Can someone explain the flags to me?
Piracy is not theft
You wouldn’t download a gold ingot
Thanks for taking away my enjoyment. Now I need to find something I can enjoy that does count as theft.
Might I suggest taking a pistachio and eating it while you’re shopping?
sometimes when I buy water I drink it before paying for it. Its coomon in Germany but apparently illegal!!!
For a very long time, I was one of the people who kep saying:
“I used to pirate until Netflix came along; now I pirate because of the fragmentation of services; should a good service become available at a reasonable price again, I will be happy to switch back.”
But at some point, that stopped being true. More precisely, my *arr-Stack + Jellyfin setup become so stable, I do no longer really think about it, while also getting better quality content, and often faster than I would due to global licensing shennanigans.
Another factor also is that at some point, we crossed the “enough content to mindlessly scroll until we find something to watch” barrier, which my GF actually kinda missed from Netflix.
The crazy thing though, is that we pay actual money for this: hardware cost; electricity; access to usenet trackers and two usenet backbones. All in all, I do not think it’s cheaper than getting Netflix+Prime+Disney.
It’s just better. And we will not be switching back, ever.
I think the main thing these pirate services don’t have is a good recommendation system tailored to your watch history like Netflix or Spotify has.
I’ve been a Spotify subscriber since the US launch. There are some other options
Listenbrainz or last.fm can offer recommendations, but there won’t be the instant gratification. Last.fm does support music playback on its website, which sources from YouTube. Either platforms are going to require some work to build up an account.
If you’re comfortable with Plex, I’d advocate for its sonic analysis tool. It looks at the waveform of newly added music and then offers recommendations. Coming from a massive streaming service, it’s been refreshing to use Plexamp. The curation aspect of my library is fun compared to the sprawling library on Spotify. I like the fact that I control with artists and albums are in my library. It’s led to me finding more deep cuts with my favorite groups rather. The hard part is finding/ripping the music you’d like to listen to.
Most work days, I use Plexamp because the curated library leads to less skipping and I stay more focused. I still have Spotify for home because the library is unbeatable and other family members use our group account. Either platform will scrobble my listens to last.fm while Listenbrainz will update itself from my last.fm account. I can search for new music on Last.fm or Listenbrainz and add it to my Plex library.
We’re currently paying for Mubi, mainly far the curated content and because some of the movies shown there are really hard to find anywhere else (international movies specially)
That’s mostly true, although you usually (in my case at least) I am aware of all shows I have available on Jellyfin, and it’s only ones I like.
For discovering new shows to download, things like Jellyseerr actually do give recommendations… No idea how good they are though.
But frankly, Netflix used to recommend a lot of things that sounded interesting on the surface-level, and then turned out to be utter shit. Probably not an entirely bad thing to be lacking recommendations :D
Why the fuck are you paying for access to trackers
For Non-English ones in my native language. There isn’t a lot of them. AFAICT the one I mostly use is free for a handful of requests/day, but generously lifts that limit in exchange for a “donation” 😄
(It’s only around 20/year)
Edit: and just to be clear, that one Tracker took us from “basically nothing is available in our language” to “literally everything is”, so it’s money well spent.
Quality control.
why choose when you can be both
