this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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Streaming:
-Charges you unreasonable amount of money
-If you cancel the subscription, you lose it all
-If they change the terms, you may lose access to some of the things in your library
Torrent:
-Costs a grand total of 0$
-Allows you to retain content for eternity
-Requires a 5 second effort to enter the name of a show/film in Sonarr/Radarr
The choice is clear.
lol I'm like 20 clicks into Sonarr's website and I still cant find a simple answer: what is Sonarr?
Agreed. I found it a bit disappointing they skipped to the highlights without describing the big picture first. This is from their GitHub:
Took a buttload of Googling to just figure out what PVR stands for lol... and I'm still not sure I got it right. Seems like it's Personal Video Recording??
My main gripe with torrent is that there isn't always a seeder available. This is a major issue if you're looking for a movie that isn't mainstream. There are pirate streaming services but we know that the quality is not usually great. Even if you download from torrent, the quality is not also always great either. I definitely noticed difference in video and sound quality between torrent and what you get from "mainstream" sources. Some torrent say they're 4k or HD quality, but many files are actually cropped so that uploading and downloading is faster.
Edit: Grammar and wording
Torrent:
-Unless your a millennial with really good memory... requires a (usually) a good paid VPN + 3 hours of reading and setup so you dont get nasty letters from your ISP.
-Requires requisite ports and knowledge of how to get the shows to your TV
-ideally requires a standalone PC, which most households no longer have
-Requires knowledge of additional programs that need to be researched and have paid competition
-Requires knowledge of how to find the source material, with huge gatekeeping between source pools
I am probably forgetting other stuff, especially for Gen Z and now the oldest Gen Alpha. But if I as a millennial feel it's a burden to relearn the steps for something I already was doing a decade or so ago. That must be a massive bar for someone who never had their hand in it, so to speak.
I am not saying it's impossible, just I haven't found a straight forward guide from beginning to end, with all the new technology included. And the first time they get a love note from their ISP, they will likely just stop.
Edit: The vastly different responses with different solutions, only proves to me that this is more complex than people let on. You have some people giving services that weren't mentioned in the OP in euros (not that there is anything wrong with Europe, just a different experience. Do EU IPs even send love notes? Then you get a mix of people saying what the best VPN is and other people saying you don't even need a VPN. Just so much different information, is it surprising that people could feel overwhelmed?
This is the age of information. It would take a grand total of a few hours for the average person to watch a video to give them all the knowledge they need to avoid the pitfalls you listed.
People are afraid and lazy, it's easy to let fear control your decisions.
I think the age of information has passed. If you try googling/search engine any of this you get scraps of information that don't tie well together.
All I am saying is I could see people throwing up their hands and thinking it's too confusing or dangerous.
Information is everywhere, but so is misinformation now. There's LOTS of AI-generated articles out there telling people nothing helpful, or straight-up incorrect answers from Google searches.
We have a Piracy board on Lemmy with a beginner's guide.
So you are mostly wrong here, I'll let you know my setup that costs me $15 a month.
A 4 core 8GB VPS: $5 a month. Unlimited cloud Storage: €10 a month.
I have Emby (Use jellyfin, I haven't changed out of laziness), Sonarr, Radarr, Jellyseerr all running on a VPS with caddy running a reverse_proxy to point a domain at emby via HTTPS.
No need for VPNs, but you can run OpenVPN on your VPS for maximum value for money if you want to use a high speed VPN.
It's all very straight forward to setup on Ubuntu 20.04 with lots of documentation. My server has been up for 3 months now and I have had 0 issues, friends use jellyseerr to requests shows and movies. Everything else is automated. Can even import lists from IMDb.
Make sure if you want to save space to use h.265 encoding where possible. Additionally, if you don't want to torrent you can use newservers. But that will cost an additional $10 a month.
Where are you getting a 4 core 8GB VPS for $5 a month with unlimited bandwidth/CPU time?
All the reputable providers have 1GB, single core shared compute for that price.
When you say VPS, do you mean like an AWS or GCP virtual machine?
Ionos, but I have been grandfathered in with price so you won't be able to get my deal
AWS/GCP is an order of magnitude more expensive for those specs. And they would ban you for downloading copyrighted material without a VPN. So I wouldn't recommend that. I was able to get a similar set up using Linode but the specs were way worse and I couldn't do transcoding, and I didn't torrent using the $5 a month VPS.
It depends on what hardware the host is using, my VPS is capable of transcoding around 4 streams simultaneously.
I have never been in a house with out a pc since the 90s.
My sister, my mother, and my brother all have laptop-exclusive households. Most people these days don’t see a need for a standalone pc when they have a laptop they can take from room to room and costs the same as a desktop.
Not to be pedantic but a laptop is a PC
I know. I said standalone pc to fit the earlier commenter’s point. Desktop would have been the correct choice, but I figured the gist got across. If it was unclear to anybody, I apologize.
No need to apologise I just wanted to clear things up for anyone reading the thread.
You can do everything you need to do on an old laptop... you don't need a desktop. You just need to make sure you disable any of the power saving settings so it can stay on all the time but then enable a display-off type of screen saver.
I don’t think most people have an extra laptop sitting around their home. And they definitely aren’t gonna want to do that to their daily driver.
I just don’t think this is feasible for the average person.
That's being very pedantic, if you start typing in Laptop V, it autofills PC on searches. Many homes don't have a desktop, you can do 90% of what you need on mobile nowadays and the other 10% can be done on a laptop.
I don't think it's being pedantic in this case. They're talking about the capabilities of a PC vs something like a mobile phone or a tablet. In this case a laptop is a PC and is fully capable of doing all the things described in this thread.
I mean, most of this is wrong?
What are you reading for 3 hours about a VPN?
Why do you need to know about ports? You can literally put shows on a flash drive and plug it in.
A stand alone PC, why? What? Hell I torrent from my phone sometimes.
A lot of this can be done, but this is not the bar for entry by any means.
Good points, there should be an all-in-one solution which very easily guides you through all the necessary steps
It's not hard. Mullvad is €5/month. In torrent client, set up Mullvad proxy. Go to thepiratebay or any other tracker to download. Watch.
You can also do it on your old laptop and use it as a home media server. Android TV can access network shares, I'm sure some of the others can too.
I guess this is the kind of shit people are talking about. Wtf does this even mean.
The knowledge is extremely easy to obtain though. There are lots of very detailed guides. It's not extremely complex, anyway.
It's just hard to know what information even correctly pertains to me. My comment received a half dozen other comments... some seemingly from the US, others from the EU. Some comments saying every house has a PC (not true) others saying a PC isn't even necessary. Some comments with how to find a good VPN, other comments saying a VPN isn't even necessary. Then I got recommendations for a half dozen different services from various comments with no idea if they are all necessary and how they interact with each other.
It may not be extremely complex, but until you get your feet wet, it sure seems like it is. In my day you downloaded what you wanted off of Kazaa or BearShare or the like and then watched it on your PC with VLC. or if you were really fancy you burned it on CDS or DVDS. Then when the bad emails or letters came in, you just told your parents it was the neighbors.