this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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I don't live in the US, so my ISP doesn't really seem to care what I torrent, but the megathread vehemently recommends to always use one. Since VPNs aren't cheap and I'm on a strict budget (wouldn't pirate otherwise), is it really that dangerous to torrent without one?

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[–] JasSmith@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Just an FYI: for the cost of a VPN, you can buy a Usenet subscription. Depending on your content, you'll get far better speeds, far more privacy, far more content, and far more availability.

[–] ivanafterall@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If you're open to paying a few bucks, look into Real-Debrid.

[–] FoodDude@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Nice, I'll check them out.

[–] Noxvento@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Real-debrid is amazing for its cost. (3 euros/month)

[–] kavides@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Where would be a good place to go to learn more about UseNet? Are there any resources you prefer?

[–] JasSmith@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

It is unfortunately a Reddit link: https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/wiki/index

My recommendation is to subscribe to Eweka when it's on promotion. I pay around $3/month since I pay for a year up front, and it recurs for that price.

Secondly, pay for NZBGeek.

Between those two you're mostly set. If you really start using your subscriptions a lot, you can look into alternate backbones and indexers.

You can automate all of this with Radarr and Sonarr. They are my favourite pieces of software ever.

[–] ramboteng@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are there quality x265 rips like QxR on usenet?

[–] JasSmith@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Yes but it's not quite as easy. For example, QxR generally releases everything on 1337. On Usenet you're going to get a mix of re-ups, remixes from various groups, new groups you haven't heard of, and they might be on various indexers. Generally speaking, I have no issues finding a good quality x265 rip, but I might have to try a couple if I haven't heard of the release team. For this reason I've configured preferences in Radarr and Sonarr which will preference QxR, for example. I also include public torrent trackers.

[–] Overzeetop@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I used to be all over usenet. Starting about 10-12 years ago most of the indexers turned to shit; either that or takedowns have eviscerated the back catalog of content from providers. I've yet to find a good tracker that can find anything (that's more than 12-24 hours old).

[–] xenos@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago
[–] Parallax@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

I wish I had gotten into Usenet back in the day. I feel like I missed out on a big part of the early internet.

[–] JC@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

I use usenet, but I find that I have a lot of issues finding content in other language than English. Also, finding rarer content is harder too. So I also use torrents to complete what I can't find over usenet. To this day I would like to get content in French, but it's hard.
This means that I still need a torrenting setup with VPN.