I’m a bit surprised to see so many torrent posts. Are most people still using Torrents? Are most piracy users aware of programs like sonarr or radarr?
You’re surprised that most people use the free option that requires less hassle to get going?
Torrents… Fast, free, and easy
What is fast for you? On usenet it maxes out my internet speeds. Can’t get any faster than that. And I pay like 5 bucks a month for usenet. Fully automated, max speeds. It’s worth it.
I just paid $70 for a 3-year PIA subscription to mask my torrent usage from my ISP. So, an average of a little over $2 per month. Well-seeded movies only take about 10 minutes to download, more obscure stuff admittedly takes longer. Also, torrent streaming exists, so you can start watching even faster if that’s your thing.
Admittedly, I’m not familiar with Usenet or how it works. I’m just saying that torrents are cheap, fast, and easy. Do you have a crash course on how to use Usenet? I’m curious.
You can find tutorials out there but the jist is.
- Subscribe to a suenet provider. I use Tweaknews, but there are some that can get as cheap as $3 per month. Especially around black friday, the plans go on sale.
- Get a downloader such as sabnzbd or nzbget and configure the provider in it.
- Get an indexer. Much like torrents, you need an indexer to grab release from. I use Nzbplanet, but there are lots of others like Nzbgeek.
- Then its a lot like torrents. You download the nzb file off the indezer and import it into your downloader. and it will max out your speeds. For example, all my content averages a download speed of 57MB/s (that is mega-bytes not mega-bits). And I have it throttled. It will max you out.
Once you get that far, then you can move on to the best part, How easy it is to plug in sonarr and radarr. then everything just auto-downloads for you and you dont have to do anything.
To me, if you are using a VPN to torrent, great, I have one too for obscure stuff. But most people are far better off using Usenet. It is way safer and faster, and is easier to automate.
- 57 MB/s isn’t especially fast. I have plenty of torrents “max” my connection, you can easily download a popular torrent at gigabit speeds because they’re often well seeded. But the speed really isn’t that important to me. The difference between a 5 minute download and a 10 minute download is insignificant.
- Torrent downloads can be automated. If you have a favorite uploader you can easily subscribe to their releases.
- I don’t see how Usenet is inherently more secure than torrenting with a VPN…You’re just downloading files from somebody else’s server, it could easily get taken over and become a honeypot, or the owner could serve you malicious files. Both torrents and usenet are potentially vulnerable to that sort of thing.
- Torrents have the advantage (and disadvantage) of being decentralized. As long as a torrent has seeders it’s nearly impossible to take down. You’d have to individually attack each seeder, and there might be thousands.
Torrents can also max out your speed if there are enough seeds, unless you live in a country where your ISPs are allowed to throttle specific types of traffic or something. Or I suppose if you have 10 gbit downlink then you prolly won’t max it off a torrent.
Idk what you mean by fully automated. If you mean sonarr, radarr and the like, they work for torrents too.
I might very well try usenet when I get fiber in my current location (haven’t had it in over a year, it sucks, don’t recommend) and a server for the arr suite, but in general I like my piracy being free lol
All I know is I don’t ever have to care about well seeded torrents, or maintaining ratios on private trackers, or getting letters from VPN disconnects. The 5 bucks a month is worth it just for that.
With a proper setup, which is not hard to do, you shouldn’t be getting any IP leaks or copyright letters. Just be sure your VPN has it’s firewall up and clients are set to only use the network adapter.
Fair enough, none of that has ever been a thing for me.
Okay, extremely obscure things have dead torrents, but I’d wager you won’t find many of those ultra obscure downloads on Usenet either. I dunno about any letters either, I suppose my country is a bit too small for anyone to care, because I’ve been torrenting for nearly 20 years with no issues - and so have many of my friends.
The ratios I’ll agree with you on. It’s a damn competition on private trackers, really annoying because everyone else wants to seed too. I just use public trackers.
Ratio on private trackers isn’t really a big deal as long as you’re the kind of person that can keep a couple hundred GB worth of things seeding close to 24/7. Aside from actual ratio(the thing your torrent client reports), they tend to have a system that rewards having things seeding, whether anyone actually connects to you or not, that you can use to boost “ratio”. There’s also usually some options for acquiring some content without it counting against you, like freeleech(download data isn’t counted in your ratio) for low seeded or new torrents, or discounted/refunded credit for extended seed times, or seeding large amounts of data. Aside from the first few months in a new tracker, ratio isn’t a big issue.
My experience (and I’ll admit that I’ve only used a private tracker since rarbg went down) is that you can only get some seeding done within the first few hours of a new torrent going up, after that there’s just so much competition and so few people downloading, you might get a gigabyte of upload a week on a 50 GB freeleech torrent. It might just be specific to TL.
I do have a ratio nearing 10, but my upload buffer is still small enough that I don’t want to download anything non-freeleech lol
Torrents. I don’t really find Usenet worth the money. I can get most of the stuff I want on public sites. Some others I can get on private trackers. Never really felt the need to use Usenet. And as others have pointed out, the arr apps work great with torrents.
And honestly, I find it a little scummy to pay for content to people who don’t own them. I don’t think piracy in itself is unethical, but I if you take money for stolen content, that’s not cool in my book.
I get what you are saying about paying someone who doesn‘t own the content.
However I‘d argue that you are not paying them for the content, but just for hosting it on their servers. So its more like a tool, as is your VPN if you are torrenting. And most people wouldn‘t mind paying a VPN just to pirate content.
Usenet, I agree, might take you some time to get invites to the good indexers, especially if you don‘t want to pay immediately, but in the long run it‘s definitly worth it.
I havn‘t played arround with torrents for quite some time, whats the most popular setup for torrents atm?
I see multiple private torrent tracker users in here. I primarily use Usenet, but is anyone willing to shed some light on the private torrent scene? Wouldn’t mind having a backup for anything that fails on Usenet but don’t have a clue where to even start research on good/reputable private trackers.
Removed by mod
Not OP but: they are apps to schedule automatic downloads. Like Star Trek Strange New Worlds but don’t wanna go every week and download it manually? Set it up in Sonarr and when you wake up the new episodes are waiting for you. Radarr is the same for film, prowlarr for aggregating torrent trackers all in 1 spot, bazarr for subtitles, and there’s a few others. Can also be set up with usenet in addition to torrents.
is prowlarr better than jackett? Is it wise to invest some time to migrate?
Yeah I switched after Jackett kept having issues with RARBG before they shut down. The biggest change is the fact that adding a tracker to Prowlarr will automatically add it to radarr, sonarr, and the like rather than having to duplicate everything manually yourself.
Its funny that you say “still using torrents” while the usenet is basically older than torrents
Honestly had no idea usenet was still a thing. I’m old. Old enough to know usenet and have used it back in the day. But young enough to switch torrenting and not ever really learn another way
Now I have to look up some info!
Usenet costs money, that’s why I don’t use it.
same. I already pay for VPN. I can’t be bothered to figure out how usenet has changed in the almost 20 years since I last was on it.
Still using torrents. They just work!
I just switched to Usenet after using torrents for the past couple of years. The difference is night and day
torrents automated with all the Arrs
I know Sonarr and Radarr, what else is there?
Been on torrent for many years, recently started using the *arr stack, it’s fantastic. For torrents I source them from a private tracker, difference of quality and speed is night and day.
Torrents and muthafuckin’ DC++!!!
Excuse my ignorance, what’s DC++?
Jesus, dc++ is still around???
Neither. DDL only
Usenet is DDL
True. Just prefer DDL where I dont have to pay
Usenet. Been using it consistently for over 10 years now. I only torrent when I can’t find something on usenet. So not too often. Plus Usenet just maxes out my download speed on everything. It’s so freaking fast compared to torrents. I gladly pay for that.
I have no knowledge of usenet. How do I get started?
Sorry just getting used to notifications in lemmy so I didn’t see this till now. But @hydra@beehaw.org summed it up perfectly.
You need A client, an indexer, and a Usenet provider.
I use SABnzbd for my client, I’ve got several different index sites, and 3 providers. One of which is a yearly unlimited subscription and the other 2 are bucket plans where I buy access to a set amount of GB to download and once I use it, I either buy more or lose access. They basically serve as backup servers if something can’t be found on my main unlimited server. I use prowlarr in conjunction with radarr and sonarr to manage my indexers and shows and movies, and use SABnzbd as my download client, connected to my Usenet provider. It works beautifully once you get it set up right.
Can you tell me which indexers you use? I would like to subscribe to a few myself.
Yeah sure. I’ve used NZBGeek, DOGnzb, nzb.su, binsearch, filesharingtalk and drunkenslug. Some are invite only, if you’re interested I do have a few invites left for DOGnzb… If you’re gonna go down this road, you’ll definitely want multiple indexers.
I use torrents almost exclusively because of the price (free) and convenience. That is, I can get them easily where I live for no additional cost beyond my low speed internet. I have no extra money at all, at this time in my life, unfortunately.
Probably a dumb noob question, but shouldn’t one use a VPN for privacy when torrenting? Wouldn’t that add additional cost?
You can also torrent on i2p for added slowness and privacy. Usually fast enough.
