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Comment by lordleft | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this will fuel a spike in piracy. I used to think piracy was motivated by entirely by cost, but I can envision folks resorting to torrents to avoid a morass of confusing services.

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Already happening for me and a bunch of people I know. I was happy paying for 1 service a month (Netflix) and having everything there. Then the studios started pulling their content for their own streaming services. I'm not signing up for a handful of subpar streaming services just because the studios got greedy. Netflix worked and worked really well.

So I got a Usenet subscription and a couple 6TB hard drives. Setup Plex/Radarr/Sonarr/SabNZBD and grabbed all the seasons of the shows I like to watch. For future episodes it is all completely automated. I just select shows I want to watch and the system finds them as soon as they're available every week, downloads, imports into Plex, and sends me a Slack notification. Some tech challenged family members have even come to me requesting a duplicate setup, a clear sign that this fragmented nonsense is not good.

That's some really nice setup! I'm gonna try it out soon as well. I have a question, I have a VPN as well but I don't wanna be connected to a VPN all the time, I only want my torrent manager go through a VPN while any other app is not. Is this achievable? Are you on a VPN constantly?

Thanks! I can't recommend it enough. As for the VPN part yeah you'll definitely want a VPN if you use torrents for the download source.

For my setup I have Radarr/Sonarr set to prefer Usenet and only resort to the torrent if it can't find a release after 24 hours. Just because Usenet eliminates the problem of having a single seeder uploading at 1kb/s and things like that. I would highly recommend grabbing a Usenet subscription if you're setting this system up. In SabNZBD you can setup which provider you prefer and then it goes down the list. My #1 is Newshosting.com, then Eweka.nl (they follow a different DMCA process so chance of a completed download is higher if a chunk is missing from Newshosting. SAB will use all sources to find missing pieces of the file automatically), then a 50GB block at Tweaknews, and finally a free trial block account at Usenet.farm. I am rambling at this point, if you want more info on this part feel free to ask.

As for your actual question - I have everything in Docker containers running on OpenMediaVault on a server in my house. I use the 'docker-transmission-openvpn' container as a self contained unit, it handles setting up the VPN connection for that container only so that the whole server isn't behind a VPN. For a provider I've had great luck with PIA for the last couple years, they don't care about torrenting. For Usenet downloads no VPN is needed.

I hand rolled this setup with a bunch of pre-made docker containers and configuring them myself. Someone else I know has a similar setup based on 'Cloudbox' (on Github) and that seems to be working well for him too.

You just up opened up a new world to me. I didn't even know what Usenet was and thought torrents were the only possible choice. I'm gonna try it out this weekend!! Thank you again!

My guess is if he’s using usenet, then he’s not bothering with VPN. Torrenting means you’re exposing your IP to anyone subscribed to that torrent. Usenet only exposes your IP to your provider, same way your IP is exposed to your VPN provider. Basically your exposure risk is the same with and without VPN, since all a rights holder needs is the logs from the usenet provider, and the VPN doesn’t obfuscate anything about this generally. VPN might provide some mitm data packet sniffing protection, and also some protections if you use anonomous pay for usenet, but otherwise probably not worth the effort. And if you were to go through the effort, then a dedicated machine with always on VPN is probably the safest way to go, since browsing the internet leaks an amazing amount of info about you.

> I'm not signing up for a handful of subpar streaming services just because the studios got greedy

I can see why people feel this way, but there is a third option. Just don't watch their shows.

I don't understand why people feel like they have a right to consume whatever media they want.

Nobody says they have the right though? They just say they are not having it and getting it elsewhere even if it’s against the rules.

I know I don't have a 'right' to consume any media. But I (along with many others) want to and will do so whether legal or not. Take that as you will.

Disruption from below is more likely to be a big factor, I'd say. Why even bother with expensive streaming TV when cheaper stuff like YouTube/Vimeo (and perhaps PeerTube/DTube in the future) is just as popular?

Don't forget Twitch.

There was a study showing its happening already. It really is all about convenience at fair price.

Also piracy is really the only thing that keeps the media corps in check, when it comes to pricing.

I ended up torrenting a movie the other day because I couldn’t find it on any major streaming service. Cost wasn’t an issue, I literally paid for a month’s worth of both Netflix and Now TV just to log in and search for the movie there, without success. Ended up torrenting it - the whole process was a lot faster than even trying to get it legally.

The industry is broken. Even when you want to pay money they can’t be bothered to match the user experience of piracy.

Guaranteed. The combination of torrents and DLNA is easy to do on android and is (in my experience) much better than all but Netflix's built-in streaming

Speaking of piracy, I´ve heard amazing things about IPTV.

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