Still not subscribing to all the shit services. I’d rather don’t watch stuff and go outside. Yeah, you heard me right, I’ll rather be going fucking outside!
Personally I prefer when people keep their fucking inside, rather than outside where I might have to accidentally see it.
Touch some grass
Smoke some grass.
FTFY
Just did, lol
I’d happily buy stuff if they’d just give me a mkv file or a disc that isn’t encrypted.
I’ve been back to buying UHDs because I can rip them. Amazing how a good experience got me to pay again.
Reminder that when you pay crunchyroll they use your money to pay for western animation instead of anime production, biggest myth ever that we were supporting the industry.
They license the anime so they do pay the studios that create anime. I know for a fact that anime studios factor in the ability to license shows in the decision on what to produce and budget.
All this does is make me more interested in “pirating” their infinitely copyable material. More to the point it’s making my interest in financially supporting them drop to zero if not lower.
With Usenet, Plex* (Streaming Server), Radarr (automated movie downloading) and Sonarr (automated TV downloading and management) it’s never been easier!
*Plex is currently on a slow path of enshittification and the only other good alternative, Jellyfin, still has some ways to go before it can pass “The Spouse Test”. I myself have only had Jellyfin in testing and not yet replaced Plex with it. But that day is coming. Jellyfin is well under active development and I have no doubt it will get to feature and stability parity with Plex
I dipped my toes in the self-hosted route and would recommend Stremio + Torrentio + RealDebrid as a much simpler alternative.
Here’s a guide I used - you can probably have it up and running in less than an hour.
Major points:
- Easy setup, easy to use
- Low cost at <$35/year
- Can not share accounts (specifically, RD limits to one ongoing stream at a time)
- Limited customization
I have very limited self hosting experience, and between getting my first hello world service running, problems with my ISP, sorting through the different ways to get content, and not already having TBs if hard drives sitting around, I found it to be pretty challenging.
If you’re already experienced in self hosting (or want to learn) and don’t mind the storage costs, then I’d recommend the Plex/Jellyfin route, but if you just want an alternative to the existing streaming services then I’d suggest looking into Stremio.
Seconded. I’ve used this exact setup for years on an NVIDIA Shield Pro. I understand it isn’t “pure” from a piracy perspective, not the most ideal, in-the-weeds setup, but it sure does just work.
You can always use the older, well established, actively developed, and stable project that Jellyfin is built from; Emby. (Jellyfin is literally Embys code from 10+ years ago)
Yea no. FUCK Emby and their bullshit, Emby is the next Plex and not in a good way. I was there 10 years ago when Jellyfin split off, so AFAIC there are only 2 viable streaming software, Plex and Jellyfin. Emby is dead to me.
I’m curious to know why you think/feel that way.
I found/started using personal streaming solutions around 8 years ago; so post-Emby/MediaBrowser split into Jellyfin.
While I started with Plex, I very quickly came to despise their always online/centralized authentication system and moved to Emby as the only alternative I’d seen/heard of at the time. From there I learned of Jellyfin and (at least some of) it’s origins; though I’ve had 0 reason/need/desire to actually install Jellyfin as Emby works fantastically.
I’ve been really quite happy with Emby; particularly with their stance of not tracking/collecting userdata and maintaining Emby as a private company focused on their customers instead of investors/partners. I understand some people don’t like the Premiere licensing model they use; but I think it’s a good way for the developers to ensure stable income for their work; and TBH, especially with the lifetime purchase option, I think it’s undervalued. Unfortunately that model is not compatible with opensource (as users just fork it to remove the paywall), which is why Jellyfin exists from what I understand.
This is going to go back quite a ways, and much of my knowledge is old at this point so some details might be off.
~15 years ago Plex as we know it started out as an OSX fork of the 0G Xbox homebrew software XBMC (Later renamed Kodi (For those who don’t know, XBMC was XBox Media Center and would turn the 0g Xbox into the cheapest Home Theater PC you could get at the time, man those were the days lol))
Plex was only briefly open source and then was quickly closed when they incorporated a year or so after they had something functional. They never made any promises about not charging or being open source or anything, so that’s why I’m generally fine with Plex
Sometime around 2012ish Emby came along as THE open source alternative to Plex and things were good. MOST of it was supposed to stay open source as was promised. From the beginning they kept build scripts n such closed source, probably should have caught on them, but heh ya know hindsight and all that.
Then around 2014/5 they took it all closed source, relicensed it and introduced their paywall including locking away already existing features. This is what pissed me and many others off and this is when and why Jellyfin split off promising to be truly fully open source forever. (There was a ton of drama about it at the time, but it looks like Embys Q&A thing a bit back doesn’t even bother to mention it, imagine that lol)
I don’t have a problem with subscriptions on open source software myself, but the way they went about it…yea. fuck em
I don’t have a problem with subscriptions on open source software myself
That’s kind of the root of the issue imo; having a subscription based model doesn’t really work with open source as the project just gets forked every release to remove the subscription.
This leaves Emby with little option but to go closed source if they want income through subscriptions.
So, I’m not sure I understand what you mean with ‘the way they went about it’. Is it the subscription you had an issue with, or the fact that they were no longer open source? What would you have done differently?
And, if you don’t mind me asking: Had you supported (paid) Embys developers prior to them shifting to closed source + ‘Emby Premiere’?
To be clear, I’m not trying to be argumentative or divisive; I’m just trying to understand the animosity towards Emby and why it’s so often left out of the conversation, so to speak. It’s something I’ve never been able to wrap my head around. Thanks for taking the time to chat about this.
Where’s Jellyfin failing the spouse test? My spouse preferred it to Plex because she could turn off all the crap on the home screen.
After looking at this list I’d like to pre-qualify what I’m about to say: I have jellyfin and like it, I use jellyfin regularly. I have it pointed to the same catalog as Plex and if Plex ever gets thoroughly enshitified I will leave it for jellyfin
The biggest things I’ve seen (in decreasing order of pain):
transcoding can fail on media that Plex has no problems with
Jellyfin is significantly worse at detecting names and properly assigning metadata. Jellyfin does not have the same ease of fixing that when it happens that Plex has.
I’m not going to go through all the work to reverse proxy it. Nor do I trust opening it to the internet. So for her to access it outside the house she’s going to be using tailscale. Kind of just extra steps for the sake of extra steps.
Finamp is a poor replacement for Plexamp, Don’t get me wrong I love the fan project but it’s not anywhere near as good, and it becomes quite painful to use on large audio catalogs.
The Roku client doesn’t have any method to mark things as watched or unwatched or modified playlisted items.
I dislike the sections being static one row high and then having to rotate left and right through multiple things when they could just wrap.
I am super amazed that the project runs as well as it does. It’s a monumental piece of open source work, but there’s a lot of polish problems and I’m not qualified to help them fix them.
Quick notes from an avid jellyfin user. When you have a show or movie or whatever you want, not get identified, there’s a simple identify option you can do on the client on a computer or phone by clicking the 3 dots on the media. You get to search and label it. The only time this hasn’t appropriately assigned metadata for me was for shows with duplicate episodes in one mkv or whatever. That did take a lot of renaming, which did suck and is reasonable to not want to have to do. Especially for massive libraries.
I definitely agree about the roku client not having a marked as watched feature, that should be added.
There’s a lot of work to be done but it’s not just being done in the basic edition. For instance, there’s plugins that allow the skip credits and skip intro functions you want. And there’s ones for fanart, and allowing other databases of Metadata to select from. There’s a lot of plugins and more are being actively developed rather often. Even I’m trying to develop a “continue watching” feature like from Netflix, but it’s going slowly.
Jellyfin definitely takes more finagling than plex, i switched at the beginning of the year, but I’ve had multiple times since where my internet is out and because jellyfin is local network I’m still able to stream my media.
So yeah. Just some info about jellyfin. I get wanting the ease of plex, but I’ve personally really enjoyed adding the plugins and fucking around with everything it has.
I want to go and look at the plugins I wasn’t aware that some of that stuff was available. I was an avid plug-in user until Plex pulled that from me.
Just general glitchiness, odd UI design choices etc. Def needs more polish
When I say Spouse Test I mean from the context of a spouse who just “doesn’t do computers”, if your spouse is technically inclined at all, say as a PC gamer or something and has dealt with sometimes-kinda-annoying software and has some patience, then they’ll probably be fine with it
This makes sense. I had to poke around the UI to figure it out. And, the client occasionally needs rebooted or the cache cleared. I can see how some users would have trouble.
I’d suggest that teaching those users is probably easier than setting up Plex today and then setting up Jellyfin as an emergency service when Plex inevitably begins ad injection or introduces a paywall for local streaming.
Jellyfin pased my spouse test for local network.
I put her on tailscale for remote access but she’s not a big fan of that.
Same, mine passed the test. But used only locally.
Is it not safe to expose externally with ssl yet?
I’m not worried about SSL. I’m worried about a rapidly developed open source project with lots of changes and lots of cooks in the kitchen. All it takes is a buffer overflow and one of a thousand libraries they’re using. I don’t know that they have a dedicated security team or even anyone really looking at that.
I wouldn’t be so worried but it needs to have access to my media which is outside of my DMZ.
And I don’t want to put my media into my DMZ.
I put through the reverse proxy and so far I haven’t had any issues
Same. Wish the world had already adopted ipv6
Why not having your own wireguard endpoint at home? Then you could additionally filter ads using adguard at home and on the go.
I have tailscale at home I could use an exit node. My family doesn’t want ad blocking because then they don’t get their ads for their free to play games.
Honestly the biggest reason not to use VPN home for everything as every time you swap cell phone towers your IP changes and you renegotiate. It’s not so bad when I’m using something that buffers, so it’s also not so bad when I’m driving, but when a passengers loading a website or playing a game with ads and the ads which are already 30 seconds take an extra 30 seconds to load they get all grumpy.
It’s good thinking though I have totally tried to sell people on that
I am constantly connected to my VPN at home if my iPhone is not connected to a WiFi in white list, and I use an IP white list, including DNS, to go through the tunnel and I play no adware games 😂I guess that is why it works so well for me.
But nice to know why VPN on phone behaves like it does if you route everything through it. I think have experienced that before, when I forgot to disable the third party VPN I use to spoof location.
The VPN keeps a constant network connection open. It’s job isn’t just to encrypt the traffic and route the traffic home but also to make sure that there’s no man in the middle activity going on.
Each cell phone tower you are connected to provides you with a new IP. In most cases cell phone towers are less than 2 miles apart. While you’re driving or taking a train or just about any other form of transportation that means you’re going to change IP addresses every couple of minutes. If you’re not connected to a VPN it’s a couple dozen milliseconds to change that IP and start talking to a new tower. But once you throw VPN in the mix your VPN says hey you’re IP changed sorry we need to renegotiate. You send your SSL key up and you’re off It checks it against your SSL key and the other side and rebuilds a new connection. In the best of circumstances this goes pretty quickly. But not quickly enough for certain tasks. Buffering video is fine. Remote screen connections, SSH terminals, anything else that’s extremely on demand underperforms horribly.
oh is it that time of year again? feels like they just published the 2023 version!
There are essentially infinite choices for entertainment these days. Hypothetically, even if they somehow stopped 100% of piracy, I still wouldn’t pay for their overpriced slop.
Fmovie is a new one I never heard of before. Good thing they mentioned it so I know to avoid it in the future.
Studios need to remember that their shows are advertising for merch and toy sales. That’s where the money is. If I pirate your show, then you don’t have to support the infrastructure to provide me a stream (which would look like shit because you’re not google). I buy posters and tshirts and stickers. Some people buy minifigs and funcopops and other plastic tat that’s cheap to make but sells for, well, whatever that crap sells for.
Furthermore, I wouldn’t mind paying $10 or $15 /month for ONE streaming service if it was able to maintain good picture quality at 1080p AND had all the shows/movies I wanted to watch in one convenient place. Extra emphasis on ‘convenient’. Even more emphasis on it actually having content I want to watch. When I watch a show, I like to watch the entire thing in like, two days. Then I’ll not watch any shows for two or three months, until something gets my attention. I don’t want to pay for a service I don’t use, cancelling and reactivating a service every couple of months is too much hassle, so I’ll just wait until the show is done airing and download it all and watch it at my pace.
surprisingly, I miss dvds.
All-in-one convenience is the only reason I pay Spotify, my only streaming service. Thought about dropping them, but it would be a monstrous hassle gathering, and continuing to gather, all those MP3s. Plus, I can download that content and use it in the woods with no internet connection. Sold.
Video content? What a clusterfuck. I steal every bit of it. Hell, I got Amazon Prime and don’t bother looking at video offerings. Default: 🏴☠️
I also used Spotify but it has a serious problem. There’s no guarantee your contents will be always available. I had music there that, for whatever reason, was removed and I can no longer listen to it. Not to mention music that was never available there. I don’t want them to control what I can and can’t listen.
Now I only use Jellyfin. It works great (except on Android Auto, but they’ll get there). Sure I have to download the MP3 but you only have to do it once and then it will always be there. Just use spotDL and rip the music right out of Spotify with all the metadata.
Video was nicer when you could buy a piece of physical media to watch your movie on.
Even then, you still had to contend with such nonsense as region locks later on. Can’t have people watch the movie earliest than release because the production company decided to delay release a while. That would be apocalyptic.
Libraries have em. For free. And you can rip them too.
Considering how the big corporations are “cracking down” on pretty much anything they want is a clear indication that the shift already happened, the internet is no longer a “free space”
Today the internet is mostly owned by big corporations or billionaires more directly, and they subject no only it but the whole world to their whishes.
The capitalist world is a piece of shit, the good things happen despite capitalism, then capitalism comes along and sabotages and ruins everything to sell you something worse.
Everyday that phrase seems more real " you will own nothing" because you won’t be allowed to own anything, just take a look at the streaming platforms, or any other platform , they remove , they revoke , they block, they delete, they control what you can and can’t do and you can’t do anything about it.
Personally I can’t see it, what have they taken away from me?
I own way more now than I did 20yrs ago when the web was still a bright young thing.
Anything you purchase that is attached to a service and you don’t have any physical copies, you don’t actually own.
Which is pretty easy to avoid, honestly. All my music, movies, and games are on external hard drives they can’t access. Same with all of my editing software.
That needs to be the default for digital again.
We need a bright web.
Nevermind the decades of these sites compensating for studios just not giving a sh*t about making their content accessible to the rest of the world.
Private Trackers are the way forward.
I thought I read that private trackers are hard to sign up to. Or that you have to prove yourself somehow and people get stressed about maintaining their ratio. Is that true? If so, that doesn’t sound fun.
You do have to get an invite, seed, and maybe toss them a small crypto donation occasionally. The ratio thing depends on the tracker but usually it’s just a requirement to seed back anything for at least a week. Popular torrents become FreeLeech and they don’t count against your ratio.
Because the participants are all vetted, you don’t get RIAA and MPAA shills in swarm trying to vacuum up IPs to start sending nasty legal letters out.
A decade ago when I used public torrents I remember getting those stupid ISP strikes. I know shit-tier regional ISPs would even try to embarrass you with the content you pirated. They’d send you a letter like “the Copyright holder for ‘Anal Hookers of Beijing’ told us they’re big mad at you, and if you do it again you’ll get your service revoked”. Some of these ISPs were integrated with cable companies so they’d freeze your internet and cable, and display the text of the copyright strike on your fucking TV for your girlfriend or grandma to see.
Fuck that noise.
Since using a private tracker I have never received a single cease and desist or ISP warning letter. Then again, I only use Bit Torrent to download Linux ISOs.
Interesting. I’ve got a fast internet connection and a server running 24/7 with Transmission and 9 TB of hard drive space. I run it behind Gluetun/NordVPN to avoid those copyright strikes. My setup has been extremely successful so far. I only delete torrents once they hit a ratio of 1.5 at the moment, though I could extend that if necessary. I don’t use cryptocurrency, though, and don’t intend to start. I assume my setup would be somewhat valuable to a private tracker. Do you have any recommendations?
The most elite trackers perhaps.
Trackers on /r/opensignups ? Nah they open their doors to the public every now and again.
Would not recommend it to anyone who can’t dedicate a seed box or machine uploading torrents most hours of the day every day. It’s possible to do it without those but difficult. With them it’s merely a matter of using free leech and building a buffer up as well as taking advantage of points systems to get free upload just for keeping torrents seeding even without uploading.
If you only ever grab free leech then all you have to worry about is meeting seed time and activity requirements like logging in every 90 days.
An old computer with an external drive. A raspberry pi, a nas that can run a BitTorrent client. Any would work if one doesn’t want to pay for a seed box. (Most trackers ban shared seed boxes though so you will have to get dedicated)
An old laptop with qbitorren in a docker container works quite nicely.
Only the few elite ones, mostly the ones with music.
Private trackers disgust me. What kind of pirate turns away from the world, to re-seeding fragments of files they don’t care about to other cowards with slightly slower rss feeds; all for a chance at enough ratio to get the show you want? It’s a country club, with self-validating assholes, dry hot dogs, and tall fences.
The Mainline DHT is the way forward. There is no social credit here. The kids in Africa are starving, and I will throw them as much as I can, kilobyte by kilobyte, for no reason at all, for I too was a leecher once.
As a leecher with atrocious upload speed. Thank you so much for your service.
We got you, homie.
I seed so others may leech.
It’s time for me to self host a jellyfin server.
All this means to me is someone is going to make a peer to peer darkweb version of these sites sooner rather than later.
Honestly most of the modern movies are so bad that even nobody will most likely want to pirate them
I pirated Twisters and wanted a refund.
I think we’re all owed a refund and a penalty. What an insult to the original film…
I watched the original and it was so bad. How can the new movie be an insult? Can it get worse?
I really don’t know why they made it. If it had been an actual sequel to the original that in some way carried on the story that would have been okay.
Wait. It’s not a sequel? Then what is it, other than a steaming pile of offal?
The only allusion to it being a sequel is the bin full of drones from the original. That’s as close to the original cast as it gets.
They couldn’t even be arsed to Ghostbusters it up by getting the old crew to show the youngsters how it’s done.
You can guess the ending about ten seconds in, and the ending is actually worse than that.
Plus I really don’t like Glen Powell. The man looks designed by committee by Hollywood to normalise age gap relationships. He gives me the fucking creeps.
The message also ends with a specifically worded call to action: “If possible, please use legal paid services. It’s something we should do to show our respect for creators and content producers.”
LOL… they have fucked EVERY artist with the “streaming is a new medium and you get no royalties from it”. Even Black Widow herself had to fight Disney in court to get paid for her very own movie.
Studios can go fuck themselves hard… they won stop piracy and they know it, this is why the always make such a big deal out of whatever little gain they make
