I don’t understand why you would pay for an illegal service when the other options are to pay legally or pirate.
I dont subscribe to any streaming service (except the occasional free prime trial, to be full disclosure), not even the one in the news story… but I can still answer your question…
Because I want to pay a single service to watch everything. Like Netflix used to be. Watch everything I want, for one monthly price that was reasonable.
But its not like that anymore. Every company looked at how well Netflix used to do, went “Fuck them! I want all that money for my self!” and took their content off Netflix, and made their own streaming services.
Now if you want to consume any media, You have to subscribe to 50 different subscription services, for hundreds of dollars a month, Which is just Cable 2.0 but with worse service and options.
because piracy is a service problem
In addition to other things people responded with, piracy services tend to not collect users data or prevent us from watching with a VPN enabled.
or prevent us from watching with a VPN enabled.
Man this one chaff’s me the most. I way a paying Netflix customer like 8 years ago. I had IPv6 setup as a 6rd tunnel through HE (Hurricane Electric) because my ISP didn’t offer IPv6. Netflix treated that as a VPN and blocked me as a paying customer… Even though I lived/payed from the same fucking locale. It’s not like I was using a VPN to bypass a Geoblock. I was just making IPv6 available to myself. I cancelled because of that. You do not get to tell me how I access the internet at large, especially when I’m not even being shady about it.
My guess is It’s probably cheaper and has much greater variety. You can watch anything from any streaming service through one single interface at the price of one service.
because IPTV is like $6 per month and has every single channel known to earth… it’s a tiny fraction compared to any cable especially if you watch sports (the only real reason to pay for cable anyway)
piracy is a service issue.
also, fuck IP owners, pigs got too fat while cutting on service.
Because the legal options are garbage.
The pirates provide a better service with more content for cheaper than the legal options; and pirating yourself takes effort as well as cost (hardware, trackers, usenet, etc).
Some people are happy to just pay for decent service; others like to learn about the process, then setup and run their own servers.
To each their own.
Because all the legal services are incredibly anti-consumer and are offering less services, with (more) ads, for more money every year.
The entire system exists for the benefit of business, not customers.
Just look at what happens with accused theft in a store. You get accused of theft? Cops are there in no time, take you to the ground, throw you in the back of the cop car. only after they’ve gotten the humiliation and brutalization in might someone come and take your proof that you didnt steal anything.
You accuse the store of stealing from you? Due to not following their own policy on returns, or overcharging and an item and not fixing it Police won’t even show. just tell you its a civil matter and to suck it up.
Access to Usenet providers is not free
My guess is because they did all the pirating for you so you didn’t have to worry about dealing with the technical hurdles of doing so.
The majority of piracy is not free.
I’ve paid for usenet, seed boxes, private servers, and more recently torrent cache services.
You pay because it’s much cheaper than commercial services and a better experience with more content.
You pay like $5/Mo for the content of all streaming services and more instead of the $500/Mo it would cost to subscribe to each of them individually. Plus you’re not taking any legal risk as a customer.
Pirating implies some knowledge and effort some people may not have or want to get into
Paid Legal services are so enshitified some people may think they are getting ripped up
Paid illegal services are often HUGE bang for buck value (no enshitification, no limits, no nonsense and often better customer service)
Yeah, I’ve got one of those too. Plex is great.
ITT: Have you heard the good news about our lord and saviour, Jellyfin?
Jellyfin is a bitch to get working outside my network. I don’t get how Plex made it so easy
really? I never had an issue with just sticking it behind a reverse proxy, doing some port forwarding, and setting an apex domain record, that was it. curious what wasn’t working for you?
Lol
…do what now?
The number of people I’ve come across that are absolutely baffled by the concept of port forwarding…
Then you add CGNAT ontop and things can get really complicated for someone unfamiliar.
Lasted a week and went back to Plex.
You know, I’ve heard this gospel before, I might still have the pamphlet…
Honestly, I haven’t really looked into jellyfin yet. I hear it’s superior in some way… But I already have Plex all set up and I have 4 friends with servers and we all share content. So it would take a lot for me to switch.
Tbh, I just like that mobile app watching is free instead of paywalled
It really isn’t superior. It’s just the hivemind that gets annoyed with Plex being stagnant, not open source etc. that claims it is. At best it has feature parity for some use-cases. Don’t get me wrong, it’s neat, but it’s not as polished as Plex.
I’m trying to switch to Jellyfin I really am. With Plex I could just throw a file bot at my files normalize the names and it was fine. I can’t mark things watched or unwatched from the Roku client. I’ve now tried three separate times to get the Doctor who specials to show up with names. Plex is by no means perfect but it’s so much easier to keep Plex goomed
I was fretting over Doctor Specials, season numbers, eras and naming a few weeks back. In fairness it has been running since black and white times so not too bad considering. Whats a filebot by the way and whats a good one?
Filebot a piece of software, it looks up your files on TMDB and themoviedb and renamese your files based on those lookups. Plex takes that naming very very well. We really need jellyfin to work with it too.
Couldn’t get on with Jellyfin…emby however has been fantastic!
Plex is a privacy nightmare that’s slowly trying to faze out you having a server all together in favor of feeding you commercialized content from other providers; and many people find Jellyfin is far too unpolished/disorganized for a lot of debatable reasons I won’t go into.
I’ve been quite happy with the middle ground: Emby. It’s not FOSS, but is well polished with consistent development, great feature parity across platforms, excellent clients for pretty much every device I’d want to use, and a helpful community ready to assist with any problems you come across. They also have a heavy focus on privacy; with no third party partners collecting your info like Plex, and no telemetry sent from servers/clients.
The lifetime premier license I bought 7 years ago was well worth it.
Wasn’t Jellyfin developed using the Emby source code as a starting point?
Yes. Emby was originally open source, but people would regularly fork it to remove the licensing. When they chose to go closed source; jellyfin forked that final release and has built from there.
Emby has a premier licencing system to support their development, instead of selling user data and making deals with content providers like Plex, or depending on OSS development/contributions like Jellyfin.
As far as I understand almost 80% of jellyfins current code is the original Emby code (called ‘media browser’ or ‘MB’ at the time), though to be fair, I haven’t verified that claim.
I always wonder why some people are so dedicated to Jellyfin. Even if JF had full feature and experience parity, it would still not have secure remote access the way Plex does. There is no need to port forward or NAT Plex for external access. With the threat landscape the way it is today, that is worth a lot.
I haven’t used Plex in a while, but I’m confused how Plex handles WAN connections without using any port forwarding? how is that possible?
I think there’s a misconception.
Plex can “hide” (not really) your own server because you can direct your users on Plex.tv (they can login there, etc. without ever typing your IP address).
But Plex can also use an internal reverse proxy that lets you see your content from outside even without port forwarding. However, quality and speed will be decreased.
I think Jellyfin should work to ease the process of setting up your server as much as they can, but unless they start managing a SaaS like Plex does, they’ll never be able to offer the same simplicity for the end user.
personally, I wouldn’t want my files going through plexs servers, especially with how shit I’ve heard they are with their privacy policy. that’s a really interesting concept tho, and makes a lot of sense. I doubt jellyfin will ever do that simply because they don’t have the resources to host that as you said.
thanks for the explanation tho! greatly appreciated
Plex, as a company, definitely is aware of what items are in your library but streams don’t go through the Plex servers unless you use the Plex proxy service which is enabled by default but only used when the client connection speed is too slow to use the desired streaming setting.
Everyone who accesses their Plex externally should use app.plex.tv rather than NAT/port forwarding unless you’re also doing IP whitelisting on the NAT (not feasible for most remote access scenarios, as IPs are dynamic in most cases). Jellyfin should never be exposed externally.
I work in a highly regulated sector of IT and have learned that even the most robust software will have serious exploits at some point.
Both the client and server connect to plex.tv which then brokers the connection between them. They essentially work as a very limited vpn between your clients and server.
This also gives them unrestricted access to the entirety of data passed between devices; and the ability to request any and all info from your server to be handed to whoever they chose.
This is also how they allow you to ‘share’ content/libraries with each others servers; through their public infrastructure that’s collecting your information. Information they then sell to third parties to support their development and broker content agreements.
I have not looked into it for a while but I believe their servers broker a direct connection between the client and server.
Teoretically speaking, asking for a friend who’s doing research, how would you access such a service? :)
There’s plenty of services like this that people use a firestick to connect too.
My friend uses one but I forget the name of it. You can find them online but people usually buy a package of say 20 connections and then sell them to friends and family. I’ll try and remember what to search for and come back.
Edit: IPTV is a good search term.
Legend
IPTV is the name of the pirated cable TV streams. Personally, I consider commercialized piracy to be a bit distasteful compared to the free and open source route, and I have the know how to self host my own streaming service.
Although it’s not piracy, another free option to consider for live TV, if you’re within range of TV broadcasters, is a digital TV antenna. I’m looking into that since not only is it free and legal, it’s also the best picture quality, not compressed like IPTV (legit or pirated) or even cable.
I’m in the UK, so loads of live TV over the air.
Nah just a regular dude trying to help others when I can.
Streaming services become required by law like insurance
Wait, why am I required to pay for a streaming service?
Because it has all of the entertainment electrolytes a human needs
We already have the private copying levy in Germany and some other countries, where you have to pay a fee for several products (printers, scanners, storage media like HDDs, SSDs, SD cards and thumb drives…) due to the potential that you could do (legal!) private copies of copyrighted media on them. The copyright collectives can set the amount of the fees freely (and it’s ridiculously high).
This comes shockingly close to the concept already.
I member the good old days when we were buying our blank CD/DVD in Germany to avoid paying those taxes.
I’m not sure about other countries, but here in Czech we actually have a mandatory subscription, that’s absolutely bullshit.
So far, the law is that if you own any TV or radio, you have to pay monthly fee for public service broadcasters (national Czech TV). It’s bullshit, the channels are full of ads anyway, and the shows they run and create is insultingly bad. Sure, it is important to have public service broadcasters that are not dependent on the state (because state-owned TV is reeaallly bad idea), but FFS can they just reduce costs and stick to news, instead of doing another stupid series, and stop forcing us to pay for something I don’t care about or use?
You could just not pay the fee, if you state you don’t have a TV capable of receiving it (which I don’t). But now, they are changing the law that everyone who has any kind of internet-capable device has to pay the monthly fee, while also rising prices to something like 6 EUR per month. Fuck that and fuck them.
Reminds me of the BBC licence fee in the UK.
yeah but with the beeb at least you got fawlty towers, blackadder, PYTHON!, red dwarf, fuck man, I’d pay the TV snoops for that stuff without much grumble.
“When a hero comes along . . .”
This is despicable. What specific service was this? So I know how to avoid it if it should resurface.
Not only does it say that in the first paragraph, it says it here
Five men were convicted for their part in operating Jetflicks, one of the largest illegal streaming services in the U.S., officials said.
My use of the word despicable instead of disgusting probably threw you off
Five men convicted by the court of the high seas for being absolute chads
Hey, look! They had a cookbook on tyranny…
“Sophisticated scripts to scour pirate sites”.
I think we’ve just found a new tagline for radarr or sonarr.
Did someone leak their Jellyfin credentials?
If five people can maintain a service bigger than all those combined, then the big streamers need to buck their fucking ideas up.
If there is no need,such places would not exist
“The group used “sophisticated computer scripts” and software to scour piracy services”
They used the basic tools that most(?) pirates use today like sonarr and radar??
I don’t mind people pirating…i do mind people pirating and profiting from redistribution.
redistribution = service?
Why would they work for free?
Not gonna pretend like this aint illegal but i don’t cry over some IP owners losing money… EVER, fuck 'em
Oh I don’t care that the IP owner don’t get money.
IDK, I just don’t like the ethics of pirating media for profit, the entire idea is that it should be accessible to everyone, not just those with money. Cover your operational cost? Sure…Making millions in subscriptions? That is an asshole move IMO. If you’re paying, you might as well pay the people who are making the media in the first place instead of some rando that had nothing to do with it.
All fair points.
I think the issue is that IP owners are mega corps, ie people who made the content don’t own it and can’t provide it anyway.
This doesn’t seem that different from paying for usenet. It’s not like they’re making DVDs of pirated movies and selling them on the street corner; they were basically just aggregating content and the service they were providing was making it easily searchable and accessible, not doing the actual pirating, from the sound of it, unless I’m misunderstanding the situation.
This doesn’t seem that different from paying for usenet.
i would think it would be a little different from usenet, considering that usenet would be a service that you pay for, and people who use that service would host content on it, so that other users can download that content. Which effectively removes the immediate liability that you would have in this case, where you are explicitly hosting a pirated streaming service, and then charging for it, for the explicit purpose of streaming said pirated content.
Yeah, I suppose I should clarify - that was in response to the objection to paying for pirated content; it’s different from the service provider’s point of view, but from the end user’s point of view, they’re paying for pirated content either way.
Guessing they used Sonarr, Radarr, qBittorrent, maybe an NZB client…
Would you look at that, I’m sophisticated now.
Maybe even Jellyseerr
Yes. Charging money for sharing content like that makes them little better than grifters
The group used “sophisticated computer scripts” and software to scour piracy services… for illegal copies of TV episodes, which they then downloaded and hosted on Jetflicks’ servers.
So they used some variant of Sick Beard?
nah probably the arr stack
Sonarr: (Automatic TV series downloads)
Radarr: (Automatic movie downloads)
Tdarr: (Automatic transcoding of media, can help save you a lot of disk space)
Bazarr: (Companion app to Radarr and Sonarr, manages subtitles)
Prowlarr: (A replacement for Jackett from the Arr team)
Lidarr: Music
Readarr: Books
Mylar3: Comic books
Plex-Meta-Manager: (Automatic collections and metadata)
Overseerr: Request tracking and website front-end
Ombi: Let users request both movies/tv shows from a simple web interface.
Dopplarr: Discord bot to make movie/tv/anime requests
Pulsarr: Browser extension for adding movies to Radarr or Series’ to Sonarr while browsing IMDB or TVDB.
Tdarr: (Automatic transcoding of media, can help save you a lot of disk space)
That’s a new one to me, I’ll have to check that out. Thanks!
Been doing conversions via Emby, but it’s not a very powerful tool for that.
If you’re using sickbeard, switch to medusa. The originally developer of sickbeard is a nut case. He took the project back from the team that was doing development so they forked it and renamed Medusa.
