Title, I haven't Yo ho ho'd in forever in internet time.. What/where do I need to start again? I'm tired of ads and 3+ streaming services to watch stuff that's interesting. Running windows. Thanks dudes and dudettes.
If you want it done simply for relatively low cost ~$40usd/year Stremio + torrentio + realdebrid is what I use and it’s fast simple and works on basically anything although with the debrid you can only have one simultaneous stream if you were to use it on multiple devices You can skip the debrid if you choose to use a vpn instead unless you are in a country that doesn’t care
This, I used to use Kodi+Serena+realdebrid but it was not as user friendly. Stremio is by far the best option if you just want to watch shows without making a server/ having to actually manage downloads or making it into a project.
You just set it up and use it like any other streaming app
No reason to self host unless you find joy in maintaining a server/ library
The strong bias seems to be toward Torrents instead of USENET? Why? Cost of providers with decent retention?
I always assume that Usenet (with anonymous payment and a separate VPN) is a safer option than torrenting since I'm not the one publishing / sharing content. A copyright holder would have to go after that Usenet host (with a general court order), extract logs from them (if they exist), figure out who was actually infringing on copyright, then go after the VPN provider, to deanonymize me.
Hold on buddy, i would say that the first three are for veterans
Go to a host like feralhost and rent a seed box. This gives you a webhosted transmission to paste magnet links in from any torrent site. Then you connect with filezilla over sftp, no vpn or nonsense needed and its all super fast because the torrenting is done from a data center and you download only from there over encrypted ssh at max speed when its finished.
That's just VPN with extra steps. Why not just set up a SOCKS5/Shadowsocks/wireguard/whatever on any hosting and get a lot better experience?
In my country I don’t get good upstream internet so I can still have good ratios on torrent sites and the private trackers I use. The prices on the dedicated seed box services can’t be beat for bandwidth and for someone with kids it’s already all set up.
Pretty sure most hosting platforms have egress costs on their cheaper VM instances.
I know Google cloud charges for bandwidth to AUS, and Oracle is 10TB of egress per month before charging (which I think is the most generous of free/cheap hosting platforms).
Hey, how about you go fuck yourself ? The only reason you’d leave a comment like this is because in real life no one cares about what you think so you need to be a petty loser
Right, reading through the comments, you say you've got a couple of kids. I'm guessing that means you're a bit older and don't have that much time to binge-watch long pointless series etc
To pare it down, ignore the comments about Sonarr and Radarr etc, they're for people who are addicted to downloading as much media as humanly possible, or folks in the US with 1990s internet speed. I've tried them and didn't find much benefit to them.
If you just want to quickly download a film or a series, setup is very simple.
In twenty years of torrenting, I've never needed more than a good VPN, a good BitTorrent client, and a good website for magnets. Plus a PC hooked up to the TV with the screen extended.
Torrent client - Use Qbittorrent, for reasons explained later
VPN - As others say, port forwarding is necessary. Use Proton, when you start it up, it gives you a different port number each time. In Qbittorrent, click options then connection, and change the port number to the one Proton gave you. Bit of a fucking about each time but worth it
As for torrenting sites, I rarely need anything more than 1337x.to
BUT, as stated, the search function on QBT is amazing for finding obscure stuff. You need to install Python on your PC first, then there are plenty guides online for installing the search plugins. It sounds complicated but is incredibly easy and stable once installed.
That's it. That's all I use and have done for decades. With fibre optic nowadays, a 1.5gb film takes about two minutes to download, you don't need an entire hard disk full of media, just plan ahead
Setting up Sonarr and Radar with docker isn't all that complex. If you set up Prowlarr as well then you can still get the instant search and download aspect you mention except you can search ALL the good websites at once and (most importantly for my stress level) avoid all the bullshit ads and malware you've got to worry about blocking while browsing those sites through the web. Sonarr is perfect for following any show, not just those you might binge watch. Topical shows like SNL and last week tonight get picked up automatically. Long term favorites with unpredictable release cycles (looking at you Doctor Who) get snapped up when they're most popular and download super fast. Cleaning up old seasons to clear out space is as simple as navigating a web page. Both radarr and sonarr can connect to other services like that.tv so less tech savvy household members can add a show or movie to their watchlist and it will automatically get added, searched, downloaded, and hosted without any extra interaction from me. You can even set up profiles so that certain lists meet quality standards, so for example the kids cartoons aren't downloaded at the same high a quality as the adult shows.
My point is this, make the switch to automating the searching and downloading, not so that you can hoarde everything, but so that you can't stop spending as much time being the home video librarian and more time enjoying it. On more than one occasion I've been out with friends and somebody mentions a movie they liked, I've taken a minute to add it to my list, and the movie is ready and waiting on my Plex (and/or Jellyfin) before I get home.
ignore the comments about Sonarr and Radarr etc, they're for people who are addicted to downloading as much media as humanly possible, or folks in the US with 1990s internet speed. I've tried them and didn't find much benefit to them.
This I really disagree with. Sonarr is absolutely terrible for backfilling shows with many seasons, it's not at all what its for and you're much better off manually finding season packs and downloading those and then binge. Sonarr is for monitoring shows with continuous releases and automatically download the new episodes so they're ready for watching when they drop. I love not having to manually track when the few shows I do follow release new episodes and then add them to my client, because they're just there in my library when they're available.
You missed the bit where I assumed OP isn't looking for long-winded series due to having kids
Shows that are continuously putting out episodes are not necessarily long-winded...most shows I "follow" (there's only 3) are on season 2 or 3 and do either batch releases of a few episodes or release single episodes one at a time.
It's just nice that when I have the time to watch them, I don't first have to check if something has come out and then wait for it to download (even though I have gigabit), it's just already there and ready to go. Why wouldn't I want that? What would I possibly gain by having this be a manual task instead? Spending 5-10min finding itin the resolution etc. that I want and then another 10-20min waiting for it to download compared to just opening jellyfin and seeing "ooh, another episode dropped, neat!"...do you prefer finding what you want to watch on e.g. Netflix, and then wait 10-20min for it to buffer before you can watch it over instantly beginning streaming it?
1337 tends to rate limit so having other options is good.
I like TGx, but that's mostly due to it's good search engine.
I didn't know 1337x rate-limits! Thanks for the info.
Yes, TGX is excellent too
RARBG is sorely missed
Torrentleech is good
Pretty sure it's a Cloudflare thing, but it may also have to do with the DDOS attacks they were under the last couple months.
https://rentry.co/megathread
Refer here for the most pirated stuff. Ask further if you need anything more detailed
VPN isn't needed if your country doesnt persecute individual piracy.
Been doing this for like 2 years. It's great and the entire family can easily use it.
Edit: But have stremio on a Chromecast.
qBittorrent is probably the best torrent client for Windows
Mullvad is a relatively cheap and trustworthy VPN provider(they unfortunately removed port forwarding, which is important for torrenting)AirVPN and Proton VPN are trustworthy VPN providers that support port forwarding
Servarr is the way to go if you want to set up a server that automates everything for you
Jellyfin is the best media server, far ahead of Plex and fully FOSS
FMHY and the Champagne Piracy Wiki have lots of valuable information
I know sharing is caring but it should be said that if you dont plan on seeding anyway, mullvad is perfectly fine for torrenting.
I also think its worth mentioning that proton only supports ephemeral remote port forwarding which is objectively worse then airvpns implementation, if port forwarding is super important to you.
You can't say jellyfin is far ahead of plex when it doesn't have nearly as many clients as plex does. I'll agree that in the free tier jellyfin is better, but as of now it's not as fully featured as plex pro. Even non pro plex just makes it easier to share outside your home too.
But Mullvad dropped port-forwarding which is relevant in the context of torrenting.
God dammit
I keep forgetting that. I didn't really notice it, since I use a seedbox anyway, but that might be a little to much for a new user.
The simple answer:
Get Qbittorrent and use it's built-in search engine.
The fully automated gay space answer:
- Look into selfhosting - (optional but makes it easier/coler)
- Look into Plex (or Emby or Jellyfin) - optional but makes it pretty
These are the apps you'll need:
- Radarr - Gets movies
- Sonarr - Gets tv shows automatically as they come out
- Prowlarr - the thing that does the searching for radarr/sonarr.
- Overseerr - Makes it simple to request stuff
- Qbittorrent - downloads things
(There is also Lidarr for music and Readarr for books)
If all set up correctly, you simply just request something with Overseerr and it shows up in Plex minutes later with artwork and metadata all pulled in and presented nicely. You can configure the apps to look for specific resolutions/file sizes/formats/etc. TV shows are downloaded as soon as a new episode is released. It's better than any streaming service by leaps and bounds.
I recently started paying for debrid services (I use real debrid, but there are others) and couldn't be happier. Got an app called Stremio on my TV and after adding the credentials, everything just works - easy & fast like the streaming services.
It also allows you to download torrents much faster than torrenting them, especially if not many people seed them.
Oh, and if you ever need to download something from Rapidshare or whatever other websites like that it does that too.
Honestly, I should've started paying for it earlier.
On a side note I've been using Google to find streaming sites by typing "free full stream" and then the title I want, and scrolling down the search to the DMCA Complaints. They have a lovely list of sites that have your movies and shows, thanks Google!
Real Debrid is probably the easiest solution.
From there you can either go the stremio route or plex / jellyfin.
