It was so easy when I was growing up. I would just type my search into LimeWire and if it turned out to be weird porn I would delete it. Then we had The Pirate Bay, and I could go through reviews to see whether something was a virus or not. Now all public sites I am aware of are riddled with viruses, and I am warned that attempting to download any of them will result in me receiving threatening letters from copyrights holders in the post.
Here is what I have discovered today, trying to pirate things again:
The safest thing you can do is direct download from file share websites, but nobody says where these websites are.
If you want to torrent files, you need to subscribe to an exclusive private tracker. To get access to a private tracker, you need to get lucky, or you need to go through a painstaking process of levelling up over months and months of seeding torrents from semi-private trackers until you get to an actual good one that may or may not have the content you are looking for.
If you don’t want to do this, you need to pay for a UseNet provider, then you need to register for a similarly exclusive UseNet index service, probably paid as well. There is no guarantee you will find what you are looking for on here either, and there is a chance that your download will fail.
Whether you are using torrents or UseNet, you need a service to help you find the content in the first place, for example Sonarr, Radarr or Lidarr. Something called Jackett also fits into this somehow and apparently links to whatever indexes you are using.
If you are torrenting, you then need a torrent client such as qBitTorrent to actually get the files.
If you are using UseNet, you need a UseNet downloader such as jdownloader.
Alternatively, for either option you can pay for a Debrid service such as Real-Debrid or Premiumize to download the files for you, if you send them the links. Besides protecting your privacy and your bandwidth, these services are also great for bypassing the limits on the elusive direct download sites nobody can tell me any more about.
I don’t really think of myself as a stupid person but this shit is so confusing. It is harder than paying for drugs on the dark web with illegal crypto currency. Am I nearly there? Is this everything? If I pay for a UseNet provider and somehow register for a UseNet index, is it as simple as connecting the two together to something such as Sonarr to find the content and jdownloader to get it?
Am I the only one that still just uses a VPN with Pirate Bay and Magnetdl? I only download videos and music, no games, and I’m finding 98%of what I want in the resolution I want. Is it really worth setting up the rest of it?
I already am self hosting everything. I have an 8TB drive over half full at the moment, and filling up fast now that I have a 4K TV. I also have an Openvpn server so that I can access my content when I’m away. I’ve had this setup since before torrents were even a thing.
Hold fire on that 4K business, if you haven’t yet I recommend you do a test to see if you can actually tell the difference between Torrent 1080p & Torrent 4K. Out of my friends & family on a few can see a difference, but if they can they do say T4K looks better, but only slightly. So weigh up if the 2x or 3x larger file is worth the improvement.
Sorry if I sound aggressive or preach-y, just trying to save a fellow sailor some space on their ship is all.
It’s only select movies that I’m getting in 4K, and any Star Trek that comes out in 4K or maybe the Star Wars 4K77 fan edit that was just released. But even then, they add up fast. I can barely tell the difference, but for some stuff I just want the best available.
Edit: I also did this when 720p VS 1080p was a thing. For a vast majority of stuff, 720p is fine and I’m not going to update that stuff. Most stuff released today isn’t even available or 720p anymore, so I’ve defaulted to 1080p for most new stuff.
1337x usually has whatever I need. Although I mostly just pirate games and the occasional movie or series. I don’t have fuck you money to run a data center in my garage
Everything else just makes it easier to manage which depending on your preferences and how much content you’re dealing with that may not be a problem for you. I run the whole stack using Deluge as my downloader with a VPN. Radarr, Sonarr, and Lidarr automatically locate the torrents on the public tracker sites for me, send the downloads to Deluge, and imports the media into Jellyfin when the download finishes. I also use Jellyseer for discovering and requesting content, as well as allowing family members to request content. I also use Prowlarr to manage the trackers being used in the various arr apps. It’s a very robust and automated system but it all boils down to just downloading torrents over a VPN.
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Am I the only one that still just uses a VPN with Pirate Bay and Magnetdl? I only download videos and music, no games, and I’m finding 98%of what I want in the resolution I want. Is it really worth setting up the rest of it?
Try stremio w/realdebrid and torrentio unless you want to self host this is the way
I already am self hosting everything. I have an 8TB drive over half full at the moment, and filling up fast now that I have a 4K TV. I also have an Openvpn server so that I can access my content when I’m away. I’ve had this setup since before torrents were even a thing.
Hold fire on that 4K business, if you haven’t yet I recommend you do a test to see if you can actually tell the difference between Torrent 1080p & Torrent 4K. Out of my friends & family on a few can see a difference, but if they can they do say T4K looks better, but only slightly. So weigh up if the 2x or 3x larger file is worth the improvement.
Sorry if I sound aggressive or preach-y, just trying to save a fellow sailor some space on their ship is all.
It’s only select movies that I’m getting in 4K, and any Star Trek that comes out in 4K or maybe the Star Wars 4K77 fan edit that was just released. But even then, they add up fast. I can barely tell the difference, but for some stuff I just want the best available.
Edit: I also did this when 720p VS 1080p was a thing. For a vast majority of stuff, 720p is fine and I’m not going to update that stuff. Most stuff released today isn’t even available or 720p anymore, so I’ve defaulted to 1080p for most new stuff.
1337x usually has whatever I need. Although I mostly just pirate games and the occasional movie or series. I don’t have fuck you money to run a data center in my garage
I found TheRarbg to have better results compared to 1337.
And often 1337 is not accessible… probably because of cloudflare
Everything else just makes it easier to manage which depending on your preferences and how much content you’re dealing with that may not be a problem for you. I run the whole stack using Deluge as my downloader with a VPN. Radarr, Sonarr, and Lidarr automatically locate the torrents on the public tracker sites for me, send the downloads to Deluge, and imports the media into Jellyfin when the download finishes. I also use Jellyseer for discovering and requesting content, as well as allowing family members to request content. I also use Prowlarr to manage the trackers being used in the various arr apps. It’s a very robust and automated system but it all boils down to just downloading torrents over a VPN.