I’ve been putting off having a local copy of the series and movies I watch because I still can access them quickly and cheaply enough in some streaming service, I think it’s time to plan ramping up my selfhosted setup.
All I can say is Netflix at 12.99 was a tough sell. That was the rate hike that made me drop them. 15.49 forget it.
When Netflix was the ticket and my sub was 8.99 some years ago, I didn’t pirate anything because I didn’t need to. I’d have to pay a hundred a month due to the fracturing and inflation of streaming services now, and I still wouldn’t get everything. I didn’t wanna pirate, but the industry backed me into a corner.
Anakin and Padme image macro
That extra money will go to the writers and actors right?
ONE DEFINITELY SHOULDNT LOOK INTO RADARR OR SONARR OR QBITTORRENT WITH THAT NICE SEARCH BAR THAT SEARCHES MULTIPLE TORRENT SITES.
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FYI, Proton free tier doesn’t support P2P traffic.
Also there definitely isn’t a VPN called cryptostorm that offers a nice free tier.
Ideally you should only use a VPN that supports port forwarding to download torrents, like AirVPN. Your IP is still hidden, but you can also seed the torrents. Don’t be a leecher! Sharing is caring.
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1.0 ratio leggoooooo
How about I do it anyway
No one should ever know about the torrentio addon for Stremio!
When I downloaded streamio it couldn’t find that add-on
That’s because it is not tied to stremio, otherwise it would be illegal, you have to search for it :P
The next step is for the ad-tier to go to $7.99, $8.99, $9.99
The strategy was always to make the ad-free options more valuable by comparison.
In no more than 36 months, the ad-tier will cost the $9.99 it was intended to replace, making Netflix having successfully added ads to the base tier, for no discount.
Enshittification 101. Usenet is cheaper, torrent indexers can be free. Remember, “Information wants to be free”, also remember the 5th of November…
pirateshipnoises
First rule of the sea:
Never place your rear end on a pirate’s face.
You’ll find me in the Drunken Slug tavern.
Netflix will be losing to a competitor with an ad-free tier that costs $0.00
Maybe they noticed that most people don’t want the most expensive Plan if they are not allowed to share anymore
I love Netflix. I’d happily pay them $20 per month for a single account. The problem is their content. It’s not original anymore. Shows with real story and depth have been replaced with reality tv and typical Hollywood formula. Sad seeing the slow decline of the platform that started out so great.
The offender for me is that they don’t commit to most show’s development.
They go by peoples perceived attention spans. On average most people don’t get invested more than 2-3 seasons per show and they keep needing to make more money each year so this is a more efficient strategy.
3 Seasons is plenty of time to create a very complete and compelling story. The problem is when they dont allow for the completion of the story but instead cancel the show for $reasons.
I watched and loved the german series DARK and was quite excited for the new show 1899 from the same creators. Unfortunately it was dumped after only 1 season so I never even watched it. I dont want to get invested in something that I know will never be completed.
The issue isn’t the number of seasons, it’s the abrupt cancellation of unresolved stories. 3 seasons is plenty. 2 seasons is fine. Hell, Chernobyl is one of the greatest pieces of media ever produced and that’s a mini-series. Just commit to giving the creators a chance to resolve their story. If that means a truncated final season, so be it. It builds consumer trust, and it increases the value of the back catalog. When I subscribe to a streaming service, a show that was cancelled on a cliffhanger offers me literally zero value. I’m not interested in starting a show that I know will never provide a satisfying conclusion.
To be fair, I’m on the fence about this reason. I really don’t like for a good show to get ruined after a long run. I hate for a good show to end, but I like it to end while I enjoy it. I’m usually okay with a series only running a few seasons. However, if the quality stays up, yes, please make more!
It’s fine to only have a few seasons, but tell the writers that in advance so they can complete the series.
Also, cancelling after one season is shitty.
IS IT CAKE?!
An alternative to self-hosting and piracy, if there’s something you really want to watch, just buy a month, then immediately cancel the subscription to whatever service has that show, after all the episodes has aired. I usually spend between $30-$50 in total on streaming services in a year this way, and as a principle, I call it “buying a month” as opposed to “subscribing.” Right now I’m waiting for Secret Wars to finish on Disney+. Will probably watch the last few MCU movies and some other stuff during the same month so that’s probably up to 10 shows/movies for $whatever-a-month-goes-for these days. Might do a month of Netflix later in the autumn, as I have a few things I want to watch there now that didn’t quite justify buying on their own. And no, I very rarely rewatch anything, so I don’t really worry about loosing access to them in the future.
Until they patch this loophole by forcing yearly subscriptions.
Then I would definitely dig out my old eye-patch and captains hat again 🏴☠️
Yarrrrr!
No doubt this is coming in the near future
A lot of other services usually offer a yearly discount, and I can see Netflix offering that. However, I don’t see Netflix choosing to get rid of the monthly market entirely.
They could just make the monthly price so high that people will always get the yearly plan. For example, make the yearly plan cost the same amount as three months on the monthly plan.
SSDs are very cheap these days
HDDs are even cheaper and you really don’t need an SSD for movies. You can get a 4tb HDD for less than 50 bucks and that will hold more than enough movies/shows for the majority of people.
You can get a 4tb HDD for less than 50 bucks
[citation needed]
Couldn’t find them (or some that are close), at least not in the EU.
Edit: But I’d be happy to see US examples as well.
I admit my mistake, I just quickly looked up the cheapest HDDs on google and saw some for 40 USD but it looks like they aren’t for sale anymore or something. Still, a WD Red goes for 70 bucks, which is half the price of a SSD of that size while also being more than good enough for movies.
You can get refurbed drives for under $50.
New ones that aren’t white label (which, nothing wrong with that) for 4 TB are about $100.
WD Red 4TB drives are only around $70 new, and they’re built for constant use in NAS devices.
This is exactly the sort of stuff we predicted way back then; this is why I’ve never touched this stuff.
I remember commenting on Reddit that the ad tier would start chiseling away the solid ad free tiers. I had absolute vitriol spew at me for saying that. And here we are.
Getting to the point where they aren’t worth the money, it is one increase away from being a dead loss of a service
Plexshares are soon going to be the only thing people will need as less money and value without bs politics and taking customers for granted and as fools…
If you use a “public” Plex share (one that you find online and pay a monthly fee for), Plex will eventually find you and suspend your account.
A safer approach with Plex is to get a cheap server (assuming you can direct play on most client systems), get an unlimited Dropbox team account for storage, use rclone to mount Dropbox on the server, and auto-download via Usenet using Radarr, Sonarr and Lidarr. Split the cost across a bunch of friends.
Or just use Weyd or Syncler plus a Real Debrid account. Real Debrid caches torrents so they’re instantly available to stream at full speed over an encrypted (TLS) connection.
real debrid might be a good option
@dan @cyberpiggy is Plex really that much better than say Jellyfin?
I’m not sure if either one is definitively better; they both have their pros and cons. Plex is probably the most popular at the moment, so colloquially the term “plex shares” is the most common term used for systems where you pay someone to share their media collection with you.
Literally all you need is a networked raspberry pi with a content hard drive, and Kodi installed anywhere. Don’t look back.
And where does the content come from?
Sonarr and Radarr with Ombi for requests if desired. Transmission + OpenVPN for the download side.
Or you could manually rip DVDs/Blu Rays if you can still get ahold of them for the stuff you want to watch.
So you literally need much more than a networked raspberry pi with a content hard drive, and Kodi installed anywhere.
yes, captain obvious, you literally need to acquire content for self hosting. otherwise what I mentioned is all you need to self host said media. the modern version of a dvd collection. whoa.
Can you elaborate for on this for simpletons like me? I’ve looked at raspberry Pi’s before but have no idea what I’m looking at or for because of the options.
If you don’t know anything about this stuff and don’t want to get into setting up linux software, you’re better off just getting a simple self-enclosed NAS drive like a WD MyCloud (just an example, I don’t know all the options out there now) that you connect to your LAN and then connect to it with Kodi or another player. With that you just login to it from a web browser to create your content folders, then map it as a drive in windows explorer and copy data to it over the network like any other drive. Then Kodi etc can be provided the network address for that drive and content folder. (And have a separate USB drive to make a content backup in case the NAS dies one day.)
Otherwise I use a raspberry pi 4, as it’s fast enough to be an emulator box with retroarch (etc), and a torrent seedbox for acquiring content with deluge installed (behind a VPN), and a pi-hole for blocking ads network-wide, and has 4 usb ports for content drives. For just hosting media you’d only have to make changes to the config for it to automount the usb drives every startup, and then the pi just acts like a NAS with several drives. The software for vpn, torrents and emulators (all included or free via git) can be a bit complicated to setup but once you have it correct, you can make a backup image of the microSD card that the os is on if you have to restore it later. I personally didn’t know what I was doing on linux when I first set it all up years ago, but got everything working properly just copy and pasting from guides on stackexchange etc.
Again, if all that makes your head hurt, just use a self-contained NAS drive for content.
edit: should probably add that I personally haven’t installed a vpn on the pi for torrenting, as I have a router with vpn built-in, and set the firewall rules so the pi can only access the internet through that (because it’s faster.) There’s a few ways to handle it.
