve spent 1000âs of dollars on home servers, Apple TVs, NAS, hard drives, Usenet/VPN subscriptions, and indexer subscriptions. Not to mention all the extra time it takes to set up and keep everything running.
I do it because I get a higher quality product. The last time I did the math, for the size of my collection and the cost of everything Iâd spent would be the equivalent to having paid $10/Blue-ray for what I have.
I also do have many streaming services through different bundles, but the low bitrates and constant switching of services means itâs harder to find and lower quality to watch than just adding something in Radarr and playing it in Plex.
On the other hand I legally stream music all the time and am very happy with the product. You pick one provider of your choice, pay a reasonable price, get access to nearly all the worldâs music, modern and historical, and the audio quality is more than reasonable.
Itâs on the movie and TV industry to fix their piracy problem. The music industry has even provided them a template.
For me its not so much quality as it is control. I set things up exactly the way I want with exactly the content I want and I know it's not going to suddenly change tomorrow. This is why I dont go for streaming unless it's from a server I control.
In the early days of streaming it wasn't quite as bad. A few licenses did expire, but it wasn't like most things were just going to disappear overnight. And Netflix started out with strong original programming, so there was still always value.
Now, though even though I've spent a lot of money on my server and a lot of time futzing with it, it's worth it to me compared to futzing around figuring out which streaming service has the license this week for the show I want to watch.
Plus, unless I totally lose my Plex/Jellyfin database (has happened before as I've tinkered around learning things), my watch history stays with me. I can pick up a show where I left off, even years later. Not true if a show moves to another streaming service.
I view it kinda like the trade-off paying for anything vs DIY. Sometimes it's worth paying a premium to hire someone, especially if it's way outside your skill set. Other times you interview contractors, and either the price is way high, or you get the sense they have no clue what they're doing and will wreck your project. If you DIY then there's a learning curve and you won't always get everything right, but you have total control.
I've stolen all my content since the 90s, never stopped. When a service for TV and movies like Steam comes along, I'll consider buying.
But know what? Such a service can't exist. Hollywood has spent too many dollars on Rube Goldberg machinations to protect their copyrights that it's a Bulgarian clusterfuck. Welp, fine by me, not my problem.
You know, I nearly stopped piracy entirely for a brief period, back when Netflix was top dog of streaming platforms.
Didn't last very long...
Now I don't pay for any subscription platform but one; Humble Monthly. All series and movies I either watch with friends through a dedicated Jellyfin server (owned by one of those friends) or through stremio.
I'm in college, and a lot of striminals don't pirate streaming services like Netflix, but instead pirate live sports streams, because the legal alternative is pay like $70/mo for an ad-infested service. Nobody is paying that.
Pay a ridiculous amount ($479 for a season of NFL Sunday Ticket right now) and still maybe not be able to watch the game due to blackouts. Or this one is on ESPN. Or this one is on Amazon. Can't watch this one just because fuck you. This one is in London and requires a subscription only accessible in one county of England.
The reason why I don't pay for a lot of media is because, if I pay for it I won't be able to watch what, when, where and how I want to.
If I could buy movies and TV series as h265 files with high bandwidth and no DRM I would pay for it.
I would also pay for streaming if it had all content available, no DRM that forces me to use Chrome to watch anything higher than 720p and a good interface.
But those things will never happen because executives are too greedy.
They don't even respect the integrity films and shows themselves anymore. Now in later releases they'll remove the music that was selected by the director to best pair with a scene, simply because they don't want to keep paying royalties for releases of old movies. And that's if they don't just stop selling them all together.
It's sadly been an issue for several decades with TV. Older TV shows used in re-runs would often have the original music replaced if it was anything by big bands because they didn't want to continue paying those royalties. They'd even sell DVDs with lousy replacement music instead.
Yuuup. Or they'll remove "problematic" storylines. Part of why it's not only morally justified, but morally imperative to pirate your favorite shows. Won't be long before Disney is erasing all the gays from all the shows because the current administration wants them to
The way this is phrased makes it sound like more than a third (60% of 69%) of millenials only ever consume media through piracy, which I find very hard to believe.
What seems more likely to me is that the survey asked people if they have ever used piracy and now they're trying to make this seem like a much bigger deal through misleading phrasing.
I haven't seen those posters, but those are also quite telling about their world view.
Piracy sites can and do expose people to all kinds of nasty stuff, but everyone knows (or should know) that and they take the risk anyway.
The media companies would rather assume that's because people are evil and like to steal things, than to do a little introspection and see it's their own bad service driving customers to piracy.
There's even a great case study for this in another type of media: Steam, despite its faults, has almost eradicated game piracy.
Piracy is an access problem.
I have the same trio (Stremio + Torrentio + Real Debrid) setup and it works great. You might need to relink Real Debrid and Stremio--it happened to me once when I let my Real-Debrid subscription lapse for a bit.
My main thing that pushes me towards being a striminal is that every service has all exclusive content.
If I wasn't too watch star trek or star wars, hello Disney+. Stranger things? Netflix. The list is long, I won't bore you with what you're probably aware of.
Moving to bring a striminal, as they say, you can watch what you want, when you want, where you want. You get everything in one place, and don't have to flip flop between services to simply see what's available.
The cost of all of the services is a problem, sure, because it's so damn costly for all of them combined. But that's not my primary factor. It's just so damned inconvenient to maintain so many disconnected accounts, and agglutinate all of the information into a sensible list of what's new or available across all services.
I just want it to be easy and they've intentionally made it not easy.
I won't comment if, or how many Linux ISOs I may or may not have.
Seriously, they make it seem like this is new.
Been a pirate since the early days of Napster.
Hell, was pirating DOS games on floppy in the early 90's.
Video stream pirating is just the latest form, and won't be the last.
Strongly reccomend using Jellyfin for your media libraries. Even if you don't have a dedicated server and just want to watch on a pc, it works better than VLC.
Doesn't jellyfin require connecting to a server to even work though? Most VLC features work anywhere without any connection, obviously streaming would require a connection still.
You can fire up the server on your PC and just connect to it; so yeah, it does need a server, but it can be ran and connected to locally, just plug in the IP address it makes into a browser on the machine your running it on. The only reason I personally have a dedicated server for Jellyfin is because I frequently switch operating systems on my main PC
The reason its better is because it unironically has a better frontend than most steaming platforms. The streaming client is the same thing you'd get with a Netflix or a Hulu and it has the basic stuff like saving your place not just in episode but with timestamp, but the cool shit is: it fetches descriptions, thumbnail, cast, genre, and etc for anything you throw at it, and you can filter your library by genre, the director, and even the cast members, and it fetches this automatically upon it scanning new media.
There's not anything that hulu/Netflix do that Jellyfin can't, it categorizes seasons under shows in the same way, and all it requires is that the names are somewhat right. I've only had to fix the names of like 3 pieces of media, and I usually just throw the raw torrent filename at the server. Just make sure you have all of the episodes in a folder with the same name as the show.
You also should be able to connect any device on your network to the Jellyfin server with just an IP address, even though its not running on a dedicated server. You can connect to it on your phone, and if you have a smart TV anywhere in your house it almost definitely has a Jellyfin app; i got a roku in my bedroom and an androidtv in my living room and they both work fine.
I will say tho, this will only work if everything is on the same network. Depending on your router, you MAY be able to port forward the server to (a) specific outside IP address(es); if you want to share it with a different trusted network. You could also just have the port open, so anyone with your IP address could connect, but I cannot understate enough how bad of an idea this is. In general, if you wanna connect from anywhere, it will require VPN bullshit and its honestly really not worth it IMO.
Overall, I think Jellyfin is better than VLC unless its being ran on a laptop, its fr like if Netflix had access to your private library.
Awwww, that's so cute how they side-stepped "... what they want, how they want, "; You know? That bit of it all that we can't buy their way because they won't sell it to us.
Look man, not one goddamn person who worked on Xam'd is getting a red penny from me paying to watch it legally. I'm not gonna reward some corporation whose only contribution was having enough money to buy the rights to make money off of it. Piracy is actually the only ethical way to consume most older media
Yeah, I used a modified Spotify client without ads, uninterrupted skipping, etc. to set random songs as my alarm. I download what I like through various sources, music wise, however to find new artists I use YouTube Music so have a client for that too (I have random tastes, and over the years got into artists who never really made it big at all: YT is good for the very obscure stuff most folks would call "people screaming into the mic" which, I mean, I guess it is but it could be music too..)
I forget the one exactly, however it's usually posted on the Mobilism forums by the dev. That site has a good amount of apps with ads and such stripped.