Meanwhile, me: Pirating since before Napster, has automated nothing at all, likes browsing private torrent trackers websites because it sort of makes me feel like I’m in Blockbuster video in the 90s walking the aisles and checking what’s available.
then there’s me, pirating for the last 20 years, but just a couple years ago switched from utorrent to qbit, still finds 99% of my stuff from 1337x, can’t be arsed to learn what trackers even are.
Started pirating in the napster days. I was an expert for a long time…
Then netflix was actually pretty good for a few years… i stopped pirating stuff… then alowly slowly the enshittification crept in… i got sick and tired and quit legal streaming one day.
Then i realized, i had no idea where to look for torrents anymore… demonoid? Piratebay?
i’m still using 1337x, but apparently thats for boomers?
My friends: “Yeah so uh… What torrent sites are safe today? Anything?”
Me: “Piratebay”
My friends: “What? Haven’t they been down for over a decade?”
Me: “Nope.”
This was me until recently, but then 1337x started blocking some VPNs exit points and FENiX disappeared from it so I moved to a different (but similar) site. Also I’ve been sailing the high-seas for 3 decades instead of 2. All the rest is exactly the same.
Mind you, I used to watch my pirated material from a TV Media Box which basically showed a file browser I used to select files to play (which were shared over SMB from my home NAS), but 2 years ago I finally upgraded to modern media player interfaces and now have a Mini-PC with Kodi.
Well, my mini Mini-PC with Kodi also doubles down as the home NAS so technically I’m not really using SMB for the videos and music anymore, though those files are also shared over SMB if for some reason I want to copy them elsewhere.
That Mini-PC has an N100 CPU which does the decoding in hardware, so it has no issues whatsoever doing it (CPU usage when playing 1080p is less that 10%) hence there really is no point for me in decoding the video files elsewhere and sending over a ton of data raw data over the network - it might even have worse performance.
In fact that Mini-PC is also my bittorrent server with an always active VPN and it’s connected to the fiber router with Gigabit ethernet, which on the other side connects to 1 Gbps fiber to my ISP, so the whole thing is pretty performant (and even with all that CPU usage is still pretty low).
Streaming can make sense if you have multiple TVs or devices and you want to share sessions across (i.e. watch a bit in one and then continue watching in a different one from where you stopped), but for a single device setup, not so much IMHO.
Meanwhile, me: Pirating since before Napster, has automated nothing at all, likes browsing private torrent trackers websites because it sort of makes me feel like I’m in Blockbuster video in the 90s walking the aisles and checking what’s available.
Makes me feel like I’m part of some secret VIP club or something
then there’s me, pirating for the last 20 years, but just a couple years ago switched from utorrent to qbit, still finds 99% of my stuff from 1337x, can’t be arsed to learn what trackers even are.
I also get stuff from there and inject trackers list took from github. If something gots peers then it must be good enough to download
I just thought it was interesting that someone could not know what a tracker was and also be, you know, using one.
Sitting on a mountain of complexities you don’t know anything about and probably don’t even know exists is basically modern computing in a nutshell.
Started pirating in the napster days. I was an expert for a long time…
Then netflix was actually pretty good for a few years… i stopped pirating stuff… then alowly slowly the enshittification crept in… i got sick and tired and quit legal streaming one day.
Then i realized, i had no idea where to look for torrents anymore… demonoid? Piratebay?
i’m still using 1337x, but apparently thats for boomers?
What are the cool kids using these days?
nice try fed
extratorrent.st
My friends: “Yeah so uh… What torrent sites are safe today? Anything?”
Me: “Piratebay”
My friends: “What? Haven’t they been down for over a decade?”
Me: “Nope.”
This was me until recently, but then 1337x started blocking some VPNs exit points and FENiX disappeared from it so I moved to a different (but similar) site. Also I’ve been sailing the high-seas for 3 decades instead of 2. All the rest is exactly the same.
Mind you, I used to watch my pirated material from a TV Media Box which basically showed a file browser I used to select files to play (which were shared over SMB from my home NAS), but 2 years ago I finally upgraded to modern media player interfaces and now have a Mini-PC with Kodi.
i also used smb share with a mini pc, but then i learned about jellyfin and that’s been pretty solid
Well, my mini Mini-PC with Kodi also doubles down as the home NAS so technically I’m not really using SMB for the videos and music anymore, though those files are also shared over SMB if for some reason I want to copy them elsewhere.
That Mini-PC has an N100 CPU which does the decoding in hardware, so it has no issues whatsoever doing it (CPU usage when playing 1080p is less that 10%) hence there really is no point for me in decoding the video files elsewhere and sending over a ton of data raw data over the network - it might even have worse performance.
In fact that Mini-PC is also my bittorrent server with an always active VPN and it’s connected to the fiber router with Gigabit ethernet, which on the other side connects to 1 Gbps fiber to my ISP, so the whole thing is pretty performant (and even with all that CPU usage is still pretty low).
Streaming can make sense if you have multiple TVs or devices and you want to share sessions across (i.e. watch a bit in one and then continue watching in a different one from where you stopped), but for a single device setup, not so much IMHO.