Technology

Monitoring torrents, especially public ones, is quite easy.

While the Brits commonly use fortnights and "next Tuesdays" the conversion to months isn't too complicated if you're used to it

Now TV is fucking awful though. They still think 1080p and surround sound are luxury optional extras.

It's basically just cybersquatting on shows so nobody else can have them, and remind you that you could watch them in decent quality if only you weren't such a cheapskate and would subscribe to full Sky.

They explicitly state these are Torrent Freaks numbers. Along with:

It should be noted, as Torrent Freak does, these statistics only reflect a portion of any pirated content this year. The stats are specifically for single-episode torrents, rather than season-wide packages, and even more specifically they’re based on data from the torrenting platform BitTorrent. Just as television has grown and evolved across new formats in the last decade or so, so has piracy, with more and more people turning to sites hosting streams of pirated content, rather than “traditionally” pirating content through downloaded, local copies.

These numbers only reflect piracy of one type and among that type only one, very public, provider. (and not even their entire community, just those that download episodes one by one) That's quite a limited scope. Lots of pirates don't like such public services and/or use other protocols/methods of acquiring media.

Personally, I don't even use Torrents at all anymore, let alone Torrent Freak, yet I pirate hundreds of hours of media every month. I've also been hearing far more commonly in the last few years about people using pirate streaming services instead of downloads.

If you want the full picture, you've gotta expand your demographics. When you only ask the straight white men, all you get is what straight white men think, instead of the whole community's opinion.

I'm not sure if the piracy megathread or FMHY megathread cover the *arr stack specifically, but they have lots of information so I'm recommending them broadly for anyone wanting to ingest information about piracy.

Regarding what the arr stack even is:

Tldr, you set up a list of public and/or private trackers in Prowlarr or Jackett. In Radarr and Sonnar you set up movies and shows respectively that you want to keep track of. Rad/Sonarr check those trackers for releases for your tracked media matching criteria (like resolution, size, language, etc).

When it finds a matching release, it sends the torrent file or magnet link to your torrent client to download. When it finishes, Rad/Sonarr hardlink or copy the file to a library location and organize/name them according to rules you set.

You can point Jellyfin or Plex to that library location and all the media will be organized so it can easily figure out what media is there and grab metadata for it (cover images, description, ratings, etc). Then you can watch that media through Jellyfin/Plex or an app that plugs into them.

The *arrs also work with usenet if you'd prefer that over or in addition to torrenting with a vpn.

The servarr wiki and the trash guides have a lot of info on what the various pieces do and how to set them up. I didn't strictly follow them but I've browsed them to get ideas on stuff like custom formats and such to get sonarr/radarr to automatically download and upgrade towards the codecs/quality that I prefer.

Personally I run Plex+jellyfin side by side to start, then sonarr/radarr/lidarr to download and organize TV/movies/music, with prowlarr to auto setup torrent sites into sonarr/radarr/lidarr, with a transmission+VPN docker container connected to each of the same 3, and finally an overseerr web ui that my friends can log into to submit requests to be auto downloaded by sonarr/radarr.

It's a lot to set up at once, but I started out with just Plex like 10 years ago and I've slowly added each container as time went on so it's only like a couple weekends a year where I tinker with it or do a migration to a new box as I moved from place to place and had different spaces available for my gear. Start with just a Plex and/or jellyfin server, you can tinker with sonarr/radarr without using it to auto download at the start. It's still super useful for renaming / organizing files, and you can only add certain folders if you don't want it to mess with a collection that you prefer to manually manage. Or create a new junk library folder to let it run amok with until you have it configured to your liking. Add in a torrent+VPN/Usenet downloader container to get it auto downloading when you're ready, and when you get tired of accepting requests personally from friends, an overseerr (for Plex) or jellyseerr (for jellyfin) container they can log into with using their existing Plex/jellyfin login to have their requests automatically forwarded to the appropriate *arr app and you'll have a fully automated low or no touch piracy setup. One of these days I'll also get bazarr up and running to make it easier to grab subtitles too since every once in a while I download something obscure and the only torrents for it dont have subs so I manually grab them from opensubtitles or something. It feels pretty magical though when you've requested a series and throughout the week, you see new episodes just pop up on the recently aired/added row in Plex/jellyfin within an hour or two of the episodes airing.