Popcorn Time 0.5.0 | Hacker News Reader

Popcorn Time 0.5.0

github.com

186 pointspentagrama135 comments

My biggest gripe with Popcorn Time is that it doesn't run on my TV. I use a cloud server instead and Radarr/Sonarr combined with Real-Debrid(to download torrents) and Usenet to download content. I have a 16TB server on which I have downloaded all movies with IMDB rating > 6 and a good number of votes.

This allows me to run Plex/Jellyfin on my TV and stream. Bonus points is that it even works on my mobile phone when I'm on the move!

> I have a 16TB server on which I have downloaded all movies with IMDB rating > 6 and a good number of votes.

That seems like a lot of movies. How many of those 16TB are used by all movies with IMBD rating > 6 ?

Depending on the quality of the media.

The highest bitrate of 4k Bluray Remux movie in my library is ~90Mbps which translates to 50GiB~80GiB per movie.

> The highest bitrate of 4k Bluray Remux movie in my library is ~90Mbps which translates to 50GiB~80GiB per movie.

I feel like my sub USD 500 television is not worthy of such high quality.

~90Mbps? That's super high. Admittedly, I haven't been in the shiny round disc game for more than a decade and a half, so maybe they bumped up the bitrate for 4K content??? According to Sony[0], up to 100Mbps is supported. This is just way higher than anything I had ever played with, and find it difficult to think that HEVC would even need that bitrate. Seems like the same logic in using gold Monster cables makes the audio sound better when using such a high video bitrate.

[0]https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/articles/00190648

Here's an example: https://www.1377x.to/torrent/5969105/Trainspotting-1996-Crit...

I'm not saying I have this in my library FWIW.

4K UHD remuxes are basically straight rips of the source Bluray, hence the high bitrate and file size.

There are even hybrid remux releases where multiple sources (e.g., WEB and Bluray) are fused together to get the absolute highest quality possible.

And how many of these movies have you actually watched? This just sounds like a text book case of digital hoarding. Most people I know that torrent do it on a distinct interest in watching vs might possibly some day maybe want to watch it so let's just get it ahead of time.

I'm not judging, just noting that it's a definite new "use case" to me

I‘ve recently heard the term „data prepper“, which I think nails it. I‘d probably qualify as one myself.

Sounds like a disease which would require some form of therapy. I couldn't imagine the sickness that would entice one to download and store/reseed content that I had no intention of ever watching like Kardashians or Twighlight or whatever content just because. I hope you get the help you need!

What happened to not judging from 30 minutes ago? Now you're saying it requires therapy.

I'm not going to go out and collect in this manner, but I have ended up with a rather sizable collection of discs I might watch someday. I had pretty much stopped buying discs because streaming was easier and I can mostly ignore the difference in quality; but I've been bitten by too many things becoming unavailable... if the discs are cheap, I'm going to get them and maybe one day watch them.

> What happened to not judging from 30 minutes ago? Now you're saying it requires therapy.

because it's not the same person, and the person i replied to sounded much more comedic by using an air quotes term, so i followed suit.

> if the discs are cheap,

but you're not collecting discs. you're collecting files. if you were collecting discs, it would be even more of a hoarding situation.

also, I can have the opinion that something needs therapy without judgement.

There has been dozens of times I heard about some classic and wanted to watch it. When I look it up on <streaming service> it is not available. If it's an old movie it can be hard to find a good torrent for it. Having an extensive local library of movies of general interest sounds nice, especially going forward when content will disappear and become more fractured between paid services.

No need to reseed when you just hoard Linux ISOs.

yeah, cuz that's exactly what people are using Popcorn Time 0.5.0 to do <facepalm>

I think it's a joke, "Linux ISOs" is a known euphemism for movies/porn/etc on /r/datahoarders.

16TB is a single hard drive these days. It's easier to grab everything at that point instead of picking through, and having everything gives you a nice easy claim you can make.

16TB on a single drive is just asking for more faith in the tech than I can muster.

You can split it into two drives at about the same price. Or add a backup drive to minimize the risk.

Though I would say that thinking you need a certain amount of data safety is more of an unhealthy thought pattern than saying "sure, give me all the movies for my $250 drive".

> Though I would say that thinking you need a certain amount of data safety is more of an unhealthy thought pattern

WTF is that? anybody that doesn't think about data safety deserves having their data lost. and if you come back with "just download it again" just proves why you don't need to have it downloaded locally to start

> deserves having their data lost

That is toxic. That toxicity is worse than "wasting" a single drive.

> and if you come back with "just download it again" just proves why you don't need to have it downloaded locally to start

How about "you can get most of it back, and it's okay to have a collection that's at risk of partial loss (good luck making any physical collection immune to loss)"

You're trading off the time to get things back and the percent you can get back for the cost of [redundant] backups.

> need to have it downloaded locally

Nobody suggested it needs to be downloaded. Do you only have data that you need to have?

I wouldn't do it for myself but I live in a big household with kids.

I expect many other "hoarders" are in a situation where what they are actually trying to do is provide a good discovery experience for others where it is not entirely clear what they would want.

You can use overseer/jellyseer and they are great but not as nice as just picking something from media browser.

DataHoarder is a very active reddit community devoted to this “hobby”

Edit: moved response to correct/intended comment

I’m not about to do this myself, but I can totally see why someone would. With the way some movies just fall off of streaming services and even rental services and just become unfindable, I’m glad there are people out there keeping independent collections.

> I have a 16TB server on which I have downloaded all movies with IMDB rating > 6 and a good number of votes

You do not have all movies >6 with a bunch of votes on just 16TB, unless the cutoff is like 100k+ votes and you're downloading 1080p max. I have a 73TB server at 99% capacity right now and I hardly have a movie library.

1080p is the way to go IMO

Depending on your tv/monitor. For example, 4K is clearly more enjoyable on my 40 inch ultra wide monitor with good color gamut. And good quality 4K, not something ultra compressed.

Lets say you want the IMDB top 500, most of those will not have a scan that is better in 4k than 1080 or even normal DVD (480p). The ones that do (like 4k77) are probably highly specialized.

What is the highest res 2001, godfather, solaris, alien rip that you can get?

3 out of the 4 films you mentioned have 4K Blu-ray releases

That doesn't mean they have a scan that benefits from 4K.

That also doesn’t mean they haven’t have a scan that benefits from 4K, but it’s a rather an indication that they benefit than otherwise.

I get TV shows in 720p and movies in 1080p. On my 75 inch TV, it's hardly noticeable unless I do a quick switch back and forth between a 4k and 1080 source of the same movie.

That's the thing. I can totally tell the difference between 1080 and 4K. But not once have I been watching a 1080 blu-ray and thought it would look better in 4K.

Most TVs have a ton of filter on any movies which you want to watch on them. You basically won’t enjoy anything how it was intended. I specified monitor and good color gamut for a reason.

I willingly avoid 4k media and 4k tvs. 1080p is fine, if the movie suck the additional pixels won’t make it any better anyway.

And 1080p os faster at everything: downloading, playing, streaming…

It’s exactly 30 seconds to start to play anything nowadays. Popcorn Time’s one main feature is to make it unnecessary to wait, but nowadays you can do this with anything basically.

That's kind of what I'm thinking, after getting my 4k HDR TV I was blown away by the filesizes needed to make full use of it.

Just the most popular stuff and limited to 1080p or less though... Yeah 16Tb is pushing it.

Instead of telling someone they're wrong you could just assume they mean 1080p. If we're talking 1080p encodes you can totally do it in that size. If you're using 73TB for barely a collection you're just wasting space.

>50GB/movie remuxes do look great though. I wouldn't say a waste of space. Storage is cheap anyway and getting big bitrates is also satisfying. This seems like the FLAC vs 320kbps "debate" where people claim to not see any difference, except with movies it's a much more noticeable gap between average and top quality.

Also the compact versions rarely have enough channels and bitrate for a good speaker setup.

Is it? If the guy has 73TB of storage let's say it's 6x 16TB disks (one redundant). Looking at Seagate IronWolf NAS disks that would cost over 2k. I guess you could get cheaper disks, but I still wouldn't call this cheap. This doesn't include the hardware to run it and power to keep it online.

Yep, most of the movies are 1080p h265. I run ffmpeg scripts to auto convert h264 to hevc and generate smaller files.

I do have 4K rips for movies I like and new movies, but by default download 1080p hevc only. I stay away from remuxes

I use https://github.com/hauxir/rapidbay for this purpose.

the advantage of that is that it's all on-demand. no need to set up sonarr/radarr. Just set up a bunch of trackers to search from and pick from them on demand.

It’s quite amazing how much you can do with a working self-hosted setup and a decent amount of storage. The open source community around self-hosted services is stronger than ever.

A few of my favorite lesser known self-hosted projects are Audiobookshelf, Komga (comic/manga reader), and Kavita (ebook/comic/manga reader).

Radar and Sonarr here with Overseerr as an UI for my wife. Bazarr for subs, jackett as a client for torrent sites, unpackerr for unpacking zips. Good old Transmission as download client.

It's a shame unpackerr is needed. BitTorrent works better on large uncompressed files.

Interesting, why is that?

- Smaller torrent filesize

- Clients prevent forcing priority if there's only one file

- Checksum checking is built in

- Less work per client [0]

- Redundant decompression required by everyone that grabs the file

[0] - https://blog.codinghorror.com/everybody-loves-bittorrent/

What does the torrent treat a compressed uncompressed file differently? I would have imagined the torrent framework would be agnostic to the actual file encoding.

To clarify it works better with big files vs small files. Compression has no impact.

Is that just efficiency (per byte, etc) or would the network actually work better (faster real downloads for larger files vs smaller)? I’m imagining there’s some tradeoff at some point.

From what I've read the swarm works better on one large file vs many smaller ones. I am verbatim passing along what I've read and have no data to substantiate that claim. Hopefully someone that has a better understanding of the protocol and client implementations can weigh in.

I suppose Usenet is still in use and distributors can use the same release regardless of medium.

Why do you need a special program to unpack rars? I just use qbittorrent and put this command in the "run external program on torrent finished" box: 7z x "%F/*.rar" -o"%F/"

Unpackerr integrates with Radarr and Sonarr and can handle various archive types, retries, split archives, etc.

Stremio with Torrentio plugin functions exactly the same as Popcorn Time and runs on TVs

Real Debrid is worth the price if you want a better experience.

I have a similar setup (32TB NAS + Jellyfin). I use three different Radarr instances (1080p/4k/Anime). Every movie that I've liked on LetterBoxd gets downloaded automatically in 1080p / 4k (1080p for streaming outside my home). Jellyseer allows me to give access to friends and they're able to request stuff easily that's not on streaming. I also use Infuse on AppleTV which has support for Dolby Atmos / Dolby Vision. Absolutely amazing once you get it setup, I've been slowly rebuilding my blu-ray collection digitally too.

you use real-debrid and plex and not plex-debrid? https://github.com/itsToggle/plex_debrid

Downloading movies is for the stone age!.

Plex shares are harder to find now but on Discord you can find servers with 100s of TB of movies and TV show to stream straight from your devices with no work and just a small monthly payment

Really interesting mix of npm packages, gulpfiles, jshint, both underscore and lodash, backbone.js, some stuff i've never really heard of like nedb which is probably because its more specific to electron. It actually uses node-webkit NW.js instead of electron.

It's an interesting mix of new and old things as a project that likely has changed hands many times. Like dayjs is pretty new.

The homogeneity of a JavaScript codebase has a tenth the half-life of an "enterprise" lang/framework.

IMO this is because the JavaScript ecosystem is speedrunning the decades of lessons learned by the greater software engineering field.

I have been half jokingly saying they’re rewriting php.

Good, PHP is an inconsistent intractable pain. Who thought referring to functions by the string value of their name was a good idea?

Your pet theory is questionable, as the JavaScript (ecosystem) is one of the oldest that's still wildly used everywhere.

The big libs have been pretty stable for the last decade though, even if the ecosystem itself feels quiet messy, likely because there are so many interested parties, each having their own ideas of how it should be.

And it's also often the first language for a lot of beginners. ..

Users of "real programming languages" have peddled this narrative for decades.

They are so mature and everything JS is just child's play...

Eek. 1) I use JS/TS every day. 2) There are a great many people who are familiar with multiple languages, their ecosystems & culture, their history, and finally how they compare to each other.

To imply that if you are critical of JS, you must be "on the other team", is a false dichotomy.

It's also some real shady shit, requiring MacOS users use an unsigned installer package.

There's no reason it should require an installer package when it can be distributed as a self-contained app.

I'm not giving authorization to an unsigned installer file made by some anonymous Russians.

The "unsigned" part isn't surprising, considering Apple would never approve it. But the installer package is far from ideal. It's typically only used when a program needs to install a privileged helper service, and I don't know why Popcorn Time would need that?

Edit: It appears to be just a .app file? Unless the .pkg is bundled in there...

> The "unsigned" part isn't surprising, considering Apple would never approve it.

Apple doesn't have approval rights when you distribute Mac software outside their App Store.

Signing just requires that you have a developer certificate and pass a virus scan.

Just based on the Apple developer documentation, it appears that you're correct: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/notarizin...

I was actually surprised not to at least see "your app must agree to abide by some basic terms of service" on the list of requirements. It seems like a mostly automatic system.

At the same time, I would also be surprised if Apple were explicitly alerted by Hollywood lawyers of the fact that an app like Popcorn Time was endorsed in any way by them, and they didn't proceed to revoke the signature.

I kind of doubt it. Right now Microsoft is paying money to distribute it to people (Github). Code signing is not really any stamp of approval from an "app store" type agency, it's more of a self-certification thing. It's similar to TLS on the Web; Let's Encrypt issuing a certificate says "Let's Encrypt checked that the website was able to receive traffic for the named domain on the issuance date", not "Let's Encrypt wishes that it made this website itself!"

It would be interesting if Github here could put a green check next to the release files certifying they were entirely built from the sources in the repository that link to a corresponding ref/tag SHA. "No external files involved in the build". Obviously this would only be possible if the release files were built by GH Actions and the environment was a special one, absolutely sealed from the open internet that GH would certify, filter and curate.

Still, this would not prevent some shady file in the repo or build hack to go unnoticed, but maybe it could become a starting point for delivering safer binary distributions from open source projects.

You’re only looking at the top 12 download links. There’s a link that says “Show all 22 assets”.

Click on that to find a link to download “Popcorn-Time-0.5.0-osx64.zip”, which contains a self-contained [.app] folder.

I don’t know what I’m doing wrong but I can’t get it to run. I get an error message reading “Popcorn-Time” is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Bin. I can’t diagnose anything sensible from the Console. What am I doing wrong?

    cloc Popcorn-Time.app/ 
       16195 text files.
       11358 unique files.                                          
        5044 files ignored.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Language                             files          blank        comment           code
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    JavaScript                            6015         106427         177209         638087
    JSON                                   947             36              0         214754
    Markdown                               964          42676            224         101002
    YAML                                     9             19             20          97485
    CSS                                     46           6016            985          88269
    SVG                                   2557              0             17          43048
    TypeScript                             581           2481          78577          37547

Amazing

Popcorn Time is back?

The code never went anywhere.

I guess it “returned” a couple years ago, as discussed heavily here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31972681

Mixed feelings about this. I do not wish for it to be shut down again, but I hope people realize that every popcorn time user is one less qbitorrent user that accidentally leaves their client open in the background.

I have a theory that most seeding is done by people who are unaware they are doing it or don't even know what it is. Tech like webtorrents, clients for portable devices and this are harmful to the network in the long term.

Unless they bring new users that would not normally use torrent and that happen to participate while they watch their movie?

The only question left to ask is… anyone want to give me view access to their movie tv server?

Strem.io + plugins + real-debrid.com

beats the old and the new popcorn time

Amen. Keep spreading the gospel. This is what we all imagined the world of online streaming would actually be like.

I use stremio with some torrent plugin. I've read about debrid , but don't really get it's advantage. Is it mainly to avoid being identified as torrenting by authorities? So if i live in a torrent friendly country it doesn't matter?

> Is it mainly to avoid being identified as torrenting by authorities? So if i live in a torrent friendly country it doesn't matter?

It's not just that. Streaming from an proper server always beats streaming from P2P connections. The former is much faster to stream, forward, and rewind, making the whole streaming experience better. Especially when watching 4K content or old movies with relatively less number of seeders.

Additionally you can use Infuse if you are in Apple ecosystem and use their AppleTV app to watch everything on your TV! Just setup Infuse with Real Debrid as WebDAV and you're set, you can even get the subtitles downloaded!

Works great! Any idea if it is possible to cast the video to my chromecast?

Nice, project resurrected?

Is there a glossary of terminology anywhere? I think popcorn time is some kind of application for watching movies, but beyond that, I don't understand many of the comments in this story. I was into torrents 20 years ago, but I have not kept up with it.

Currently, I get my movies from Netflix, and nowhere else, and I'm basically happy with that. Judging from internet comments, I might be the only one.

It's a torrent client that is able to download the torrent file sequentially, rather than in random chunks. Meaning you can stream a movie torrent instead of the old-fashioned method of needing to wait for the entire thing to download before you can watch. It's a combination torrent client and media player.

It also shows you a list of movies, shows and anime in the app and lets you search for one without having to go to a separate website.

Any decent torrent client (apart from Transmission?) has had sequential downloading for years. It was never a unique feature of those idiot-oriented wrappers.

Well it combines website lookup + bittorrent client + viewer. If you're happy with apps that you use for that then popcorn time doesn't really bring anything to the table except the all-in-one solution.

Popcorn Time is 10 years old. Sequential downloading wasn't as common then, and the torrenting community had very mixed feelings about integrating sequential downloads at the time. It was (still is) good for leechers and bad for seeders.

It is a tool. “Good” and “bad” are views of that tool that humans have. If two or more people are fine with transferring the pieces sequentially, there is nothing wrong with that, and no “hurting” of any “network” happens. Setting it as default for every user of some client would be bad on average, and bittorrent has enough math to ensure balanced distribution of pieces in various common and corner cases by default. However, it is quite irrelevant for torrents with hundreds or thousands of peers. They don't have availability problems, and the fairness of data downloaded and uploaded depends on too many random factors anyway. Say, if you have a client seeding just a couple of torrents which connects to peers quickly, and I have a client with a lot of torrents, and slow peer rotation, you are going to serve more data to more peers than me on the same torrent. 20 year old discussions reasoning about possible peers with modem speeds and metered connections are not completely correct today. You probably need to have terabytes of data to transfer to start caring about which approach is more fault tolerant and more fair, or notice the difference.

Also, sequential download was in libtorrent-rasterbar since 0.14 (November 2008).

2014 is not that different from 2024 if we talk about torrenting. Certainly not “the old times”.

> I get my movies from Netflix, and nowhere else, and I'm basically happy with that

Mr. Hastings, is that you? The Netflix library has become so small and full of crap, that I find it hard to honestly accept that anyone could be satisfied with that alone.

> The Netflix library has become so small and full of crap, that I find it hard to honestly accept that anyone could be satisfied with that alone.

260 million paying households around the world disagree. In last quarter alone, 13 million new households started subscribing.

https://apnews.com/article/netflix-fourth-quarter-results-vi...

260M households does not equal 260M satisfied with Netflix alone. Almost everyone I know with Netflix also has at least one, if not both, of Disney+ or Prime Video

Thanks for confirming that I didn't imply something that the GP read into it.

They posted numbers like they were well informed, but conveniently left out of those numbers that you pointed out had more than 1 subscription that you've pointed out. I just didn't think this was something that needed to be pointed out in an honest conversation, and would only be needed by shills for Netflix

You said that the reason people don't subscribe to Netflix alone is because the library has become so small and crap. Your thesis is incorrect.

Nobody ever only got their TV and movie entertainment from a single source.

If you pay attention to consumer sentiment with respect to video streaming services, you will know that the #1 thing streaming subscribers value is original and exclusive content first. https://www.fool.com/research/state-of-streaming/

No studio has a monopoly on exclusive and original content.

> Your thesis is incorrect.

How much Disney content is now on Netflix? Gotten smaller.

How much Paramount content is now on Netflix? Gotten smaller.

How much WB/HBO content is now on Netflix? Gotten smaller.

please, show me where my thesis is incorrect.

Netflix was the only streaming site which meant ever studio used them for streaming, plus they also had their shiny round disc service. Now, Netflix is claiming they want to get to 100% only their content which is just PR spin because nobody else will license them content. If you think they have more content now than they have in the past, you are sorely mistaken. Arguing the point just shows your lack of honesty.

I no nothing about the "poll" you link to other than they did not ask me. I don't care about exclusive content produced by the streaming platform. I care about the depth of the content available. The streaming platform fragmentation has pushed me away from caring about ANY of the platforms. Cutting the cord from cable providers was meant to be a cheaper solution than paying for the various cable packages. Now, there are so many streamers that must be paid for separately, they add up to the same as the old cable providers people were wanting to "rebel" against.

Nothing has changed for the consumer's wallet. It's just cutting out the cable middleman, and now going straight to the studios.

> Now, Netflix is claiming they want to get to 100% only their content which is just PR spin because nobody else will license them content.

See how studios are increasingly licensing to. Netflix again. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2023/12/21/studios-a...

Look, I'll give you credits for trying since you don't know who I am, but suggesting I'm not paying attention to streaming clearly shows you know nothing Jon Snow about me or what I do.

Hi dylan. Can you tell me about your self and what you do so I and others can better contextualize your comments?

Netflix's US catalogue is not the same as many international markets where they are still the only game in town and have the streaming rights to much more stuff.

I am a paying customer. Mostly due to my kids enjoying a lot of their stuff.

It used to have a decent amount of content for me - but as time went, I just found less and less interesting content and now I no longer bother to even browse Netflix.

I exist, and I'm not paid by Netflix. You learn something new every day.

i'm happy for you. i personally, and i know i'm not alone, feel like the Netflix service is no longer near the value it was. Before, it was cheaper and had oh so much more content. Now, it is much more expensive, less content and of less quality. So, you can continue being happy with it if you truly are, but do not think those of us that have been long time subscribers that we're the strange ones

No, I think I'm the strange one. I can't remember the last time I saw someone say Netflix is satisfactory. I've been a netflix subscriber since before it offered streaming. It used to be better. But I still like it.

There is a giant market for one-click piracy solutions for the technologically illiterate. It's actually the same market on which legal services operate. Their competitors are streaming sites, various pay-to-pirate services that promise to do your work for you, and applications that combine torrents coming from popular catalogues with covers and descriptions from general purpose services into a nice interface. Choose a movie, and downloading starts in the background without the need to figure anything out. The latest and greatest Hollywood hits always have peers, and the rest does not really interest the general public.

Because the users self-select for laziness and blind trust, it's a perfect feeding ground for malware operators, just like “system optimizer” and “system cleaner” applications are. Clients like “Zona” or “MediaGet” can sometimes be seen in torrent peer lists, and it's a common joke among tech support crowd that if one of those is installed, for some reason, the system always has malware to clean. Of course, the only “official” version may not display any unwanted behavior — at least initially — but there are 50 other sites in the search results with totally not suspicious installers.

The other thing is there is no “deep learning” here. Authors do not scan ALL the available torrents and figure out which is which, they simply use metadata filled in by users in catalogues. Those are the same torrents anyone can find and download.

Wow, the Windows version has a lot of files... 18,450.

(https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop/releases...).

Just yesterday I was thinking about Popcorn Time and now I see it here.

Can you think of my bank account having 30m$? tnx

Reminds me of the Little Johnny joke about "I need a bike!"

I got you.

Popcorn Time app takes ages to load even on my 5600X. It is one of those apps which I think should definitely move to Bun

IMO just join a private group and use Plex.

You'll never have any ISP woes/issues.

How?

I know reddit had censored and shut the sub down but in past I used r/plexshare. You probably could just search for one on yandex or something. Google sucks for a search like that. The problem I had with plex was it can at any moment be shut down. Plex is actively looking for those sharing services like this and shutting them down. Then it would be offline from anywhere from 1hr to 12 hours. Usually pretty quick but more then one night I sit to watch my show and it had been shut down. I used a site called all media access I believe and they charged $10 a month. It was however with it in my opinion. They have since moved off plex and on to something like iptv but I just am not with them anymore so don’t know the details. But if I was you check out all media access.

You might look into seedboxes, I use feral hosting, basically it’s a server someplace where torrenting is legal that you run a remote torrent client on. Then on a server in my house I sync the files locally with syncthing and run plex locally.

Jellyfin is another similar app to plex but it’s open source and while promising is not quite there yet for what I want out of a media app.

Plex saved me from my Samsung TV's abysmal UPnP client.

If you happen to go down the same route I did and eventually get frustrated with Plex's frankly abysmal apps and interfaces (the server is terrific though) I cannot recommend Infuse enough as a replacement. I HATED the Plex Apple TV app and infuse is a fantastic replacement.

Depending on what features you want (I'm not sure how it is with, say, streaming outside your LAN) Jellyfin works pretty well for me and is extremely simple to set up.

As long as private trackers have absurd seeding rules and require you to sign up (initially) without your VPN active, I won't be touching them with a ten foot socket.

Get a seedbox and set it to seed indefinitely, you solve both problems at once.

Just buy a hard drive.

Why are you so afraid of them knowing your IP?

People running such trackers usually have no idea about security, they‘ll likely put your IP in an excel sheet, for law enforcement to take when their home is raided.

there was one tracker that suffered this, 32p.

From what I have seen about published seeding rules most trackers as switching to pretty reasonable rules. Typically the only major sin is not seeding for a minimum length of time (usually a few days). Then there are ratio rules but these are typically assisted by bonuses for long seeding even with no downloads and freeleach for new and popular torrents. There are still a few trackers where the site ratio stat is zero-sum but for the most part this isn't the case. As long as you do make content available you will not be punished.

The challenge is twofold on “elite” private trackers:

1. Getting into the tracker requires ratio proof from other reputable trackers.

2. Freeleech becomes less common, which makes maintaining a >1.0 ratio difficult without a seedbox and IRC based tools (eg, autobrr).

I think they mean join a group that uses a shared Plex server. People sell slots on their own servers with an automated/semi-automated request workflow for new content.

Use Jellyfin over Plex, it is open source for one thing and it's not being enshittified as Plex is, as Plex tries to generate revenue from notoriously cheap customers, by definition.

Anywhere I can find jellyfin shares?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com