I’ve been a good boy for 5 years or so but the seas call to me. Are streaming sites the way to go now or is torrenting still a better bet for mainstream movies and tv? I’d imagine all of my accounts have been deleted on those sites so I’d be starting over.
Commenting to bring awareness to the ‘arrs. Radarr sonarr and lidarr will get you all the media you need organized perfectly. It runs on any device but take a few days to figure out. Once setup it’s a set it and forget it thing. Uses torrents and or usent so use a vpn. Mine runs on a 10 year old raspberry pi 2 and a few usb hdds. Been going strong with very little maintenance for 6 years at this point.
Agreed. Combined with a jellyfin instance and you will never want to come back. As said before, it takes a while to setup at first (especially if you download animes which aren’t exactly handled the same way), but when it’s done you’ll see you weekly episodes magically appear with nothing to do on your side, and that’s just great
Jellfyfin is the reason why I do this. I went from spending 30 minutes dumpster diving through terrible movies in one of the streaming platforms to now spending 30 minutes trying to choose from a selection of movies that I actually want to watch.
Have you seen a good method/guide to prioritise release groups for anime? I looked into it but it was super confusing to me and didn’t beat just grabbing a nyaa rss feed.
Actually yeah I do. I followed this guide which is really nice. I did need to add a few more sources manually depending on how popular a given anime is, but it’s really useful anyway
Thanks for sharing!
I’m super old school and just started finding my way back to torrenting. Would you have a recommendation on how to read up on these arrs? So far I still manually pull my torrents from a search engine and run it through my vpn hardened Pi in the cellar. It works, but I do wonder if there’s a more streamlined approach.
Their docs are decent and will guide you through setup. For advanced stuff search for Trash’s arr guides
Torrents and usenet will get you high quality videos if that’s what you want. Streaming sites are usually only have low bitrate videos.
I use Real Debrid with Stremio + Torrentio. I just need to figure out how to add the manual torrent search & download plugin for Real Debrid since I watch a lot of obscure British TV, not everything is hosted already.
For mainstream stuff, it just works. For obscure stuff, it’s about 50-50 if it’s on there.
Manually downloading torrents is just for stuff I’ll be transferring to a mobile device, like audiobooks. And cracked software, I suppose. I needed Adobe Acrobat for something and torrented it.
I use Real Debrid with Stremio + Torrentio. I just need to figure out how to add the manual torrent search & download plugin for Real Debrid since I watch a lot of obscure British TV, not everything is hosted already.
If you mean caching content to RD I think you can do this with the Unchained app, if you use Android, or you can do it pretty much anywhere you like using the RD website.
Then you can use the DMM addon to watch it on Stremio, or probably it will show up with any addon that supports RD, or if not then you can simply use the Debrid manager that is available at Torrentio, or as a standalone addon.
Pay for real-debrid and set up a kodi addon like Seren on a streaming box. You’ll get an equivalent experience to paid/official streaming platforms without having to pay for them all, including browsing popular shows without having to download them ahead of time or manage a home server. It’s still torrenting under the hood, just a lot more convenient
Kodi + add-ons is great if you like tinkering, otherwise I would recommend Stremio with the Torrentio add-on. Stremio + Torrentio + Real-Debrid is the easiest way to consume pirated media IMO.
I’ve heard good things about Stremio + Torrentio. Does it have trakt integration or similar equivalent? I think the discovery in addons that have this makes a big difference. I have many different categories to browse that might sound similar, e.g. Trending, Trending New, Most Watched, Most Popular. But each one has a specific and plainly disclosed ranking methodology and that’s very useful to avoid constantly being recommended to watch The Office, Breaking Bad, cowboy soaps etc
Does it have trakt integration or similar equivalent?
It has a subpar integration, if you care too much about this kind of stuff (getting a whole working multimedia center, and thinkering in general) and have a proper device that can handle Kodi in a lagless manner, I’d say you stick with it.
If you want a set it and forget it kind of solution and have less sophisticated hardware Stremio + a Debrid provider is golden.
(My Nvidia Shield TV Pro 2019 struggles with Kodi and a Debrid/streaming setup, also is significantly slower than Stremio).
How does a shield struggles with kodi? It’s my main setup (kodi+fen+trakt+real debrid) and I have no problem with it.
It doesn’t right away (after a fresh reboot) but it fails eventually, as Kodi is my heaviest app, it could be due to my skin, but man, some ppl say Stremio is ugly, but Kodi with stock addon is way uglier that is not even pleasen to use, my skins aren’t the heaviest, Arctic Horizon 2 and Fuse.
It also could be because the Shield TV is my secondary Plex Server and that would bring some background load (even when it is not serving media), but I have done tests with and without this, same for the PlexKodiConnect addon.
There is also a Trakt add-on, like the other commenter said the integration isn’t as seamless as a well-maintained Kodi setup, but it’s definitely good enough that I’ve switched from Kodi to Stremio with Trakt being the way I organise my TV/movie watchlists.
And you can use it for any torrents, like games & software. It’s way cheaper than any streaming site and so much more worth it.
We do both honestly. Stream for TV and crappy movies, I don’t need to see every nose hair and skin pore. Movie night is torrent. 17 years with no traditional tv or paid services in our house.
Depends on your hardware.
Streaming is more accessible, but you’re stuck at 720p usually.
If you can afford a vpn and the storage then torrenting gets you better quality.
Don’t forget to seed
I find it easier to get 4k streaming than to download such large files.
The large files are such better quality, though (if you care about such things and have a TV that allows you to appreciate the extra detail).
The newer AV1 codec has me very interested in HQ streaming. You need a monster machine to make the file, but then it’s 2GB for a high quality 1080p movie.
I used to use a kodi box. Every month or so I’d have to find a new source. I might have to dig it out and give it another try.
I used to use the arr applications and use Usenet but as time went on I needed more and more space. I pay a guy once every six months to get access to a Plex library that has everything you can think of. I even have the ability to request things if they aren’t there.
Does anyone have a one click piracy stack setup with all the *arrs that takes mullvad yet? Someone should make that happen.
Maybe a nix config? Docker?
I used a compose file from reddit and made a couple of adjustments, it was pretty quick and works great. I dont have a VPN though.
Mullvad removed port forwarding so it’s not the way to go for torrenting anymore.
Stremio + ThePirateBay plug-in works great (allegedly)
There’s no need for torrenting with services like Stremio (with Real-Debrid).
There is if you intend to keep torrents alive.
I haven’t heard that before, so I had to search a bit. This poster says Stremio uploads, but theres no docs. https://www.reddit.com/r/Stremio/comments/182cb7f/does_stremio_upload/
Stremio uploads/seeds just when you’re watching the movie, and usually with a very small cache. On a 20gb movie maybe you seed 200-300mb, which isn’t anything substantial
Just watch this https://piped.video/watch?v=yvhv7bgmz64 lol (videogameduneky video)
