• Nobilmantis@feddit.it
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    10 days ago

    Teoretically speaking, asking for a friend who’s doing research, how would you access such a service? :)

    • dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de
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      10 days ago

      There’s plenty of services like this that people use a firestick to connect too.

      My friend uses one but I forget the name of it. You can find them online but people usually buy a package of say 20 connections and then sell them to friends and family. I’ll try and remember what to search for and come back.

      Edit: IPTV is a good search term.

  • paris@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    10 days ago

    The group used “sophisticated computer scripts” and software to scour piracy services (including the Pirate Bay and Torrentz) for illegal copies of TV episodes, which they then downloaded and hosted on Jetflicks’ servers, according to federal prosecutors.

    They probably used Sonarr and Radarr and called it a day (or similar off-the-shelf tools available on GitHub). It’s not very sophisticated at all. That combined with Jellyfin and a VPN (or Usenet or a country that doesn’t care about piracy) and you have your own up and running. You could also just use free sites with an ad blocker instead of paying $10/mo like the service this article is about charged.

    Unrelated to all of this: https://rentry.co/megathread

    • Seasoned_Greetings@lemm.ee
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      10 days ago

      Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

      For the elderly folk who write and enforce the laws that caused this to come to pass, sufficiently advanced technology just means more complex than notepad

        • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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          10 days ago

          If they’re servicing that many users their UX should be better, but it’s not. Search should work better, but it doesn’t. They should let me make playlists, but they don’t.

          Yes, scale is hard but it shouldn’t be hard to put a clock in the pause screen showing me what time the show will be done. And that’s just a tiny way Plex is better.

    • dan@upvote.au
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      10 days ago

      That’s the thing about all the pirate apps (apps like Weyd, Syncler, the now-defunct TvZion, etc). They’re made by people that actually care, not by companies that are only in it for the money. The user experience is usually a lot better.

        • dan@upvote.au
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          10 days ago

          I’ve heard that Google might have information about Real Debrid and apps that support it. I cannot confirm or deny this myself.

        • LeFantome@programming.dev
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          10 days ago

          He is saying that people that get rich selling others people’s stuff without paying for it are not “in it for the money”. What don’t you understand.

        • Setnof@feddit.de
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          10 days ago

          I’ve heard that you can download stuff from filmfans.org and serienfans.org with jdownloader. Reportedly it’s then possible to host it locally on your own Synology NAS and use Infuse on your Apple TV for a magnificent user experience.

          • dan@upvote.au
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            10 days ago

            Rumor has it that apps that use Real Debrid are way easier to use since you can just go to a TV show and watch it. Even a non technical person can use apps like Weyd. Real Debrid supposedly caches torrents on their server so you can instantly stream them over an encrypted connection.

  • deweydecibel@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    All the comments in here are so damn tedious. Copyright is a mess, but holy shit, people tie themselves in knots to make excuses for pirates being careless and stupid

    • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      I mean, operate a massive illegal streaming service that has more content than everyone combined, but don’t be so tacky as to charge for it.

  • Dorkyd68@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    The only thing I’m pisseed about is the fact that I was unaware of its existence. Fuck the system

    • Scrollone@feddit.it
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      10 days ago

      You can always start creating your own personal media server, using apps such as Plex or Jellyfin, and qBittorrent, SABnzbd, etc.

      • FordBeeblebrox@lemmy.world
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        10 days ago

        I’ve been trying to do just that and it’s slow going with qB, if one was looking to avoid dens of sins where you might find a usenet key, where should I stay away from?

    • BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      You might be overestimating how much content that was. Streaming services try to maintain an illusion of neverending content but last I saw except for prime, the amount of content they offer has been trending down.

      Those numbers are fairly accessible for an average person with 3 or 4 large hard drives.

  • fartington@lemm.ee
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    11 days ago

    I don’t understand why you would pay for an illegal service when the other options are to pay legally or pirate.

    • kakes@sh.itjust.works
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      11 days ago

      Because all the legal services are incredibly anti-consumer and are offering less services, with (more) ads, for more money every year.

    • sic_semper_tyrannis@lemmy.today
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      11 days ago

      In addition to other things people responded with, piracy services tend to not collect users data or prevent us from watching with a VPN enabled.

      • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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        11 days ago

        or prevent us from watching with a VPN enabled.

        Man this one chaff’s me the most. I way a paying Netflix customer like 8 years ago. I had IPv6 setup as a 6rd tunnel through HE (Hurricane Electric) because my ISP didn’t offer IPv6. Netflix treated that as a VPN and blocked me as a paying customer… Even though I lived/payed from the same fucking locale. It’s not like I was using a VPN to bypass a Geoblock. I was just making IPv6 available to myself. I cancelled because of that. You do not get to tell me how I access the internet at large, especially when I’m not even being shady about it.

    • shortwavesurfer@monero.town
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      11 days ago

      My guess is because they did all the pirating for you so you didn’t have to worry about dealing with the technical hurdles of doing so.

    • Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca
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      11 days ago

      Because the legal options are garbage.

      The pirates provide a better service with more content for cheaper than the legal options; and pirating yourself takes effort as well as cost (hardware, trackers, usenet, etc).

      Some people are happy to just pay for decent service; others like to learn about the process, then setup and run their own servers.

      To each their own.

    • fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de
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      11 days ago

      The majority of piracy is not free.

      I’ve paid for usenet, seed boxes, private servers, and more recently torrent cache services.

      You pay because it’s much cheaper than commercial services and a better experience with more content.

    • jonne@infosec.pub
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      11 days ago

      You pay like $5/Mo for the content of all streaming services and more instead of the $500/Mo it would cost to subscribe to each of them individually. Plus you’re not taking any legal risk as a customer.

    • sunzu@kbin.run
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      11 days ago

      piracy is a service issue.

      also, fuck IP owners, pigs got too fat while cutting on service.

  • kakes@sh.itjust.works
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    11 days ago

    Love how they make this sound like some incredible feat. When you aren’t bound to license agreements, turns out it’s actually very easy to have a “massive” content library. Literally the only hurdle is storage space.

    • Bronzie@sh.itjust.works
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      11 days ago

      Yeah it costs, depending on quality of course.
      My 14 TB disks are filling up faster than I expected and I am not close to Netflix’s catalogue.

    • Wrench@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      I mean, distributing it isn’t a small feat. Plus you need to manage subscriptions, billings, CMS, a front end to navigate the content, etc.

      That’s no small amount of work, even if they used out of the box solutions for many layers.

      • jonne@infosec.pub
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        11 days ago

        All of those things already exist. Typically it’s just a Plex server running on a cloud service.

      • iopq@lemmy.world
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        10 days ago

        Both Wikipedia and Stack Overflow just have a few dozen fast servers despite being some of the world’s highest trafficked websites

        • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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          10 days ago

          The entire content of the wikipedia fits in a pen drive.

          Streaming video is a lot more expensive than text and images.

  • Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca
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    11 days ago

    I wonder how that compares to my own collection…

    I haven’t found a source for the size of Netflix/Amazon/Hulus libraries; but I haven’t looked all that hard either.

      • Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca
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        11 days ago

        Storage is expensive :/

        That’s already almost 36tb, after conversion to HEVC which compressed it ~40%

          • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            11 days ago

            really large hdds are still really expensive, the prices have somewhat plateaued at this rate. Nobody really needs such massive drives, and their isn’t exactly an incentive to produce larger drives, especially now that everyone seems to be moving to ssds.

            • TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee
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              11 days ago

              They aren’t though, price per GB on renewed storage with warranty is less than 10 cents a GB. That’s insanely low compared to just five years ago.

          • Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca
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            11 days ago

            Cheaper, but it’s still not cheap and I really don’t have a whole lot of disposable income rn.

            • TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee
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              11 days ago

              You can get 12tb renewed drives for $100. A lot will even have decent warranties. If you’re lying for like, 3 streaming services, and cancel all three in favor of saving your own media locally it pays for itself quickly. Especially if you download stuff from like HBO Max.

              This is doubly true now that streaming services have started raising prices and pay walling content.

        • MrJukes@lemmy.today
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          11 days ago

          How did you convert to hvec? I’d love to do that on my entire library but don’t know where to start. I’d also love to burn subtitles into some foreign films since Plex is generally terrible at doing subtitles…

          • Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca
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            11 days ago

            Up until now, I’ve been using the convert tool in Emby server. You can select a whole library and convert it, or individual items/playlists/collections; with options to automatically convert new media as it’s added.

            Tbh, I’ve been having a bit of trouble with it re-converting media it’s already done, so I was looking for another solution.

            Someone in this thread mentioned tdarr, so I’m going to be looking into that this weekend. Seems like a much more manageable tool with more powerful options.

            /edit; I should also mention, this is a long process. Using an rtx4080, it was almost 3 full months non-stop to convert my entire media library from mostly h264 -> h265.

            • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              11 days ago

              I should also mention, this is a long process. Using an rtx4080, it was almost 3 full months non-stop to convert my entire media library from mostly h264 -> h265.

              and if you’re looking to do software conversion you’re easily looking at years, but considering how long most media servers will be up for, it might actually be worthwhile to aggressively automate that so it just runs in the background while you aren’t looking. Also eats up additional CPU time which might be a benefit for someone.

              • MrJukes@lemmy.today
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                11 days ago

                Cool, I’ll check out tdarr. My server is sitting idle most of the time so I’m fine with it taking it’s time doing it in the background.

  • Alphane Moon@lemmy.world
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    11 days ago

    183,200 TV episodes is pretty modest compared to alternative “non-approved” sources.

    One datapoint is one source (that has a rule against any TV/show content released in the last 5 years) has a total number of 19.5K shows and TV movies/specials, with ~80 K releases. For many shows a single release can be a full season.

  • shortwavesurfer@monero.town
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    11 days ago

    It’s sad that these people got taken down. Maybe the next people to do it will do it from a country that does not have extradition with the United States, so they would be safe.

  • digger@lemmy.ca
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    11 days ago

    The group used “sophisticated computer scripts” and software to scour piracy services… for illegal copies of TV episodes, which they then downloaded and hosted on Jetflicks’ servers.

    So they used some variant of Sick Beard?

    • aodhsishaj@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      nah probably the arr stack

      Sonarr: (Automatic TV series downloads)

      Radarr: (Automatic movie downloads)

      Tdarr: (Automatic transcoding of media, can help save you a lot of disk space)

      Bazarr: (Companion app to Radarr and Sonarr, manages subtitles)

      Prowlarr: (A replacement for Jackett from the Arr team)

      Lidarr: Music

      Readarr: Books

      Mylar3: Comic books

      Plex-Meta-Manager: (Automatic collections and metadata)

      Overseerr: Request tracking and website front-end

      Ombi: Let users request both movies/tv shows from a simple web interface.

      Dopplarr: Discord bot to make movie/tv/anime requests

      Pulsarr: Browser extension for adding movies to Radarr or Series’ to Sonarr while browsing IMDB or TVDB.

      • Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca
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        11 days ago

        Tdarr: (Automatic transcoding of media, can help save you a lot of disk space)

        That’s a new one to me, I’ll have to check that out. Thanks!

        Been doing conversions via Emby, but it’s not a very powerful tool for that.

    • bitchkat@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      If you’re using sickbeard, switch to medusa. The originally developer of sickbeard is a nut case. He took the project back from the team that was doing development so they forked it and renamed Medusa.