In general: Do not buy any media that you can't download.
this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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Got any good sites for movies and TV shows? I've been buying physical copies for them. But have found places like hd tracks and Amazon for music drm free that I can control the way I consume them much easier.
I'm using torrentgalaxy for all my shit. I do tend to still buy stuff occasionally, but usually after having seen it and appreciating the work into it. I'm a bit against paying for cats in bags (not knowing if it's any good until you already paid). The original website ends in 'dot to', but you might have to set your dns settings to an open one (like google [8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4] or Cloudflare [1.1.1.1]) to get there.
😜
I've never heard of torrentgalaxy. Did you say I need to change my DNS to reach it?
In a perfect world you don't, but many ISP's block torrentsites by poisoning their own dns lookups to torrentengine domains and even some torrenttrackers. (They purposefully send you back a wrong IP when your pc asks where the website is, usually one that goes to a "this website is blocked" webpage instead).
If you use an open one you kinda circumvent this measure and you can get on any site again without any further hassle. There's Google's 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, cloudflare's 1.1.1.1, there's also 9.9.9.9, or if you are a techy you can even run a dns server yourself and then point to localhost.
Anyway, in my previous post I first said it ended on "dot io", but was wrong and then edited it to "dot to", but since edits don't always federate well I'm repeating now it is '.to', and not '.io'. 😜
Please don't recommend Google DNS 8.8.8.8 in the DeGoogle community. This would be the last service I'd use for privacy and security. Cloudflare isn't much better for privacy. Mullvad's public DNS offering is the best I've found that appears committed to privacy and supporting libre projects.
https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls/
Hey, I mentioned the self-hosting way of doing it, but it's not for everyone. Google and Cloudflare are just easy to remember, yet just (arguably bad) examples. But in the end any company can't be trusted anyway. Google once promised to keep your privacy and to never spy or give ads, so did Facebook at the start to get you away from "Evil data-seller MySpace". In the end you're just giving info to a new company that one day can start using it against you too, and if past is any indication, they either disappear or start doing it,... Correct me if I'm overseeing something now, but I can't think of anything that got popular and didn't abuse its power...
Anyway, though maybe a good ad-profile source, for the few that still have direct IP's (which is getting constantly smaller among consumers) these days with CGNAT and hotspots, it gets hard to identify someone over the limited info of a DNS request. In any case, going completely self-hosted is sadly not possible in a single sweep so you'll always have things that remain centralized throughout the switch, and even if you could, DNS will always be the biggest centralized entity. The root-dns servers all the way at the top (I have been taught in an IT catch-up education thing not so very long ago there's apparently just 5 keys, owned by 5 people) still would have some control cause the centralization of them is a necessity for having constant global consensus over a single internet. Until someone comes up with a decent genious ad-hoc federated dnsservice-alternative idea one day (and somehow would get all registrars with current running contracts on board) we're stuck with it, which is gonna be for still quite some time, I'm afraid... 😅
Anyway, that all being said, none of the above is meant as an excuse. I do also see the irony of suggesting a Google thing in an anti-company-dependence place, but in all honesty, I hadn't even connected those dots until now. 😅 I did not do it out of bad intent anyway, so also: my apologies. 😉
just pirate stuff its so much easier:
- you download stuff
- its in your storage
- no accounts & bullshit
Add VLC and set up a media server and it's just as convenient as streaming for at home use.
I have a media server set up, but Stremio is pretty easy for normies.
That's great and all but some apps require GPStore and check for license upon every start.
Ex: Radarscope
Don't suggest FOSS weather map apps, they all suck in comparison.
Lol so easy and convenient.
You don't own anything if it's hosted in the cloud. Download and archive.
Working on it. After we move, I'm buying larger SSDs for my NAS.
If you're interested in cost-effectiveness, hold out for the deals on SaveMyServer. I ended up with a 48TB Dell R720xd for like $500 delivered. 36TB usable in a RAID5 is nothing to sneeze at, plus it's an amazing chassis for, say, GPU accelerated transcode.
I am not tech-savvy enough to know about any of this ^^;
I don’t run Raid, but the idea is that you can setup a computer specially for storing your content.
For streaming Ssd will be very expensive. You can get a huge mechanical hdd for similar costs.
I don't need to keep a ton of movies and shows, but I do need to double-back-up my work. I lost two HDDs in the past and I now always back up "online". At first it was Google, but now I have a NAS with a primary SSD and a backup SSD. I will never buy a HDD again.
The thing with hdds is that when they fail, if you check regularly, you can recover a lot of your data if not all the data from it.
When an ssd fails, it’s all gone instantly.
I still rely on hdd for long term storage.
Additionally hdds are better for backups that are not regularly connected. The ssd can lose charge over time and data can be lost.
With that being said, I also have important work data and it is duplicated on multiple types of drives in multiple places.
Maybe. But since I store all my work on my NAS and none of it on my PC and laptop anymore, I prefer the speeds of SSD and the automatic backup from storage SSD to second SSD that I do. My desktop and laptop SSDs are only used for the OS, software, and installed games now.
If you can afford it, go for it, but having HDD fail isn't a great reason to never buy HDDs again (SSDs fail too).
RAID is a way of pooling multiple HDDs so that even if one fails, you can still access your data.
Im also trying to stick with SSDs, but many of them died. Backup is needed for both
Everyone starts somewhere. This was the start for many of us. The myriad self-hosted information resources are very helpful.
Cool tip. Would love to score something like that. Wanna get past a simple nas with no hardware encoding.
You don’t own anything if it’s hosted in the cloud.
Unless you own the cloud. Self hosting should be made as ubiquitous as linux distros.
I used to work for a major TV/Internet provider that offered video on demand movies and TV shows. I had several instances where a family would move to a new location but the account wouldn't transfer and instead it was set up as a new account. Hundreds of dollars spent on VoD titles would be lost and I couldn't do anything for them because the company I worked for didn't provide a way to restore those titles. If I purchase a digital copy of a movie, show, book, etc. I don't feel a single shred of guilt pirating it to keep a downloaded version for myself and neither should anyone else.
They're not letting me watch tv shows I paid for. I'm from the UK and I have a huge catalogue. I bought some new shows and movies and they blocked them. Said some BS about region. Said they understand and they can't/won't do nothing.
Let's not forget all the 4K movies I bought only play in 480. Yey.
Yeck, sorry for your loss. I bought a lot of TV show on Google Play; and while they're not lost, they are inconvenient to access.
You seem to have missed the real lesson. Google is not a good company. They will screw you if they can. Avoid them when possible.
I was purchasing from them a bunch of years ago.
Fair enough. I was more commenting on your Lesson summary down at the bottom, so I didn't consider that you had mentioned it was long ago.
Stay away from google play if you can - forget buying from them. From logging you in without consent to requiring credit card for unlocking geo-locked app, Google play is a very scummy, anti-privacy malware.