Title, I haven’t Yo ho ho’d in forever in internet time… What/where do I need to start again? I’m tired of ads and 3+ streaming services to watch stuff that’s interesting. Running windows. Thanks dudes and dudettes.

  • Mr_Blott@feddit.uk
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    3 months ago

    Right, reading through the comments, you say you’ve got a couple of kids. I’m guessing that means you’re a bit older and don’t have that much time to binge-watch long pointless series etc

    To pare it down, ignore the comments about Sonarr and Radarr etc, they’re for people who are addicted to downloading as much media as humanly possible, or folks in the US with 1990s internet speed. I’ve tried them and didn’t find much benefit to them.

    If you just want to quickly download a film or a series, setup is very simple.

    In twenty years of torrenting, I’ve never needed more than a good VPN, a good BitTorrent client, and a good website for magnets. Plus a PC hooked up to the TV with the screen extended.

    Torrent client - Use Qbittorrent, for reasons explained later

    VPN - As others say, port forwarding is necessary. Use Proton, when you start it up, it gives you a different port number each time. In Qbittorrent, click options then connection, and change the port number to the one Proton gave you. Bit of a fucking about each time but worth it

    As for torrenting sites, I rarely need anything more than 1337x.to

    BUT, as stated, the search function on QBT is amazing for finding obscure stuff. You need to install Python on your PC first, then there are plenty guides online for installing the search plugins. It sounds complicated but is incredibly easy and stable once installed.

    That’s it. That’s all I use and have done for decades. With fibre optic nowadays, a 1.5gb film takes about two minutes to download, you don’t need an entire hard disk full of media, just plan ahead

    • pyrflie@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      1337 tends to rate limit so having other options is good.

      I like TGx, but that’s mostly due to it’s good search engine.

    • ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 months ago

      ignore the comments about Sonarr and Radarr etc, they’re for people who are addicted to downloading as much media as humanly possible, or folks in the US with 1990s internet speed. I’ve tried them and didn’t find much benefit to them.

      This I really disagree with. Sonarr is absolutely terrible for backfilling shows with many seasons, it’s not at all what its for and you’re much better off manually finding season packs and downloading those and then binge. Sonarr is for monitoring shows with continuous releases and automatically download the new episodes so they’re ready for watching when they drop. I love not having to manually track when the few shows I do follow release new episodes and then add them to my client, because they’re just there in my library when they’re available.

      • Mr_Blott@feddit.uk
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        3 months ago

        You missed the bit where I assumed OP isn’t looking for long-winded series due to having kids

    • Wolf314159@startrek.website
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      2 months ago

      Setting up Sonarr and Radar with docker isn’t all that complex. If you set up Prowlarr as well then you can still get the instant search and download aspect you mention except you can search ALL the good websites at once and (most importantly for my stress level) avoid all the bullshit ads and malware you’ve got to worry about blocking while browsing those sites through the web. Sonarr is perfect for following any show, not just those you might binge watch. Topical shows like SNL and last week tonight get picked up automatically. Long term favorites with unpredictable release cycles (looking at you Doctor Who) get snapped up when they’re most popular and download super fast. Cleaning up old seasons to clear out space is as simple as navigating a web page. Both radarr and sonarr can connect to other services like that.tv so less tech savvy household members can add a show or movie to their watchlist and it will automatically get added, searched, downloaded, and hosted without any extra interaction from me. You can even set up profiles so that certain lists meet quality standards, so for example the kids cartoons aren’t downloaded at the same high a quality as the adult shows.

      My point is this, make the switch to automating the searching and downloading, not so that you can hoarde everything, but so that you can’t stop spending as much time being the home video librarian and more time enjoying it. On more than one occasion I’ve been out with friends and somebody mentions a movie they liked, I’ve taken a minute to add it to my list, and the movie is ready and waiting on my Plex (and/or Jellyfin) before I get home.

  • Andromxda 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇹🇼@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 months ago

    qBittorrent is probably the best torrent client for Windows

    Mullvad is a relatively cheap and trustworthy VPN provider (they unfortunately removed port forwarding, which is important for torrenting)

    AirVPN and Proton VPN are trustworthy VPN providers that support port forwarding

    Servarr is the way to go if you want to set up a server that automates everything for you

    Jellyfin is the best media server, far ahead of Plex and fully FOSS

    FMHY and the Champagne Piracy Wiki have lots of valuable information

    • emhl@feddit.org
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      3 months ago

      A bit of topic but why the hell does the champagne wiki reccomend Edge as a browser citing it’s AI capabilities? Is this copied directly from MS marketing material?

      Edit: I am starting to read through it and there Is so much bad, outdated and just wrong information there:

      • they recommend to set a DNS level adblocker using an app that isn’t supported on the android version the guide is for and completely forget that you can just set the DNS server without any additional app on any modern android version (what is what the provider of the Dns server they recommend reccomends)
      • they tell you protonVPN doesn’t support Torrenting (maybe just bad wording) and recommended mullvad because of that

      I don’t really want to continue beyond before-you-begin

      Edit2: Uh why is there an extensive article on how to deal with addiction and how to do meditation in the piracy section?

      I don’t think I should continue any further

      Edit3: you can contribute to the wiki by sending markdown files in a discord channel. Wikipedia should switch to this model as well imo

        • jittery_shibe@lemmings.world
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          3 months ago

          Why is port forwarding important? I have my torrent server running, downloading and uploading perfectly fine. Is port forwarding needed for like something else besides general down/uploading?

          • 84skynet@discuss.online
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            2 months ago

            To my understanding, it works like this: your client talks to the torrent tracker, then it sends you the data about seeders and leechers. Then your client tries to connect to them, but if neither you nor the other peer have port forwarding, you cannot connect to each other. This is not a problem for popular torrents with lots of peers, but when there are not so many it can be a problem because the other peers might as well not have port forwarding, so peers cannot connect to each other and the torrent will eventually die.

            That’s why it is recommended to use a VPN with port forwarding. When not using a VPN, if your router supports uPnP you are already port forwarded (with the default settings in qbittorrent).

            • jittery_shibe@lemmings.world
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              2 months ago

              Thank you! I did some reading and that’s also how I understand it: at least one peer has to have port forwarding enabled / listen on a port for two peers to connect. Also I found out about “Hole punching” or “NAT punching” where a middleman server is used to open up ports on two peers that do not have ports forwarded yet to allow them to talk to each other directly. This is also used in BitTorrent. And also explains why it works without explicit port forwarding enabled.

    • Admax@lemmynsfw.com
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      3 months ago

      Please could you elaborate about how qbittorent is a good VPN and why is port forwarding important for torrenting ? I’m kind of confused about those statement…

      • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 months ago

        I’m fairly positive they meant “qbittorrent is a good torrent client” instead of “VPN”

        As far as port forwarding, I know it’s important for seeding but I don’t know why.

        • RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works
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          3 months ago

          It’s a poor analogy, but imagine a public IP like a hotel, there can be lots of guests (clients) at this hotel. Hotel policy is they won’t let any outsiders in unless you know the room number (port) of the person you’re trying to reach.

          Imagine you and a friend are staying in separate hotels and want to give each other copies of your favorite Linux .ISOs, but neither of you knows the other’s room number - you show up at the hotel and the front desk tells you to pound sand because you don’t have their room number.

          As long as one of you knows the other’s room number though, you can meet.

          Torrenting without port forwarding means you can only trade your favorite .ISOs with people who have port forwarding enabled (sharing their room number to the tracker), which makes you less effective of a seeder. Enabling port forwarding allows you to share with anyone (sharing your room number with the tracker).

    • rooster_butt@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      You can’t say jellyfin is far ahead of plex when it doesn’t have nearly as many clients as plex does. I’ll agree that in the free tier jellyfin is better, but as of now it’s not as fully featured as plex pro. Even non pro plex just makes it easier to share outside your home too.

  • JadenSmith@sh.itjust.works
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    3 months ago

    Grab Stremio, it’s a program you can download.
    Once you’ve downloaded that and opened it up, in any browser go to torrentio.strem.fun and click to install that to your client.

    In the program go into your settings and remove the official sources from showing up (like apple TV, Netflix, etc.) and et viola.

    You can use popular lists or search for series, and it’ll find the episode/movie from pirates sources.

    The fun thing about this is it’s all educational. Not the program nor the torrentio link are illegal, it’s only what you do with it. So all in all, I hope you enjoy searching for legal documentaries supported by creative commons licensing!

  • histic@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 months ago

    If you want it done simply for relatively low cost ~$40usd/year Stremio + torrentio + realdebrid is what I use and it’s fast simple and works on basically anything although with the debrid you can only have one simultaneous stream if you were to use it on multiple devices You can skip the debrid if you choose to use a vpn instead unless you are in a country that doesn’t care

    • dan@upvote.au
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      2 months ago

      Also consider Weyd or Syncler instead of Stremio + Torrentio, and Premiumize in addition to Real Debrid. Premiumize can download from Usenet too.

    • Dumbkid@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 months ago

      This, I used to use Kodi+Serena+realdebrid but it was not as user friendly. Stremio is by far the best option if you just want to watch shows without making a server/ having to actually manage downloads or making it into a project.

      You just set it up and use it like any other streaming app

      No reason to self host unless you find joy in maintaining a server/ library

      • pyrflie@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        And only for those interested in streaming rather than downloading.

        • lud@lemm.ee
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          3 months ago

          What? Those are used for downloading. Can you even stream using those? (Well you obviously can with Jellyfin but you stream downloaded content so that doesn’t count)

        • dan@upvote.au
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          2 months ago

          IMO music makes more sense to download than movies. You might only watch a movie once or twice. Music files are smaller and you’re much more likely to listen to them multiple times.

          For movies and TV shows, streaming using Real Debrid is way more convenient.

  • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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    2 months ago

    My main suggestion is to search whatever you want with Yandex.com - unlike Google, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Brave, etc etc, Yandex doesn’t delist piracy sites. So, “bookname pdf” will almost always return a good result. “some anime or movie name watch online” will also work.

    Oh, and use uBlockOrigin. Ditch Chrome, use Firefox or anything that still makes uBlock works in full capacity.

  • Sibbo@sopuli.xyz
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    3 months ago

    Well, you can stop wearing those weird clothes for once. Nowadays we pirate from home. No sailor suit required anymore. I recommend you start by buying a laptop. But those are quite hard to use if you have skipped a century or two. Can you even read? Do you speak modern English?

    Anyways, maybe go to some adult education center first and learn how to read and write. Yes you got that right. Piracy requires education nowadays. Who would have thought?

  • Bigfoot@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    The simple answer:

    Get Qbittorrent and use it’s built-in search engine.

    The fully automated gay space answer:

    • Look into selfhosting - (optional but makes it easier/coler)
    • Look into Plex (or Emby or Jellyfin) - optional but makes it pretty

    These are the apps you’ll need:

    • Radarr - Gets movies
    • Sonarr - Gets tv shows automatically as they come out
    • Prowlarr - the thing that does the searching for radarr/sonarr.
    • Overseerr - Makes it simple to request stuff
    • Qbittorrent - downloads things

    (There is also Lidarr for music and Readarr for books)

    If all set up correctly, you simply just request something with Overseerr and it shows up in Plex minutes later with artwork and metadata all pulled in and presented nicely. You can configure the apps to look for specific resolutions/file sizes/formats/etc. TV shows are downloaded as soon as a new episode is released. It’s better than any streaming service by leaps and bounds.

    • Scrollone@feddit.it
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      3 months ago

      “VPN up” depends on the country. Some countries don’t give a flying fuck, don’t waste money on a VPN if you live in such countries.

        • Scrollone@feddit.it
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          3 months ago

          Italy, Bulgaria, Spain for example. They usually couldn’t care less (unless it’s football/soccer piracy).

          Germany, on the other hand, cares a lot. Use a VPN for sure there.

  • فریدون حسینی@vegantheoryclub.org
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    3 months ago

    Go to a host like feralhost and rent a seed box. This gives you a webhosted transmission to paste magnet links in from any torrent site. Then you connect with filezilla over sftp, no vpn or nonsense needed and its all super fast because the torrenting is done from a data center and you download only from there over encrypted ssh at max speed when its finished.

    • khorovodoved@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      That’s just VPN with extra steps. Why not just set up a SOCKS5/Shadowsocks/wireguard/whatever on any hosting and get a lot better experience?

      • فریدون حسینی@vegantheoryclub.org
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        3 months ago

        In my country I don’t get good upstream internet so I can still have good ratios on torrent sites and the private trackers I use. The prices on the dedicated seed box services can’t be beat for bandwidth and for someone with kids it’s already all set up.

        • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          3 months ago

          FWIW if you have a seed box which you can ssh into, you can setup a SOCKS5 proxy to route all traffic through the seed box. It’ll act like a VPN for you and is the best of both worlds in my opinion. This way your ISP and government can’t block your traffic or see that you’re accessing trackers at all (even to get the magnet links).

    • BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      Do you trust your seed box provider to not rat you out? Or at the very least not have identifying information on you that will be seized in a raid?

      How do you do this with zero trust towards any provider? I mean unless you hijack a neighbors wifi, any provider can fuck up their OPSEC and get you burned.

      • فریدون حسینی@vegantheoryclub.org
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        2 months ago

        I don’t live in a place that would raid an international hosting provider. In my county no one is ever going to come after me for using a seed box to download tv and movies. I simply do not need to worried about being ratted out.

        • BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works
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          2 months ago

          I don’t know to what extent law enforcement would go to catch a pirate in Denmark. But a guy just got 30days for seeding about 800 movies, so I’m not taking any chances. If I was ever to use p2p, and this is purely theoretical, I would find a public (or open private) wifi, use an external wifi adapter and a virtual machine that doesn’t contain any personal information.

          • فریدون حسینی@vegantheoryclub.org
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            2 months ago

            Seeding is different than downloading though and the seed box service is in another jurisdiction doing that where it is legal. I only connect to a proxy up with ssh and download data to my actual home, never upload. As far as my jurisdiction is concerned I haven’t seeded anything, just downloaded encrypted data from a datacenter ip.

            I live in latam so my government isn’t enforcing pretty much anything though.

  • Yodan@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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    3 months ago

    On a side note I’ve been using Google to find streaming sites by typing “free full stream” and then the title I want, and scrolling down the search to the DMCA Complaints. They have a lovely list of sites that have your movies and shows, thanks Google!