Piracy forced the creation of the streaming economy because their only choice was to make it easier to stream than pirate. Now every streaming service is racing to the bottom based on the belief they have captured the audience forever. The only ethical solution, therefore, is to start pirating again.
not only has streaming gotten worse, piracy has gotten better.
i did some research recently and found that there’s a whole suite of “collection manager” tools that make the whole process obscenely easy (assuming some level of technical skill to get through the initial setup), from automatically downloading content at a preferred quality to getting it correctly tagged and sorted for Plex or Jellyfin or whatever media player thing to display it
you can even get an app to manage it all from your phone
not that i’m doing any of this obviously. just thought it was interesting and wanted to share. for educational purposes only 😉
I run most of the full "Servarr" stack (Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, Prowlarr, etc.) on my server, and can queue up new things for it to add using LunaSea. I can just open the app, search for a show or movie, select it, and then the *arr app searches a bunch of different torrent trackers at once, downloads the best torrent based on the criteria I give it (i.e I can tell it to only download torrents in a certain range of sizes relative to episode count, search for only certain seasons of a show, or get the dubbed version of an anime) and then it'll download it through my VPN-equipped torrent client, and then copy the files over to the target Plex video directory and clean up the names and directories automatically, and even grab subtitles when available!
It also automatically grabs new episodes of shows when they're released - I didn't think much of that feature at first, but it's let me keep up with still-airing shows in a way I haven't done since I watched cable TV, and that's been a fun experience!
Getting started with the Servarr stack can be pretty daunting if you haven't used docker before (Or any software that hosts itself on your local network), but if you want a setup that's really slick and you're interested in learning a bit, I can't recommend it enough, it's so cool~ ^u^
