IMO music makes more sense to download than movies. You might only watch a movie once or twice. Music files are smaller and you’re much more likely to listen to them multiple times.

For movies and TV shows, streaming using Real Debrid is way more convenient.

Also consider Weyd or Syncler instead of Stremio + Torrentio, and Premiumize in addition to Real Debrid. Premiumize can download from Usenet too.

You missed Lidarr.

Usenet is great, but it’s a client-server model, and things can be deleted from the servers (e.g. due to DMCA requests). The copyright agencies for very popular content automatically send DMCA and NTD takedowns for them.

On the other hand, torrents are peer-to-peer. They’re practically impossible to shut down since there’s no central server in control of everything. You don’t even need a torrent file, just a magnet URI, which can be generated by anyone that already has the torrent.

Usenet is much better for rare/unpopular/uncommon content, since good providers have thousands of days of retention, whereas an unpopular torrent from 5 years ago would likely have 0 seeds left.

And make sure it’s a VPN that supports port forwarding. Sharing is caring.

or just use Usenet.

Oh, I didn’t realise (I don’t use it). Thanks for the info.

Ideally use a VPN with port forwarding (like AirVPN or Mullvad) so you can properly seed :)

I still don’t think that I’ve ever seen a 4k image or video

Have you not watched a recent movie? Modern midrange to high-end TVs have been 4K for a while (eg my 2019 LG OLED is 4K) and it’s pretty common for movies to be released on 4K Blu-ray.

Good 4K looks great. Not the low-bitrate streams from services like Netflix, but the 60Mbps+ streams from Blu-ray remuxes (for example, via Real Debrid or downloaded via usenet) or from Blu-ray disks themselves.

You’ve definitely seen a 4K image. It’s equivalent to 8.3 megapixels, and good cameras have supported at least that resolution for a long time. Even the nearly 15-year-old Samsung Galaxy S2 had an 8MP camera.

It’s using the YouTube API, so that makes sense. The developer likely wants to keep the app focused and reduce the amount of feature creep, hence reusing YouTube’s standard subscription and list systems rather than building their own. That’s also what the majority of users expect - if someone subscribes to a YouTube channel on one device, they’d expect to be subscribed to it on all devices.

A VPN can also have a faulty config. Everything depends on correct configs :)

A proxy is no less secure than a VPN, assuming it’s using encryption like TLS. It’s not as good for torrents since you can’t port forward, but fundamentally people that use commercial VPNs are using then just like a proxy. Some providers like NordVPN do offer HTTPS proxies in addition to their VPN service.

How many of those are you streaming video to, though?

Intel iGPUs have supported H265 since 7th gen, which is 8 years old now (released in 2016). Nvidia added support the same year, starting with the GTX1050. Even the Raspberry Pi 4 supports hardware-accelerated H265.

Do seeds actively connect to peers even when the download is complete? I haven’t used BitTorrent in a very long time, but it didn’t used to do that.

How though? People that want the torrent can’t connect to you if you’re not forwarding a port.

If you do use a VPN for torrenting, ensure it supports port forwarding. You won’t be able to seed if the provider doesn’t allow port forwarding. Sharing is caring :)

AirVPN is currently one of the best VPNs that support port forwarding, but there’s some others that do, too. NordVPN doesn’t support it. There’s an old list here: https://old.reddit.com/r/VPNTorrents/comments/s9f36q/list_of_vpns_that_allow_portforwarding_2022/

If you’re self-hosting a VPN that you’re using for piracy, you’ll still have an unique IP associated with you, and your hosting provider knows that you’re using that IP. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose?

The majority of VPNs are self-hosted. The most common use cases for a VPN are things like connecting to an employer’s network when working from home, or connecting to your home server when away from home.

Commercial VPNs that route all your traffic through them aren’t the usual VPN use case. They’ve become common mostly because people don’t know how to use proxies, and they make it easy to ensure everything is routed via the VPN. A lot of use cases that people use VPNs for could really be solved with proxies.

What hardware doesn’t support H.265?

Unmanic is way easier to understand than Tdarr. I use it to transcode DVR recordings recorded using Plex and a HDHomeRun tuner. Digital TV uses MPEG2 which has pretty large file sizes.