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.
99% of my stuff from 1337x
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
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.
I don’t trust robots to download shit 😒 I’ll click on my own magnet links thank you very much
Honestly pirating through the browser has gotten so convenient that I can see why people don’t bother with torrents anymore. I’ve known about torrents for decades, but these days, there are sites you can instantly stream any movie or TV show in 1080p with subtitles right from your browser. No need to add it to a queue or wait for it to download, no need to fiddle with srt files or resync subs… and for gaming, OMG. If someone has a steamdeck they can visit any number of reliable sites found on fmhy and download preinstalled/cracked game folders right from the steamdeck browser, extremely fast direct download speeds, and then they just have to add the exe file to steam as a non steam game. No need to run an installer through Lutris, or free up enough space for the installer and installation. Way faster and way simpler. Torrents are great for archival purposes but direct downloads through the browser are so much more convenient, and they pop up faster than they can be shutdown.
Thats why Steamdeck is called the Ultimate Nintendo Pirate device, Valve made it for this
Quality is the main thing lacking, that and convienence. Do the fancy setup and with some configuration everything shows up in high quality with surround sound great for a nice home theater setup. Or even a middling home theater setup. Uhd 5.1 surround, hdr, the works. And convenience one app for everything from, shows, sports, Anime to porn, no need to use a keyboard the TV remote is all you need. It’s a bit annoying to setup, but the result is luxury and learning a bit more about networking.
Monitoring too. I subscribe to shows and new episodes just turn up. More than once I didn’t even realize a new season had started.
I don’t have a 4k tv anyway, or surround sound speakers, or the storage for huge media files. The quality on these sites is 1080p which is good enough for me and my TV. A laptop and an air mouse keyboard and I’m good to go
*Edit I also can’t stand using an on screen keyboard so using the air mouse remote with a little keyboard on the back feels like luxury to me. I guess you can use a phone or computer to add stuff to jellyfin but usually when I want to watch something I wanna watch it right away
It took me way to long being puzzled by the eye patches before realizing they were added in
As someone who has been liberating entertainment and culture since the days of Wolfestein 3d I’m amused when youngones talk about “downloading movies”. Funnily enough it happened today in class because I was doing the black magic called yt-dlp and derps were amazed
