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Yo ho ho. If purchase is not ownership, then piracy is not theft.
Completely relatable. The prices keep going up with more and more restrictions while being enshittified with ads, tiered service, and paying twice to watch something - the streaming service fee and then a rental fee on top of that, for a movie that might be a decade or more old.
Arr…fuck that.
This is exactly why people fled cable. It was completely predictable the streaming services would enshittify just like cable.
Wife and I live in Germany, but still have some streaming services from our home country in Eastern Europe.
We started a Scream movie marathon on the weekend to catch up on the series, before we watch the newest one in cinema.
We watched the first 2, and half of the 3rd on 28th February Saturday on one of the streaming platforms (SkyShowtime). The next morning (1st of March), the movies were not available anymore.
We finished 3 and watched 4 on Amazon Prime, but within that we had to start a separate subscription for horror movies.
5 was only available in German with no subtitles, so I had to search for another source. Ended up creating a Paramount+ account, downloaded the app, and watched the movie there.
Then back to Amazon Prime, where finished the 6th Scream movie, before heading to the local cinema.
This was the last straw, we decided to go back to sail the seas after a decade of streaming service subscription. Next weekend I will take some time to figure out the setup we need to make this happen safely, as a lot has changed since I left it behind.
Yep. I pirated when I was young because doing things “proper” was more difficult. Then they started having reasonable fees for services that were easy to use without ads.
But now the prices are outrageous, the ads are back, and everything is so fragmented. Piracy is the better user experience again. I was about to set up a NAS and start sailing again, but now storage prices are jumping.
I may just start going outside.
What’s an “outside,” precious?
I think that’s where what they call “grass” is.
Use Jellyfin. I have been running it since the middle of last year and it has been amazing and stable. Have fun.
Yarrlist, cast from PC to tv if available. Or get a browser plugin and download it from the site if you don’t want to go full pirate.
Arrrrr, shipmate! Welcome back to the cove!
Enshitification is the word
You’re not wrong.
I turn full pirate at the first stage already. I despise ads so much.
One thing that I will enjoy with the slow demise of streaming is that the current generation will git gud at IT again. It’s kinda shocking, as an older millenial/xennial, how bad some of the Gen Z’s I work with are with basic IT tasks whereas X’s and M’s are fine with it as we’ve had to deal with Napster and Limewire
Hopefully some. The apathy is strong in this generation
Do what you want, cuz a pirate is free
You ARRRR a pirate!
“This show is not available in your country” is the one that pisses me off the most. The Internet connects the entire world and then we have unnecessary artificial barriers like georestriction for no reason. There’s foreign shows I’ve been wanting to watch but they’re not available on torrents and only on these georestricted platforms so I can’t even watch it even if I’m willing to pay (which I am for few films).
its annoying but a carry over from film distribution rights that are negotiated. I agree these should have been updated by now , and region locks make no sense, unless a government is trying to control its people’s media.
The Internet connects the entire world and then we have unnecessary artificial barriers like georestriction for no reason.
Lawyers negociate rights for media with every country. The reason is money.
What about using a VPN?
Idk if sites have ways to block that now
Even VPN isn’t enough. Ex. One time I wanted to watch a show that’s only available on Amazon Prime India according to justwatch. VPN isn’t enough because I’m using US-based Amazon account and I have to create an Amazon IN account per Amazon’s policies. And for that I need an India phone number for verification. So of course I don’t want to spend money on account setup especially since I don’t know if it’ll work. So I setup Azure VM based in India (in case they use location) but it still got stuck on the phone verification or puzzle loop so there’s nothing I can do unless I find a friend in India and use their account :(
And it wasn’t available on any piracy sites I’m guessing? Yeah that is rough. I know it took me quite some time to track down a copy of the movie Blueberry for similar reasons. (Weird French acid western)
yeah not available on any torrent sites. I checked all of the major ones through Jackett and it returned no results. If you’re curious, the name of the movie is “Kulkarni Chaukatla Deshpande”. There’s a couple movies like that that are available on Amazon Prime India but not on torrent trackers.
Damn I tried looking and for a second I thought I found a free online version for you, but it was actually just “Mrs. Deshpande”
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For piracy I mostly go to those watch online sites with ad block and stuff turned on. I used to torrent but I don’t do that much anymore.
I torrent because I care about quality. I can usually find 4K torrents of stuff I like.
Where are you finding torrents? Been a long time. Is piratebay still a thing?
TPB should be your last resort. If you dig around, you’ll find other sites which are far better.
Any suggestions? This is me digging around!
I recommend installing jackett: https://github.com/Jackett/Jackett
It’s a tool that searches major torrent sites at once and it integrates right into qbitorrent which simplifies things a lot.
Cough (ext) cough (.to)
TPB is good for more mainstream stuff like movies and such. Especially when you recognize the uploader. Downloaded the last two weeks of Last Week Tonight last night and they’re perfect quality.
Piratebay is still around, but it lacks good moderation. I’ve heard that it’s still fine to use for non-executable files such as media.
Same, but oh my god I miss WatchEpisodes. It would track what episodes you had actually watched already. I have a shit memory in some cases and an extra-shit memory when it comes to remembering which episode I watched last lol
If the super-rich don’t want to pay taxes, then why should I pay for subscriptions or watching movies?
The difference between 20 years ago and now is companies have been slowly setting up all the dominoes to make piracy nearly impossible in the near future. I don’t think people are aware of how screwed we really are.
Make it impossible how? I’ve been hearing similar claims for about three decades but have yet to see anything definitive happen.
With the proliferation of age checks, we’re only a couple steps away from “age checks aren’t sufficient to protect our children. We need ISP level whitelisting of sites that obey the law.”
And then if VPNs manage to get around that with any reliability? Well, be ready for the hardware you need to take advantage of it to double every couple of years while the component supply is strangled to death.
Also, moves now to give OPERATING SYSTEM level “age verification” to any site that asks, which will ABSOLUTELY not be done to identify individuals. No sir. Not at all.
The past 30 years have been DRM. The next 30 are gonna be “You can’t access the tools you need to even think about it anymore.”
We’ll be trading them drives then, yarrrr.
Piracy was a thing before the internet and it will be the thing after the internet.
Russia has been trying to make a whitelisted internet for over a decade. It’s still easy to get around their blocks with obfuscated VPNs etc, even my parents can do it. It’s really really difficult to implement this kind of blocks without breaking everything. It’s possible to access the outside net even from China if you know what you’re doing. Worst-case scenario, your local mesh network nerds will hook more and more people up to the network, eventually the town-local movie sharing groups will come back like in the good old days. And even if they shut all that down, movie swapping groups will pop up in big cities - piracy existed long before the internet, after all.
As for the hardware, well, yes, that’s a concern on some level. But then again you can still play DVD-quality movies on 20 year old potatoes with Linux, and DVD-quality is quite watchable if you aren’t too snobby about it. There’s a lot of old computing hardware around, even if no new computers are produced starting now we will be fine for a while just with second-hand parts and dumpster diving. Perhaps the biggest concern for video content specifically is storage, which has a more limited lifetime and is also getting very difficult to find new, but if you’re only aiming at DVD-quality, a few dozen TBs will give you something to watch for the rest of your life.
Impossible how?! There are easy free streaming sites out there, granted do not enter without Adblock on full. Shit, there’s a site that aggregates the free streaming sites and keeps an active list. And then the ever more concise solutions that programmatically download in the background, many of them end in ‘arr’, all from torrents and newsgroups.
Never underestimate motivated humans.
What? It’s easier than ever!
" the game you purchased has been delisted " ’ yahrr mateys ’
The other solution I go for is library media, as well as finding competing streaming services like PBS’s. Just finished Fallout season one off a borrowed DVD.
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Don’t torrent. You put yourself in danger. Get a good Usenet binary subscription.
Torrented two videos yesterday.
Computer hasn’t caught fire yet.
Rookie numbers.
You put yourself in danger.
LOL.
