All this does is make me more interested in “pirating” their infinitely copyable material. More to the point it’s making my interest in financially supporting them drop to zero if not lower.
With Usenet, Plex* (Streaming Server), Radarr (automated movie downloading) and Sonarr (automated TV downloading and management) it’s never been easier!
*Plex is currently on a slow path of enshittification and the only other good alternative, Jellyfin, still has some ways to go before it can pass “The Spouse Test”. I myself have only had Jellyfin in testing and not yet replaced Plex with it. But that day is coming. Jellyfin is well under active development and I have no doubt it will get to feature and stability parity with Plex
After looking at this list I’d like to pre-qualify what I’m about to say: I have jellyfin and like it, I use jellyfin regularly. I have it pointed to the same catalog as Plex and if Plex ever gets thoroughly enshitified I will leave it for jellyfin
The biggest things I’ve seen (in decreasing order of pain):
transcoding can fail on media that Plex has no problems with
Jellyfin is significantly worse at detecting names and properly assigning metadata. Jellyfin does not have the same ease of fixing that when it happens that Plex has.
I’m not going to go through all the work to reverse proxy it. Nor do I trust opening it to the internet. So for her to access it outside the house she’s going to be using tailscale. Kind of just extra steps for the sake of extra steps.
Finamp is a poor replacement for Plexamp, Don’t get me wrong I love the fan project but it’s not anywhere near as good, and it becomes quite painful to use on large audio catalogs.
The Roku client doesn’t have any method to mark things as watched or unwatched or modified playlisted items.
I dislike the sections being static one row high and then having to rotate left and right through multiple things when they could just wrap.
I am super amazed that the project runs as well as it does. It’s a monumental piece of open source work, but there’s a lot of polish problems and I’m not qualified to help them fix them.
Edit: oh and I really really miss these skip intro Skip credits option that Plex has.
Quick notes from an avid jellyfin user. When you have a show or movie or whatever you want, not get identified, there’s a simple identify option you can do on the client on a computer or phone by clicking the 3 dots on the media. You get to search and label it. The only time this hasn’t appropriately assigned metadata for me was for shows with duplicate episodes in one mkv or whatever. That did take a lot of renaming, which did suck and is reasonable to not want to have to do. Especially for massive libraries.
I definitely agree about the roku client not having a marked as watched feature, that should be added.
There’s a lot of work to be done but it’s not just being done in the basic edition. For instance, there’s plugins that allow the skip credits and skip intro functions you want. And there’s ones for fanart, and allowing other databases of Metadata to select from. There’s a lot of plugins and more are being actively developed rather often. Even I’m trying to develop a “continue watching” feature like from Netflix, but it’s going slowly.
Jellyfin definitely takes more finagling than plex, i switched at the beginning of the year, but I’ve had multiple times since where my internet is out and because jellyfin is local network I’m still able to stream my media.
So yeah. Just some info about jellyfin. I get wanting the ease of plex, but I’ve personally really enjoyed adding the plugins and fucking around with everything it has.
Just general glitchiness, odd UI design choices etc. Def needs more polish
When I say Spouse Test I mean from the context of a spouse who just “doesn’t do computers”, if your spouse is technically inclined at all, say as a PC gamer or something and has dealt with sometimes-kinda-annoying software and has some patience, then they’ll probably be fine with it
This makes sense. I had to poke around the UI to figure it out. And, the client occasionally needs rebooted or the cache cleared. I can see how some users would have trouble.
I’d suggest that teaching those users is probably easier than setting up Plex today and then setting up Jellyfin as an emergency service when Plex inevitably begins ad injection or introduces a paywall for local streaming.
I dipped my toes in the self-hosted route and would recommend Stremio + Torrentio + RealDebrid as a much simpler alternative.
Here’s a guide I used - you can probably have it up and running in less than an hour.
Major points:
Easy setup, easy to use
Low cost at <$35/year
Can not share accounts (specifically, RD limits to one ongoing stream at a time)
Limited customization
I have very limited self hosting experience, and between getting my first hello world service running, problems with my ISP, sorting through the different ways to get content, and not already having TBs if hard drives sitting around, I found it to be pretty challenging.
If you’re already experienced in self hosting (or want to learn) and don’t mind the storage costs, then I’d recommend the Plex/Jellyfin route, but if you just want an alternative to the existing streaming services then I’d suggest looking into Stremio.
Seconded. I’ve used this exact setup for years on an NVIDIA Shield Pro. I understand it isn’t “pure” from a piracy perspective, not the most ideal, in-the-weeds setup, but it sure does just work.
Studios need to remember that their shows are advertising for merch and toy sales. That’s where the money is. If I pirate your show, then you don’t have to support the infrastructure to provide me a stream (which would look like shit because you’re not google). I buy posters and tshirts and stickers. Some people buy minifigs and funcopops and other plastic tat that’s cheap to make but sells for, well, whatever that crap sells for.
Furthermore, I wouldn’t mind paying $10 or $15 /month for ONE streaming service if it was able to maintain good picture quality at 1080p AND had all the shows/movies I wanted to watch in one convenient place. Extra emphasis on ‘convenient’. Even more emphasis on it actually having content I want to watch. When I watch a show, I like to watch the entire thing in like, two days. Then I’ll not watch any shows for two or three months, until something gets my attention. I don’t want to pay for a service I don’t use, cancelling and reactivating a service every couple of months is too much hassle, so I’ll just wait until the show is done airing and download it all and watch it at my pace.
All-in-one convenience is the only reason I pay Spotify, my only streaming service. Thought about dropping them, but it would be a monstrous hassle gathering, and continuing to gather, all those MP3s. Plus, I can download that content and use it in the woods with no internet connection. Sold.
Video content? What a clusterfuck. I steal every bit of it. Hell, I got Amazon Prime and don’t bother looking at video offerings. Default: 🏴☠️
Video was nicer when you could buy a piece of physical media to watch your movie on.
Even then, you still had to contend with such nonsense as region locks later on. Can’t have people watch the movie earlier than release because the production company decided to delay release a while. That would be apocalyptic.
I also used Spotify but it has a serious problem. There’s no guarantee your contents will be always available. I had music there that, for whatever reason, was removed and I can no longer listen to it. Not to mention music that was never available there. I don’t want them to control what I can and can’t listen.
Now I only use Jellyfin. It works great (except on Android Auto, but they’ll get there). Sure I have to download the MP3 but you only have to do it once and then it will always be there. Just use spotDL and rip the music right out of Spotify with all the metadata.
Piracy ends when content is offered in a convenient fashion. It’s always been this simple and always will be.
Naturally, rich and out of touch people want to believe that more authoritarianism is the solution, because they got rich through their contempt for humanity, so why should this be any different?
The thing is, as we learned with Netflix (and… everything lately), even if it starts off convenient and reasonable, that will last only long enough that they think they’ve cornered the market. So unless something changes to guarantee an ongoing reasonable proposition, i will never trust them again.
Here is how I see Piracy ending. We’re offered Netflix and forgot about streamers so the government went heavy handed and forced other governments to change all their laws and give up these pirates while seizing sites.
Even though there are smaller pirates, the leaders of it so are mortality wounded killing any progress. We eventually end up with cable television 3.0 and try to go back to piracy. However while we weren’t looking there’s a ton of new laws and tools and ability to stop it that was created while we were watching umbrella academy.
Now the final nail is using media to create a foot-in-the-door technique where media convince the public to hate a new thing. Once that zeitgeist is established laws will then slowly be created by as suggested by lobbyists which are really just a facade that would give more power to take out pirates.
Anyone know the names of the pirate Bay owners? a/Anyone hear any news on those guys. Podcasts? Articles? Viral Reddit posts? In my mind it’s probably one of the top ten craziest political strong arming and over reaches in the past decade. Here is the story that I can’t find for some reason. Pirate Bay placed a server inside a bank in Switzerland. The Swedish laws prevent the government from touching anything inside the bank. Freedom type thing that the USA love. This means the Swedish government couldn’t be forced to shut down the server. Until Mike Pompeo on behalf of Hollywood flies to Switzerland and says you’re going in or America is going to make you pay. So they change the law for America and seize the servers. My point is this is pretty fun incredibly interesting story. But we don’t get these stories we get another season of making handsome real life serial killer show on Netflix. Pirating dies by suppressing it slowly over time until there’s no more pirates and the ability to regain the knowledge lost its gone and trying to look up how to crack anything results in the FBI at your door and you on a no fly list. Just like other pirates and creators of technology (look up how tor creators get harassed) and these stories all get suppressed.
The message also ends with a specifically worded call to action: “If possible, please use legal paid services. It’s something we should do to show our respect for creators and content producers.”
LOL… they have fucked EVERY artist with the “streaming is a new medium and you get no royalties from it”. Even Black Widow herself had to fight Disney in court to get paid for her very own movie.
Studios can go fuck themselves hard… they won stop piracy and they know it, this is why the always make such a big deal out of whatever little gain they make
jellyfin with sonarr and radarr and now jellyseerr make the whole process simple.
usenet and nzb are the way
now i just wait 10 min to get the film/series i want and then watch it. a minor delay I’m more than happy with.
I’d be happy to pay if, and it’s a big if, the studios can catalogue all their shows in one place. i can watch without adverts. i can pay per episode if i want. I’d rather pay 50c an episode than pay for the whole service. let me curate what I want to watch on my terms.
until then, the high seas win every time
It comes down to where the copyright material is stored. The actual media hosted by torrent users is by the users and as we know over the last 15 years, that backfired entirely. So the easiest way is to take down the tracker.
The files for NZBs are hosted on newsgroups and while obfuscated, is much easier to automate DCMA notices to. Also, the good NZB sites (like private trackers), are tightly controlled so their files are rarely hit vs a lot of ones who have open signups.
Yo-ho-ho. The wife and kids love the pirate life as well. They just search what they want on Radarr or Sonarr and it pops up on Jellyfin in a few minutes. We were spending around $200/no on services with a lot less choice and lower quality.
There are essentially infinite choices for entertainment these days. Hypothetically, even if they somehow stopped 100% of piracy, I still wouldn’t pay for their overpriced slop.
Still not subscribing to all the shit services. I’d rather don’t watch stuff and go outside. Yeah, you heard me right, I’ll rather be going fucking outside!
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@lemmy.world
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
All this does is make me more interested in “pirating” their infinitely copyable material. More to the point it’s making my interest in financially supporting them drop to zero if not lower.
With Usenet, Plex* (Streaming Server), Radarr (automated movie downloading) and Sonarr (automated TV downloading and management) it’s never been easier!
*Plex is currently on a slow path of enshittification and the only other good alternative, Jellyfin, still has some ways to go before it can pass “The Spouse Test”. I myself have only had Jellyfin in testing and not yet replaced Plex with it. But that day is coming. Jellyfin is well under active development and I have no doubt it will get to feature and stability parity with Plex
Where’s Jellyfin failing the spouse test? My spouse preferred it to Plex because she could turn off all the crap on the home screen.
After looking at this list I’d like to pre-qualify what I’m about to say: I have jellyfin and like it, I use jellyfin regularly. I have it pointed to the same catalog as Plex and if Plex ever gets thoroughly enshitified I will leave it for jellyfin
The biggest things I’ve seen (in decreasing order of pain):
transcoding can fail on media that Plex has no problems with
Jellyfin is significantly worse at detecting names and properly assigning metadata. Jellyfin does not have the same ease of fixing that when it happens that Plex has.
I’m not going to go through all the work to reverse proxy it. Nor do I trust opening it to the internet. So for her to access it outside the house she’s going to be using tailscale. Kind of just extra steps for the sake of extra steps.
Finamp is a poor replacement for Plexamp, Don’t get me wrong I love the fan project but it’s not anywhere near as good, and it becomes quite painful to use on large audio catalogs.
The Roku client doesn’t have any method to mark things as watched or unwatched or modified playlisted items.
I dislike the sections being static one row high and then having to rotate left and right through multiple things when they could just wrap.
I am super amazed that the project runs as well as it does. It’s a monumental piece of open source work, but there’s a lot of polish problems and I’m not qualified to help them fix them.
Edit: oh and I really really miss these skip intro Skip credits option that Plex has.
Quick notes from an avid jellyfin user. When you have a show or movie or whatever you want, not get identified, there’s a simple identify option you can do on the client on a computer or phone by clicking the 3 dots on the media. You get to search and label it. The only time this hasn’t appropriately assigned metadata for me was for shows with duplicate episodes in one mkv or whatever. That did take a lot of renaming, which did suck and is reasonable to not want to have to do. Especially for massive libraries.
I definitely agree about the roku client not having a marked as watched feature, that should be added.
There’s a lot of work to be done but it’s not just being done in the basic edition. For instance, there’s plugins that allow the skip credits and skip intro functions you want. And there’s ones for fanart, and allowing other databases of Metadata to select from. There’s a lot of plugins and more are being actively developed rather often. Even I’m trying to develop a “continue watching” feature like from Netflix, but it’s going slowly.
Jellyfin definitely takes more finagling than plex, i switched at the beginning of the year, but I’ve had multiple times since where my internet is out and because jellyfin is local network I’m still able to stream my media.
So yeah. Just some info about jellyfin. I get wanting the ease of plex, but I’ve personally really enjoyed adding the plugins and fucking around with everything it has.
I want to go and look at the plugins I wasn’t aware that some of that stuff was available. I was an avid plug-in user until Plex pulled that from me.
Just general glitchiness, odd UI design choices etc. Def needs more polish
When I say Spouse Test I mean from the context of a spouse who just “doesn’t do computers”, if your spouse is technically inclined at all, say as a PC gamer or something and has dealt with sometimes-kinda-annoying software and has some patience, then they’ll probably be fine with it
This makes sense. I had to poke around the UI to figure it out. And, the client occasionally needs rebooted or the cache cleared. I can see how some users would have trouble.
I’d suggest that teaching those users is probably easier than setting up Plex today and then setting up Jellyfin as an emergency service when Plex inevitably begins ad injection or introduces a paywall for local streaming.
Jellyfin pased my spouse test for local network.
I put her on tailscale for remote access but she’s not a big fan of that.
I dipped my toes in the self-hosted route and would recommend Stremio + Torrentio + RealDebrid as a much simpler alternative.
Here’s a guide I used - you can probably have it up and running in less than an hour.
Major points:
I have very limited self hosting experience, and between getting my first hello world service running, problems with my ISP, sorting through the different ways to get content, and not already having TBs if hard drives sitting around, I found it to be pretty challenging.
If you’re already experienced in self hosting (or want to learn) and don’t mind the storage costs, then I’d recommend the Plex/Jellyfin route, but if you just want an alternative to the existing streaming services then I’d suggest looking into Stremio.
Seconded. I’ve used this exact setup for years on an NVIDIA Shield Pro. I understand it isn’t “pure” from a piracy perspective, not the most ideal, in-the-weeds setup, but it sure does just work.
Nevermind the decades of these sites compensating for studios just not giving a sh*t about making their content accessible to the rest of the world.
All this means to me is someone is going to make a peer to peer darkweb version of these sites sooner rather than later.
Studios need to remember that their shows are advertising for merch and toy sales. That’s where the money is. If I pirate your show, then you don’t have to support the infrastructure to provide me a stream (which would look like shit because you’re not google). I buy posters and tshirts and stickers. Some people buy minifigs and funcopops and other plastic tat that’s cheap to make but sells for, well, whatever that crap sells for.
Furthermore, I wouldn’t mind paying $10 or $15 /month for ONE streaming service if it was able to maintain good picture quality at 1080p AND had all the shows/movies I wanted to watch in one convenient place. Extra emphasis on ‘convenient’. Even more emphasis on it actually having content I want to watch. When I watch a show, I like to watch the entire thing in like, two days. Then I’ll not watch any shows for two or three months, until something gets my attention. I don’t want to pay for a service I don’t use, cancelling and reactivating a service every couple of months is too much hassle, so I’ll just wait until the show is done airing and download it all and watch it at my pace.
surprisingly, I miss dvds.
Libraries have em. For free. And you can rip them too.
All-in-one convenience is the only reason I pay Spotify, my only streaming service. Thought about dropping them, but it would be a monstrous hassle gathering, and continuing to gather, all those MP3s. Plus, I can download that content and use it in the woods with no internet connection. Sold.
Video content? What a clusterfuck. I steal every bit of it. Hell, I got Amazon Prime and don’t bother looking at video offerings. Default: 🏴☠️
Spotify is getting worse as well, at least on desktop.
“we are moving the album to a right sidebar, it now only occupies more of your screen”
“we liked the right sidebar so much that we are moving the queue over there as well, we’re also removing useful info like album and artist”
I shouldn’t have to use spicetify just to get basic features back
Video was nicer when you could buy a piece of physical media to watch your movie on.
Even then, you still had to contend with such nonsense as region locks later on. Can’t have people watch the movie earlier than release because the production company decided to delay release a while. That would be apocalyptic.
I also used Spotify but it has a serious problem. There’s no guarantee your contents will be always available. I had music there that, for whatever reason, was removed and I can no longer listen to it. Not to mention music that was never available there. I don’t want them to control what I can and can’t listen.
Now I only use Jellyfin. It works great (except on Android Auto, but they’ll get there). Sure I have to download the MP3 but you only have to do it once and then it will always be there. Just use spotDL and rip the music right out of Spotify with all the metadata.
Piracy ends when content is offered in a convenient fashion. It’s always been this simple and always will be. Naturally, rich and out of touch people want to believe that more authoritarianism is the solution, because they got rich through their contempt for humanity, so why should this be any different?
The thing is, as we learned with Netflix (and… everything lately), even if it starts off convenient and reasonable, that will last only long enough that they think they’ve cornered the market. So unless something changes to guarantee an ongoing reasonable proposition, i will never trust them again.
Fully agree.
Here is how I see Piracy ending. We’re offered Netflix and forgot about streamers so the government went heavy handed and forced other governments to change all their laws and give up these pirates while seizing sites.
Even though there are smaller pirates, the leaders of it so are mortality wounded killing any progress. We eventually end up with cable television 3.0 and try to go back to piracy. However while we weren’t looking there’s a ton of new laws and tools and ability to stop it that was created while we were watching umbrella academy.
Now the final nail is using media to create a foot-in-the-door technique where media convince the public to hate a new thing. Once that zeitgeist is established laws will then slowly be created by as suggested by lobbyists which are really just a facade that would give more power to take out pirates.
Anyone know the names of the pirate Bay owners? a/Anyone hear any news on those guys. Podcasts? Articles? Viral Reddit posts? In my mind it’s probably one of the top ten craziest political strong arming and over reaches in the past decade. Here is the story that I can’t find for some reason. Pirate Bay placed a server inside a bank in Switzerland. The Swedish laws prevent the government from touching anything inside the bank. Freedom type thing that the USA love. This means the Swedish government couldn’t be forced to shut down the server. Until Mike Pompeo on behalf of Hollywood flies to Switzerland and says you’re going in or America is going to make you pay. So they change the law for America and seize the servers. My point is this is pretty fun incredibly interesting story. But we don’t get these stories we get another season of making handsome real life serial killer show on Netflix. Pirating dies by suppressing it slowly over time until there’s no more pirates and the ability to regain the knowledge lost its gone and trying to look up how to crack anything results in the FBI at your door and you on a no fly list. Just like other pirates and creators of technology (look up how tor creators get harassed) and these stories all get suppressed.
https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/92/
Can’t stop the signal…
Good luck with that,lol
LOL… they have fucked EVERY artist with the “streaming is a new medium and you get no royalties from it”. Even Black Widow herself had to fight Disney in court to get paid for her very own movie.
Studios can go fuck themselves hard… they won stop piracy and they know it, this is why the always make such a big deal out of whatever little gain they make
jellyfin with sonarr and radarr and now jellyseerr make the whole process simple. usenet and nzb are the way now i just wait 10 min to get the film/series i want and then watch it. a minor delay I’m more than happy with. I’d be happy to pay if, and it’s a big if, the studios can catalogue all their shows in one place. i can watch without adverts. i can pay per episode if i want. I’d rather pay 50c an episode than pay for the whole service. let me curate what I want to watch on my terms. until then, the high seas win every time
The fact that nzbs are old as fuck and not one service has been taken down is weird.
They bust torrent sites every day and they don’t even host anything.
News hosters have literally petabytes of warez and nothing.
And don’t get me started with real-debrid
It comes down to where the copyright material is stored. The actual media hosted by torrent users is by the users and as we know over the last 15 years, that backfired entirely. So the easiest way is to take down the tracker.
The files for NZBs are hosted on newsgroups and while obfuscated, is much easier to automate DCMA notices to. Also, the good NZB sites (like private trackers), are tightly controlled so their files are rarely hit vs a lot of ones who have open signups.
Yo-ho-ho. The wife and kids love the pirate life as well. They just search what they want on Radarr or Sonarr and it pops up on Jellyfin in a few minutes. We were spending around $200/no on services with a lot less choice and lower quality.
There are essentially infinite choices for entertainment these days. Hypothetically, even if they somehow stopped 100% of piracy, I still wouldn’t pay for their overpriced slop.
Fmovie is a new one I never heard of before. Good thing they mentioned it so I know to avoid it in the future.
Still not subscribing to all the shit services. I’d rather don’t watch stuff and go outside. Yeah, you heard me right, I’ll rather be going fucking outside!
I’d happily buy stuff if they’d just give me a mkv file or a disc that isn’t encrypted.
I’ve been back to buying UHDs because I can rip them. Amazing how a good experience got me to pay again.