I have been out of the loop for over a decade, where do I begin?
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.
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.
Thanks ill check it out!
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
A bit of topic but why the hell does the champagne wiki reccomend Edge as a browser citing it's AI capabilities? Is this copied directly from MS marketing material?
Edit: I am starting to read through it and there Is so much bad, outdated and just wrong information there:
I don't really want to continue beyond before-you-begin
Edit2: Uh why is there an extensive article on how to deal with addiction and how to do meditation in the piracy section?
I don't think I should continue any further
Edit3: you can contribute to the wiki by sending markdown files in a discord channel. Wikipedia should switch to this model as well imo
Also Gluetun if you want to run qbittorrent in docker with a tun interface.
"far ahead of Plex"
I love and use jelly fin but let's not lie here.
[qBittorrent] is probably the best VPN client for Windows
It does VPN?
Sorry I meant to say torrent client
Please could you elaborate about how qbittorent is a good VPN and why is port forwarding important for torrenting ? I'm kind of confused about those statement…
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.
which platform that you use to consume media is missing a jellyfin client? there are a lot of jellyfin clients: https://jellyfin.org/downloads/clients/all
What about stremio. Isn't that foss as well?
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.
Radarr, Sonarr, Jellyfin, qBittorrent.
VPN, depending on how your country handles copyright laws.
Jellyseer, prowlarr, and bazarr can be added to that list.
Jellyseer doesn't have a Windows installer as far as I know.
Bazarr seemed useful but most stuff comes with subtitles anyway, and every time Bazarr grabs them for me, they're inevitably out of sync because they're for a slightly different version. I normally have to go to opensubtitles and grab a few until I find the right one. It's probably more useful if you require subs in a language other than English.
Well, I would say bittorrent with a good vpn or, usenet with a good indexer and depending on how much you download, block account vs monthly.
Personally I top up all my block accounts whenever I see a sale. With priority set from cheapest per gig to most expensive (so the pricey ones are only used as fillers).
But that does involve paying some money, but then doesn't really require a vpn. In the long term I don't think I'm paying that much though.
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
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.
This is great advice. I'm not at all interested in building and maintaining a library of stuff I won't watch twice anyway. Resist the urge. I hooked an old laptop to my TV, put Linux Mint on it and use KDE Connect to remote control it's mouse and keyboard with my phone. Bookmark some streaming sources in Firefox, install FreeTube for your YouTube needs, add an external harddrive for stuff your really want to keep and your have a great media center for zero money.
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.
Nah. If you're catch and release then stremio is much better than all of this. Install the app on your Android TV, get debrid for a few dollars, and you're off to the races. Great wife approval factor.
Grab Stremio, it's a program you can download.
Once you've downloaded that and opened it up, in any browser go to torrentio.strem.fun and click to install that to your client.
In the program go into your settings and remove the official sources from showing up (like apple TV, Netflix, etc.) and et viola.
You can use popular lists or search for series, and it'll find the episode/movie from pirates sources.
The fun thing about this is it's all educational. Not the program nor the torrentio link are illegal, it's only what you do with it. So all in all, I hope you enjoy searching for legal documentaries supported by creative commons licensing!
Well, let me start with this gorilla they called Harambe....
The simple answer:
Get Qbittorrent and use it's built-in search engine.
The fully automated gay space answer:
These are the apps you'll need:
(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.
Does overseer do anything besides let you request from the others? And where does Prowlarr come in?
I more or less have this setup, but I start in Trakt (which I was using before I started with the arrs) and add something to my watchlist. Sonarr and Radarr regularly sync with that and check the indexers I have set up and download via sabnzbd. It unpacks and gets to where it needs to go, and I watch it in Jellyfin.
It all works fine for me. So what I'm really asking, is am I missing out on anything by not using Overseer and Prowlarr or is it just another way of doing the same thing?
Prowlarr allows you to manage all the indexers/trackers in one location. This is helpful if you want to add or remove one or limit things from being automatically downloaded from site A but not B, C, and D like when you join a new private tracker and need to build ratio first.
Overseerr is basically a polished front end for Radarr/Sonarr. It's useful if non-techies are requesting things, and/or you just want a single, dead-simple place to request (video) media. If you want to just try it out it doesn't affect your radarr/sonarr setup at all.
@ShepherdPie@midwest.social gave a good explanation of Prowlarr. Just another simplification/automation tool.
Overseer makes recommendations according your plex/jellyfin views, but don’t know if it is better than trakt (don’t know trakt well..) Prowlarr is to manage indexer centralised for all the arr services. It is as well a good tool to search releases manually, if the arr services fail to grab a release you want.
Pinned thread on this very community.
if you're in Australia ignore all VPN advice. Companies can only come after you for the cost of a single copy of whatever you pirate making it functionally legal here.
Torrents are your best bet for now because they are super easy.
Usenet is a paid service, absolutely worth it but you're paying for at least 2 different services to make it work and setting up a whole bunch of software. Just steer clear of the Arr suite until torrents fail you (and they will)
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?
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).
You have to do this under the full moon of the longest day of summer too. Otherwise it doesn't work.
Do you trust your seed box provider to not rat you out? Or at the very least not have identifying information on you that will be seized in a raid?
How do you do this with zero trust towards any provider? I mean unless you hijack a neighbors wifi, any provider can fuck up their OPSEC and get you burned.
Recognize that there may be some costs involved: hard drives, a raspberry pi, VPN/VPS/seedbox, even just electricity.
Get a good VPN and use it for any torrenting you do from home. Nord is not a good VPN. (unless your government doesn’t care or you use a seed box, then do whatever)
Use public torrent trackers if you have to but: If you have some private torrent tracker accounts from yore, try to get them re-activated. Surprisingly they may have your old info. This will probably require IRC. If not, look into interviewing with RED, OPS, or MAM to learn the ropes, then use them to get invited into movie/TV/general PTs.
If you don’t like the sound of torrenting look into newsgroups. This will cost money in two ways: a newsgroup account and a news indexer.
Check out the arr suite, especially radarr and sonarr, to automatically get what you are interested in.
Remind me please. What is the problem with Nord?
I think it's mostly to do with their advertising tactics and misleading people in what their service is actually doing.
They also had a data breach and did not handle it well.
Maybe there's other stuff I don't remember.. I've never used them, I've been on Mullvad for some years now but considering proton next.
A laptop with an hdmi, stremio and a real Debrid account.
Simple
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.
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!
Trash guides
Thanks! I couldn't be assed enough to get the actual link.
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
Also consider Weyd or Syncler instead of Stremio + Torrentio, and Premiumize in addition to Real Debrid. Premiumize can download from Usenet too.
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
Next to what everyone already said let me just mention I also returned recently after being out for like 10 years and the progress is amazing. If you’re willing to selfhost, Servarr is super amazing, my whole family got away from Netflix and I have a huge bullshit free library of stuff to watch.
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.
My main suggestion is to search whatever you want with Yandex.com - unlike Google, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Brave, etc etc, Yandex doesn't delist piracy sites. So, "bookname pdf" will almost always return a good result. "some anime or movie name watch online" will also work.
Oh, and use uBlockOrigin. Ditch Chrome, use Firefox or anything that still makes uBlock works in full capacity.
Welcome back 🏴☠️❕
Real Debrid is probably the easiest solution.
From there you can either go the stremio route or plex / jellyfin.
Why pay someone else to run a service that you'd have been paying Netflix for.
That's how I feel about Usenet tbh. If you're going to pay, actually pay to support the shows you're watching. IMO.
Otherwise you build a server PC and set it up for the *arr suite, Radarr, Sonarr and the rest. It's the cost of your internet and your electricity after the upfront cost of your server.
Bonus: you have it when your internet is down, since they're downloaded to the hard drive.
I'm of a similar opinion but really it depends on the user's wants.
I personally don't care for an easy app like interface. My set up is literally just wireless keyboard and mouse in the living room and a pc hooked up to my TV. I just stream stuff from 'free' sites online. It's not much effort really. I'm not usually interested in checking out movies and shows the moment they release, I can wait a couple weeks or months for them to pop up in good quality on those sites.
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.
Usenet is great, but it's a client-server model, and things can be deleted from the servers (e.g. due to DMCA requests). The copyright agencies for very popular content automatically send DMCA and NTD takedowns for them.
On the other hand, torrents are peer-to-peer. They're practically impossible to shut down since there's no central server in control of everything. You don't even need a torrent file, just a magnet URI, which can be generated by anyone that already has the torrent.
Usenet is much better for rare/unpopular/uncommon content, since good providers have thousands of days of retention, whereas an unpopular torrent from 5 years ago would likely have 0 seeds left.
is TPB dead?
Works great for me. Definitely not as many seeders as they were during it's heyday, but still a decent number. I've downloaded a couple semi-obscure films in the past couple of months and they downloaded just fine in an hour-or-two even with only one seed.
Well, you can stop wearing those weird clothes for once. Nowadays we pirate from home. No sailor suit required anymore. I recommend you start by buying a laptop. But those are quite hard to use if you have skipped a century or two. Can you even read? Do you speak modern English?
Anyways, maybe go to some adult education center first and learn how to read and write. Yes you got that right. Piracy requires education nowadays. Who would have thought?
Gravity was spot on that day
tldr: You need to learn instead of sucking blood and/or being a bot
Is this a community, or is this a circlejerk? I don't think categorizing beginners who don't know where to start as leeches creates the kind of environment people of all knowledge levels want to spend time in. You don't personally have to educate them, but telling them off for asking is pretty rude.
My guy, I am 2 kids deep since I last hit the high seas, I am absolutely lost on what plugins or sites or programs I need to even begin. Maybe be a bit helpful instead of insulting lost people? I'll use the megathread link the other people posted.
You'll be fine mate.
I re-hoisted the flag after a decade and two minions myself this year. The old ways still work fine, but there's also a ton of new things to make life easier.
Check out the .arr suite, burn uTorrent and get Qbittorrent and try out Jellyfin.
Feel free to ask me directly if you need some pointers.
So 15 years ago they said don't be an asshole, and yet here you are
You sound fun.
God damn mate...