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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Isn't torrenting way down from its heyday? Streaming companies are not perfect, but I always thought they were at least moderately successful such that in 2025, average, casual, non-techies no longer bother to jump through the VPN and private tracker hoops just to download a movie.

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In my circles the modern alternative seems to be using Yandex to search for "$show stream".

I don't know about BitTorrent but Usenet is way up:

https://www.newsdemon.com/usenet-newsgroup-feed-size

Daily volume could just be more bluray high quality downloads with people with better internet. And not neccesarily larger number of people right?

I would be pretty surprised if the quality of rips since 2017 would account for a 20x increase in traffic.

Most of the rips are probably the same-ish size. But there are definitely now a lot of incredibly huge rips. A 13-episode season of television that's like 80 gigs. It's an additive load, and while it's not that regular, it could have a massively outsided impact.

It's down from it's heyday for the mainstream, but for the dedicated few, it's better than ever before. Gone are the days of manually searching for a movie on tracker sites, downloading them, organizing your library and watching stuff on your laptop.

There are now open-source, self-hosted applications that automate that entire process, so it's as simple as requesting a movie on your phone and having it show up on your own personal streaming service on your TV a few minutes later.

What are the names of these immoral piracy applications, so that I can know to avoid them if I happen to stumble upon one?

Plex/Jellyfin for streaming, the *arr suite for cataloging/downloading [0]

[0] https://wiki.servarr.com/

It's so nice to have all my legal media backups cataloged and organized and easily viewable. My server isn't powerful enough for 4k HDR though so I need to upgrade it.

:D I'm glad you're protected from these terrible services now

Do not under any circumstance download Stremio (available in Firestick as well). Also don't try to install the Torrentio extension for Stremio. That would allow you to play pirated content with one click I your TV, similarly to PopcornTime.

I know a guy who knows a guy that says that you don’t even need that, you just browse the movies and press “play” as there is direct torrent streaming now. But I don’t know anything about all this i just use my VCR with the clock flashing 12:00.

Yes, for $30 a year you can instantly stream any torrent with no real setup or install. The most used client is a PWA that calls out to VLC or whatever.

Bluray 4K 100+GB copy of Dune Part 2 at >70Mbps with maybe 5 seconds of buffering at the start. Literally can’t replicate it with legal streaming.

I torrent content I’m legally allowed to watch because the UX is far better with Plex than with the plethora of crappy apps.

I rip stuff from YouTube for the same reason. Currently watching Taskmaster which has all or most episodes freely available on YouTube, but no way am I interested in using that dumpster fire of a UX.

I think it was down when the answer to streaming was "get netflix, it has most stuff", but now it's "pay for netflix, Disney+, Amazon prime, apple tv, ...".

For a while, streaming was better than any alternative. However over the last several year prices have a spike while the collections available for streaming have shrunk and splintered. Then a bunch of the streaming sites started adding ads for their paying customers.

At this point streaming servcies have been enshitified enough to make piracy again the better experience.

Can confirm. The only streaming service I use anymore is Disney+, and I only have it because I like to watch the new Star Wars stuff when it releases at good quality. Everything else I care to watch, which isn't much besides older stuff, I'll just torrent now.

Greedy companies really need to heed Gabe Newell's words.

Even Disney+ is crappier than Netflix in the streaming heyday - there are Disney Junior shows that Disney+ didn’t have (maybe still doesn’t).

Buying DVDs and ripping to Jellyfin is much easier.

Why do the ripping myself when the torrents are mostly all rips other people already did?

I still subscribe to some of the services, but the experience has deteriorated sufficiently that at this point I rip all videos I care about and then watch them in Plex.

dunno about public sites, but the private ones are healthier than ever

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