Today is a no better time to set up a storage machine and loaded with Jellyfin.
You can pirate whatever shows, including ones that can't even be legally sold, and run your own service.
If you add the Arrs suite, then you can also get dynamic additions of shows you watch, and just have them show up.
And well, if Meta and ilk can use pirate libraries in a commercial setting, I see nothing wrong in piracy in a non commercial setting.
bayarearefugee · 6h ago
> Today is a no better time
Agreed.
And anyone creating or supporting generative AI built from massive unfettered internet scraping that wants to lecture me on the ethics of violating copyright to sidestep the monstrosity they have built can take a flight to Hypocrite Island and go fuck themselves.
ulrikrasmussen · 5h ago
With Chromecast getting more and more unstable (and not working on LineageOS, forcing me to use Chromium on a laptop) and now streaming services turning to engagement optimizing ad monsters, I guess I'll start doing that.
I had really hoped that the streaming era would have ended up in a better future where I could buy movies and TV shows in the same was as I buy them on Bandcamp: Watch some of it, maybe all of it, for free, and after payment you can either stream it OR download it and play it however the fuck you want on whatever device you want, with whatever software you want.
Ads are not just a question of whether you can pay to turn them off. The mere presence of ads on a platform is pure poison for its content curation, and further gives the streaming vendor incentives to control you as a user and take away your freedom.
lm28469 · 6h ago
Even manually downloading torrents and watching them from my laptop plugged into a projector like it's 2006 is more convenient than netflix at that point. People who grew up after the peak of piracy really don't know what they're missing
thatguy0900 · 6h ago
Piracy is still peak, there's 0 reason to download anything or install any special software. Just go to yandex and type watch (show/movie) online.
lm28469 · 4h ago
I guess it depends on how picky you are and what type of content you watch, free streaming services usually have pretty low bitrate and their catalog is far from exhaustive. If you want to watch the latest disney on a phone or laptop it does the job though
thatguy0900 · 3h ago
Their catalogs are more than exhaustive. I watch a lot of foreign films, bollywood, Thai/Korean movies, etc. I have no idea where I'd get some of them legally. The vast majority of content will hit pirate sites within a day of dropping legally, if it's popular content it will be within an hour usually.
alabastervlog · 6h ago
If it’s just you watching on your laptop, true. Add family and a decent home theater and there are reasons to set up Jellyfin and use torrents.
mystified5016 · 6h ago
Sure if you want a unknown quality stream with extra ads and malware loading down the website.
Who is paying for that bandwdith? (It's you)
amarcheschi · 6h ago
Not that I have done it, but I've heard that usually the first results from yandex torrents are from reputable sites or forums that are quite known to the pirate community. At least regarding torrent, I haven't heard much about streams
kalleboo · 6h ago
What you describe also matches the legal video services
thatguy0900 · 3h ago
We're literally commenting on a article about how Netflix will inject Ai ads lol. And besides that if you're pirating content I assume you don't have any moral qualms about using a ad blocker. Bandwidth is also basically free?
johnbatch · 5h ago
I just shut down my NAS and PC that was running Sonarr/Radarr SABnzbd etc.
I setup stremio and a debrid service, and it's much easier for me to not deal with all that.
Do you have any recommendations for resources to learn how to do this correctly/well? Subreddits, forums, etc?
mystraline · 6h ago
Nah, I've been doing piracy since the '80s. I've always been on the edge of 'interesting' stuff.
Getting a machine with lots of storage is first step. Make sure you also get an Intel graphics card. A380 I think. They're amazing at transcoding and color mapping (10bit->8bit). Transcode is very important to support with hardware, since it allows realtime resolution change, colorspace conversion, and pretty much every video file format to mp4. Can be done in CPU but not recommended.
I'd recommend Linux, but Jellyfin works with damn near everything. Use whatever youre comfortable with.
Getting content? First, use Firefox with Ublock Origin. Turn on all filters. Pirate websites are VERY hostile.
Get a VPN that can port forward. PIA and Proton can both do so, and are reasonable priced. VPN keeps simple copyright scanners from attacking your network, legally speaking.
Sites to look for goods: thepiratebay.org still exists. /r/piracy reddit has loads of links. Yandex search of "show torrent" has all completely relevant links. If you have a Usenet subscription to alt.binaries then you can use that method to grab stuff.
I also grab DVDs and Blurays and rip myself. Doing this is great since you may be able to find shows, but special features are almost never included. I use this tool to quickly rip: https://github.com/xenomachina/dvdrip/blob/master/dvdrip.py
"Getting a machine with lots of storage is first step."
This isn't as true as it used to be. My current Jellyfin server is an old laptop with a 5TB USB hard drive dangling off of it. Syncthing is used to sync the media to another system in my house because I don't really want to rip it all again if something fails.
If you proactively torrent "everything I may conceivably ever want to watch" or are glued to media 12 hours a day but still want it all to be new, then 5TB will go quickly, but 5TB can go quite a ways for people who don't match those conditions.
While a NAS won't hurt anything, the days when you needed one to do anything useful at all are gone. Just like I just slam my entire MP3 collection on to my phone's SD card now... I don't need any sort of windowing setup, or network access, or anything fancy anymore. Not only does it fit, nowadays it's only a fraction of the space anyhow.
scruple · 2h ago
Same here. I have a 5TB external that I use for TV shows and movies and run Jellyfin off of my main desktop. Obviously we're not massive consumers and don't need a huge array of tens or hundreds of TBs... What's nice about it is when we're going on vacation or whatever, the external fits into a sling bag with my iPad Pro and it's all highly portable without the networking headache.
username135 · 6h ago
qbittorrent (qT) is a great client with equally great search capabilities. you'll want to install jackett along with it so you can search through a large swath of torrent sites from the qT search.
You don't even need a dedicated GPU. Any Intel Core-series CPU past 5th gen has a built-in quicksync engine that can handle many simultaneous transcodes.
massysett · 5h ago
OMG after I do all of this, I could have just paid for Netflix and spent that time actually watching content, or doing something other than nursing all this tech.
I abandoned MythTV and rented DVR from Comcast for just that reason.
alabastervlog · 1h ago
It’s for the (far) superior UX and having some things on it that either practically or literally cannot be purchased legitimately.
yahoozoo · 4h ago
Except Netflix has a limited catalog compared to being able to pirate pretty much everything ever made.
DonnyV · 4h ago
Your that dev customer that pays for another service to handle their authentication aren't you?
alabastervlog · 6h ago
I just got an old used workstation that can’t transcode for shit, bumped the ram up and filled it with disks, then made sure my client devices can all handle whatever I throw at them (appleTV) so I never need to transcode.
I built my Jellyfin server on $180 PC from Amazon and an old USB HDD. It was basically installing it from the downloadable installer and configuring parts. You will need a client to access it, and Roku works great.
I'm running it on the Windows Pro that came with the device. I'm not saying you should use Windows, I'm just pointing out that you don't need much to run it.
You don't have to use this, but maybe it inspires you.
If you go the torrent route, there are also subreddits about trackers.
infecto · 6h ago
I am going to go counter to the other reply.
Pay for a seedbox and get access to a single private tracker site and that’s all you need.
mystified5016 · 6h ago
There servarr docs are pretty good, if you already know how to set up Linux servers. Otherwise look at the homelab subreddit
gchamonlive · 6h ago
I honestly gave jellyfin a try but it didn't work for me for several reasons. The server wouldn't find some shows or movies no matter what I did, and I had countless issues with subtitles.
I'd recommend giving jellyfin a try because it's a worthy project, but it's not even a competition, Plex is hands down much more user friendly, if you can excuse the fact that it's closed source.
Now for findability I can't recommend Kagi enough. You can find virtually anything there, no filters and no bullshit results.
alabastervlog · 6h ago
You do have to follow the naming scheme, though 95% of the time I don’t need to touch the names of tv show episodes, just stick them in the correct folders. The exceptions are mostly anime and shows I could only find on internet archive, as, for some reason, those often come with just the episode number in the name, not the full “s01e14” that basically everyone else uses.
I rename my movies but that takes maybe ten seconds per one I add, tops, and the result is easier to read when managing files later than leaving them as “www.torrenting.com The.Matix.ita.eng.1999[rarbg]” or whatever insane file names they usually come with.
myvoiceismypass · 5h ago
Are there equivalents for live streaming (sports in particular)? Some of the backout laws are still fucking absurd in the year 2025.
Brian_K_White · 6h ago
'Netflix regards its advertising business as in its early stages, meaning customers can expect the firm's ad efforts to continue expanding at a faster rate over the coming years. The company plans on doubling its advertising revenue in 2025.
“The foundations of our ads business are in place, and going forward, the pace of progress will be even faster,”
'
The exact moment they stopped being a movie service and became an ad service. Google showed everyone the way.
rchaud · 5h ago
Blockbuster was a movie service. Netflix is a straight-to-DVD content mill and has been for a long time.
BobaFloutist · 3h ago
Which frankly I'd be fine with if I was also allowed to buy the DVDs.
One of the two main characters is a veteran BBS-era and Internet movie pirate (among other things). I don't necessarily endorse his actions, but he is who he is...
ryandvm · 5h ago
I've said it before - if you follow many of our biggest problems all the way down, at the bottom you will find the advertising industrial complex to blame.
rchaud · 4h ago
There is no Advertisers' Association forcing Netflix to bow to their demands to pay them billions of dollars to post ads. The problem is shareholder capitalism which demands infinite revenue growth by any means necessary.
sillystu04 · 6h ago
Netflix should try out a free tier which is entirely monetised by ads. Even if it only contains a subset of their library.
Just imagine how much money loveholidays or Jet2 would pay for an advert midway through a travel show, where a customer could press a button on their remote for a holiday purchase link to be sent to their Netflix email address.
Mashimo · 6h ago
Free netflix, but every 45 minutes you have to enter a verification code that is at the bottom of a Mountain Dew Verification Can, 0.5L
growlNark · 6h ago
> Netflix should try out a free tier which is entirely monetised by ads. Even if it only contains a subset of their library.
Wait, people are paying to be advertised to? It's like we learned nothing from newspapers.
SketchySeaBeast · 5h ago
I honestly think the world would be in a better place if there was more local news media, even if it was both ad driven and user supported.
growlNark · 5h ago
Ads fundamentally contradict the role of news. You don't want to get your news from an organization that has two customer bases.
sillystu04 · 5h ago
What's the alternative? Subscriptions aren't affordable for poor people, government funding creates a conflict of interests, and so does relying on philanthropists.
growlNark · 18m ago
Substack? Independent journalism? Pay-what-you-want? Donation-funded publications? I'm not saying I have a solution, just that that's "ads" are bad place to start. I certainly read plenty of non-advertisement-based coverage.
Good news costs money, and the poor get propagandized to.
I'm not even sure how the NyTimes justifies this with their massive subscription revenue. They probably just expect people to suck it up, despite greatly lowering the value of their product.
Anyway, Manufacturing Consent came out almost 40 years ago and we're still stuck in the same place if you only look at cable news, newspapers, and radio. Hell even NPR pimps themselves to the nearest think-tanks—during the iraq war people with little subtlety referred to them as "national petroleum radio".
graemep · 4h ago
A mixture so you get different biases (to atleast some extent). That way different problems offset each other.
> Subscriptions aren't affordable for poor people
If people are affluent enough that advertising to them supports the business, then they probably do have the money to pay.
Most people in rich countries certainly can afford to pay. 68% of households in the UK have streaming services, most of the rest pay the TV license fee to the BBC. A lot of those who do not choose not to, rather than being unable to afford to.
> government funding creates a conflict of interest
There are ways of dealing with this and blocking government interference. Hypothecated taxes as in the UK.
> so does relying on philanthropists.
Different conflicts of interest though.
BobaFloutist · 3h ago
Ads aren't affordable for poor people either, we just like to pretend they're not the ones financing the vast majority of ad-driven content.
SketchySeaBeast · 5h ago
Sure, if you're going to insist on philosophical purity, but imagining that people are going to pay full price for news is unrealistic. There's a reason we've ended up with "news" being nearly entirely funded by ads.
There's a difference too between the type of ad and the companies behind its reach - Uncle Bob's Local Mattress Shop and Citizens United are two entirely different beasts.
teeray · 6h ago
Can’t wait to see a smiling dude with a few too many fingers pour an ice cold, refreshing Budveieskkkkker Berr into a gaping mouth-like orifice that appears in his shoulder.
l72 · 5h ago
Cancelled! That was the last streaming service I had. I guess in 2 weeks when it goes dark, I’ll see how long it takes before the family notices.
Anyway my Jellyfin instance is growing every week. Used dvd/blu rays + my library’s great movie selection has been worth the effort.
If there was a Bandcamp but for tv/movies, I’d happily buy from there instead of ripping DVDs!
ulrikrasmussen · 5h ago
> If there was a Bandcamp but for tv/movies, I’d happily buy from there instead of ripping DVDs!
I find it so frustrating that this does not exist in 2025.
mingus88 · 4h ago
The bandcamp model works for music because music that is worth paying for can be produced on a laptop in a bedroom
I just don’t see a whole lot of TV/movie content worth paying for that isn’t produced by a studio that will lock up the rights to rent it out
beAbU · 1h ago
Have you seen the production quality of some of the stuff that's on youtube? I don't buy the assertion that high production value is reserved for the big studios any more.
I will concede that music has an order of magnitude lower bar of entry.
rchaud · 6h ago
I hope that once and for all, we never have to read another HN comment saying "I'd pay for Facebook / Spotify / Prime / whatever" if I didn't have to see ads." They will never remove the ads. Your paying for it simply makes you a more valuable target to advertise to.
Bittorrent skipped a generation due to the 'convenience of these services, but maybe the iPad kid generation will pick up the torch.
ozmodiar · 5h ago
Originally when I started my comment you mentioned watching cable TV (since removed), but I think a lot of people forget that cable TV started out as an ad free service as well. It's just the same bait and switch over and over again. Revenue must be maximized and competition is always either non existent or in collusion.
mingus88 · 4h ago
As I understand it, very few cable channels started out ad-free, and that didn’t last long.
By the time it was available in my area, cable TV was a service to provide better reception and more channels that OTA, but everything aside from subscription channels like HBO were riddled with commercials.
My point is that for most people in the U.S. there was never a bait and switch with cable. It was just more programming (ads). And you paid for it, unlike OTA.
alnwlsn · 5h ago
Unless you can install a torrent client on an iPad, probably not.
bakugo · 5h ago
The iPad kid generation doesn't know what a folder is, so I highly doubt it.
Xerox9213 · 5h ago
It's even worse: a lot of them don't know an ad when it's presented to them.
dogleash · 6h ago
> “[Netflix] members pay as much attention to midroll ads as they do to the shows and movies themselves,” Amy Reinhard, president of advertising at Netflix
Well, that's one way to spin "second screen" content that isn't worth paying attention to.
rchaud · 5h ago
I remember Facebook execs making similar statements to push publishers to 'pivot to video' back in 2018, which ended up being a costly disaster. Without a detailed look into their user analytics, these statements can't be taken at face value. They're not under oath, and what they say can't be corroborated.
growlNark · 6h ago
I've not had netflix for years, and I can't say I miss it at all.
bitshiftfaced · 5h ago
I wonder how long until we have targeted, generative ads that are inserted into the content itself, merging the content with the ads.
beAbU · 1h ago
Netlifx with their analytics data is perfectly positioned to dynamically generate content based on user behaviour and preferences. When AI content becomes good enough (and it will), then I predict this will become the end game.
Imagine being able to tweak an episode post production after analytics show a particular scene results in a dip in engagement.
Imagine being able to AB test movies, because it's dirt cheap now to shit them out.
Imagine being able to dynamically change the brand of a drink in a character's hand based on what you know of the user's preference, and which brand is currently paying the most (e.g. coke gets 80%, pepsi gets 20% views)
Imagine being able to change the sex/race of a character based on what you know of the viewer's biases!
I probably shouldn't be saying these things out loud.
This explains the entire idea of how the late tech world is evolving. I've been thinking lately, how can we achieve good profit for stakeholders yet keep a high-quality platform?
Can a company at its inception (and legally) limit their profit to stakeholders and the surplus be used in investing in it?
SketchySeaBeast · 5h ago
Stay private, stay humble, and be willing to say you have enough. The problem is "good profit" is a constantly growing number.
rchaud · 5h ago
Netflix has been profitable for years without this bullshit. The question you should be asking is why they're spending untold billions churning out mountains of crap that maybe a handful of people watch, before canceling them anyway?
an0malous · 4h ago
Because they're data driven and they've found a way to make content that's just good enough to retain subscribers for the lowest cost
M95D · 5h ago
A lot of people watch that crap. There's nothing else but crap to watch.
Besides, for most countries, there's no alternative to Netflix. In the age of AI and Google translate, Disney doesn't bother having subtitles in the local language.
Profitable is not enough. It needs to grow. In capitalism, growth is an imperative. Did you invest your savings? Do you expect growth? Well, there it is - the source of the imperative to grow. When the possible customers run out, the only way to grow is to enshittify.
an0malous · 5h ago
It’s not just the tech world, it’s every business. It’s basically the function of the private equity industry to enshittify every business.
Jyaif · 5h ago
Once Netflix has all the industry contacts and the infra for delivering video ads, all they need is to do is open up their platform to the top youtube creators and just like that they have a youtube competitor.
And they'd have potentially higher profit margin because they wouldn't deal with the same volume of video, which means savings on things like storage and content moderation.
You can pirate whatever shows, including ones that can't even be legally sold, and run your own service.
If you add the Arrs suite, then you can also get dynamic additions of shows you watch, and just have them show up.
And well, if Meta and ilk can use pirate libraries in a commercial setting, I see nothing wrong in piracy in a non commercial setting.
Agreed.
And anyone creating or supporting generative AI built from massive unfettered internet scraping that wants to lecture me on the ethics of violating copyright to sidestep the monstrosity they have built can take a flight to Hypocrite Island and go fuck themselves.
I had really hoped that the streaming era would have ended up in a better future where I could buy movies and TV shows in the same was as I buy them on Bandcamp: Watch some of it, maybe all of it, for free, and after payment you can either stream it OR download it and play it however the fuck you want on whatever device you want, with whatever software you want.
Ads are not just a question of whether you can pay to turn them off. The mere presence of ads on a platform is pure poison for its content curation, and further gives the streaming vendor incentives to control you as a user and take away your freedom.
Who is paying for that bandwdith? (It's you)
I used this guide - https://guides.viren070.me/stremio
Getting a machine with lots of storage is first step. Make sure you also get an Intel graphics card. A380 I think. They're amazing at transcoding and color mapping (10bit->8bit). Transcode is very important to support with hardware, since it allows realtime resolution change, colorspace conversion, and pretty much every video file format to mp4. Can be done in CPU but not recommended.
I'd recommend Linux, but Jellyfin works with damn near everything. Use whatever youre comfortable with.
Getting content? First, use Firefox with Ublock Origin. Turn on all filters. Pirate websites are VERY hostile.
Get a VPN that can port forward. PIA and Proton can both do so, and are reasonable priced. VPN keeps simple copyright scanners from attacking your network, legally speaking.
Sites to look for goods: thepiratebay.org still exists. /r/piracy reddit has loads of links. Yandex search of "show torrent" has all completely relevant links. If you have a Usenet subscription to alt.binaries then you can use that method to grab stuff.
I also grab DVDs and Blurays and rip myself. Doing this is great since you may be able to find shows, but special features are almost never included. I use this tool to quickly rip: https://github.com/xenomachina/dvdrip/blob/master/dvdrip.py
https://www.bfloeser.de/posts/bluray/ covers Linux Bluray ripping, including where to download the AACS keys.
This isn't as true as it used to be. My current Jellyfin server is an old laptop with a 5TB USB hard drive dangling off of it. Syncthing is used to sync the media to another system in my house because I don't really want to rip it all again if something fails.
If you proactively torrent "everything I may conceivably ever want to watch" or are glued to media 12 hours a day but still want it all to be new, then 5TB will go quickly, but 5TB can go quite a ways for people who don't match those conditions.
While a NAS won't hurt anything, the days when you needed one to do anything useful at all are gone. Just like I just slam my entire MP3 collection on to my phone's SD card now... I don't need any sort of windowing setup, or network access, or anything fancy anymore. Not only does it fit, nowadays it's only a fraction of the space anyhow.
https://www.qbittorrent.org/
https://github.com/Jackett/Jackett | https://github.com/qbittorrent/search-plugins/wiki/How-to-co...
I abandoned MythTV and rented DVR from Comcast for just that reason.
I'm running it on the Windows Pro that came with the device. I'm not saying you should use Windows, I'm just pointing out that you don't need much to run it.
You don't have to use this, but maybe it inspires you.
If you go the torrent route, there are also subreddits about trackers.
Pay for a seedbox and get access to a single private tracker site and that’s all you need.
I'd recommend giving jellyfin a try because it's a worthy project, but it's not even a competition, Plex is hands down much more user friendly, if you can excuse the fact that it's closed source.
Now for findability I can't recommend Kagi enough. You can find virtually anything there, no filters and no bullshit results.
I rename my movies but that takes maybe ten seconds per one I add, tops, and the result is easier to read when managing files later than leaving them as “www.torrenting.com The.Matix.ita.eng.1999[rarbg]” or whatever insane file names they usually come with.
“The foundations of our ads business are in place, and going forward, the pace of progress will be even faster,” '
The exact moment they stopped being a movie service and became an ad service. Google showed everyone the way.
One of the two main characters is a veteran BBS-era and Internet movie pirate (among other things). I don't necessarily endorse his actions, but he is who he is...
Just imagine how much money loveholidays or Jet2 would pay for an advert midway through a travel show, where a customer could press a button on their remote for a holiday purchase link to be sent to their Netflix email address.
Wait, people are paying to be advertised to? It's like we learned nothing from newspapers.
Good news costs money, and the poor get propagandized to.
I'm not even sure how the NyTimes justifies this with their massive subscription revenue. They probably just expect people to suck it up, despite greatly lowering the value of their product.
Anyway, Manufacturing Consent came out almost 40 years ago and we're still stuck in the same place if you only look at cable news, newspapers, and radio. Hell even NPR pimps themselves to the nearest think-tanks—during the iraq war people with little subtlety referred to them as "national petroleum radio".
> Subscriptions aren't affordable for poor people
If people are affluent enough that advertising to them supports the business, then they probably do have the money to pay.
Most people in rich countries certainly can afford to pay. 68% of households in the UK have streaming services, most of the rest pay the TV license fee to the BBC. A lot of those who do not choose not to, rather than being unable to afford to.
> government funding creates a conflict of interest
There are ways of dealing with this and blocking government interference. Hypothecated taxes as in the UK.
> so does relying on philanthropists.
Different conflicts of interest though.
There's a difference too between the type of ad and the companies behind its reach - Uncle Bob's Local Mattress Shop and Citizens United are two entirely different beasts.
Anyway my Jellyfin instance is growing every week. Used dvd/blu rays + my library’s great movie selection has been worth the effort.
If there was a Bandcamp but for tv/movies, I’d happily buy from there instead of ripping DVDs!
I find it so frustrating that this does not exist in 2025.
I just don’t see a whole lot of TV/movie content worth paying for that isn’t produced by a studio that will lock up the rights to rent it out
I will concede that music has an order of magnitude lower bar of entry.
Bittorrent skipped a generation due to the 'convenience of these services, but maybe the iPad kid generation will pick up the torch.
By the time it was available in my area, cable TV was a service to provide better reception and more channels that OTA, but everything aside from subscription channels like HBO were riddled with commercials.
My point is that for most people in the U.S. there was never a bait and switch with cable. It was just more programming (ads). And you paid for it, unlike OTA.
Well, that's one way to spin "second screen" content that isn't worth paying attention to.
Imagine being able to tweak an episode post production after analytics show a particular scene results in a dip in engagement.
Imagine being able to AB test movies, because it's dirt cheap now to shit them out.
Imagine being able to dynamically change the brand of a drink in a character's hand based on what you know of the user's preference, and which brand is currently paying the most (e.g. coke gets 80%, pepsi gets 20% views)
Imagine being able to change the sex/race of a character based on what you know of the viewer's biases!
I probably shouldn't be saying these things out loud.
Can a company at its inception (and legally) limit their profit to stakeholders and the surplus be used in investing in it?
Besides, for most countries, there's no alternative to Netflix. In the age of AI and Google translate, Disney doesn't bother having subtitles in the local language.
Profitable is not enough. It needs to grow. In capitalism, growth is an imperative. Did you invest your savings? Do you expect growth? Well, there it is - the source of the imperative to grow. When the possible customers run out, the only way to grow is to enshittify.
And they'd have potentially higher profit margin because they wouldn't deal with the same volume of video, which means savings on things like storage and content moderation.