For me, piracy isn’t about the cost. I’ve spent 1000’s 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 I’d 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 it’s 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 world’s music, modern and historical, and the audio quality is more than reasonable.
It’s 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.
they “watch what they want, when they want, where they want, and they don’t pay for it.”
Damn. Are these guys trying to sell me on being a striminal now?
Whoever wrote that was definitely giggling to themselves as they were typing.
I’m pretty sure it was written by Strong Bad.
I’ll start paying when they stop being racist with their region locks.
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.
When no one was looking, the striminal watched forty episodes. He watched 40 episodes. That’s as many as four tens. And that’s terrible.
Hell yeah
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
Yar, I don’ be likin’ this new diction, “striminal.” I’ll be a pirate ‘till me dyin’ day.
Lets find whoever coined this doubloon and make them walk the plank!
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.
Lmk if you have any questions :)
Of course not. I’m a law abiding citizen, I’m not smart or sexy enough to commit copyright infringement.
Only 69%? Nice. Thought it would be way higher though. I mean. The youngest of us are almost 30 now.
I’m a streamennial, but I know a few streazoomers, and also few bootreams.
what they want, when they want, where they want
Saying this as if any current streaming service or even Netflix in its prime actually fulfilled this requirement.
Stremio with torrentio. Powered by torrents.
If you want some live channels on Stremio, look for an add on called Moveonjoy
