I’m more pissed about shows you can’t watch or buy.
if you aren’t selling I can’t pay for it.
Nothing pisses me off more than shows, movies, or games that you literally cannot buy with legitimate means yet every single time someone tries to preserve it they get in trouble with whoever holds the rights. It’s like bro, I am more than willing to pay for it if you’d let me. The reason people are trying to preserve your show, movie, or video game is literally because you won’t let us give you money for it and even when you do let us pay for it you make it worse on purpose to make more money (I.e. ads and subscription tiers)
Often this is because neither streaming nor selling physical media is “worth it” for the parent company. Setting up even a simplified BD release takes tons of money because it’s not as simple as the copyright owner taking ready to use final renditions and burning it to a disk, there’s a whole process that goes into taking the masters and getting the highest possible quality digital copies off them, encoding appropriately for the disks, etc., and that’s not even mentioning the physical production of the disks, cases, booklets, etc., and getting a distribution deal with the right sellers and so on. What seems like a no brainer “you have a product, I want to buy that product, sell me that product” isn’t so simple after all.
Same goes for streaming albeit differently. The rights owner needs to create a streaming compatible release from the master (or sometimes even from the existing physical copy masters!), pay residuals after every playback, AND it has to bring new viewers to the platform for it to be profitable. Adding content just because existing users demand it - users who will 95-99% of the time will still stick with the platform even if they don’t get what they want - is not profitable, as it brings in no extra revenue.
Then there’s licensing. A lot of TV shows and movies are stuck in perpetual licensing hell because even though the trademark and franchise ownership lies with one company, long term rights usage has been sold to third parties as a way to have the IP generate revenue. Foe example, Paramount didn’t start their own streaming for years because all their IP has been sold for 5-7 year terms to e.g. Netflix. Why start a platform if you can literally not put your own product there? Or take HBO - since all Warner Brothers licensing was done in 10 year exclusive blocks with SkyTV, HBO (Go, Max, Plus, etc.) literally couldn’t enter the UK market because ALL the content was licensed out to another company who was promised exclusive rights within the UK for that time period…
I fully agree that going after piracy when you’re not willing to provide your content for legal procurement, is a bit hypocritical, and shouldn’t be a thing.
That was anime in Canada for a bit.
That’s still a ton of movies and shows.
Fuck em if they don’t want my money
Yar har fiddlety de
I love how the go-to pirate theme song is a 50/50 split between Disney and LazyTown.
It’s such a banger
Reminds me when I tried to watch anime legit. Checked if crunchyroll had what I wanted then paid up. Except crunchyroll has that anime but in another region, why not tell me that before? Since then I’ve been sailing the seven seas without any remorse.
Also, jellyfin is better than any streaming service and it’s not even close.
Yeah but how do you make the jellyfin interface not ass?
I use this theme https://github.com/lscambo13/ElegantFin
I’m glad that works for you, but I hate that. Thank you very much for your response, though.
You can make your own if you know how to fuck with css
Alternatively bc I agree that jellyfin clients are weak you can just use kodi as a client, which also looks horrendous by default, but has 20+ years of themes
I minimise the time spent in that interface and launch whatever I wanna see as fast as possible. I assume you mean the androidTV interface right? The web and android interface is decent.
“This show has replaced the iconic music with generic slop to save on licensing costs.”
Revisionism should be outlawed. Imagine Friends without the intro song, or the same thing for South Park or Simpsons or Seinfeld or King of the Hill.
Every time I run across a show that has this happened to it, I imagine a full on lightning bolt hitting whoever thought it was a good idea.
House is NOT the same without Massive Attack
Oh god. I completely forgot about that one. That intro was by far the best, but the others did a fair job of following the same motif, and could reasonably pass as following or successive season intros.
I can’t wait until a studio replaces an entire character with a new actor using generative AI, kind of like Lucas did with Anakin in Return of the Jedi but for an entire series. It’ll be a shitshow.
It already happens in games with voice actors. I’m fine with it when it’s done because the actor turned out to be a sexual predator or something, but a few live service games recast VAs during the recent(-ish) voice actor strikes, then went back and rerecorded every line ever said by their characters. That was pretty gross.
That sort of retaliation is so, so shitty. Was it EA?
No, it was Mihoyo (makers of predatory gacha games like Genshin Impact and Star Rail). IIRC the replaced VAs had gone on strike in solidarity with the union, but weren’t actually members so lacked job protection.
Awful.
The *arr stack truly is fully automatic luxury gay space communism!
Once again I implore you to build your own media streaming tools. It’s very easy: https://yams.media/
Dumb question: what’s a media server? (eli5 please) Is it like a netflix with your own vids? Why not open the directory, double click the file, and lean back?
The convenience of netflix (whatever you want to watch, from any device in any location), populated with any media you decide; and easy to share with anyone you want.
I currently have 5114 movies and 39033 tv episodes from 483 shows; shared with friends and family. New episodes of any TV show that I’ve added get downloaded automatically as they air. Movies can be added before they release and will download as soon as they are available, with cam rips being ignored.
You provide one of these media servers (Emby, Jellyfin, or Plex) with folders of video files that are named after movies/shows and it identifies them, downloads all the necessary metadata, and presents it in a very similar format to comercial streaming services.
They can also perform tasks like converting media on the fly to support devices that can’t play a particular format, or are trying to stream over a poor/low speed remote connection. You can search, sort, and filter by things like genre, studio, cast/crew members, tags. Vist links to imdb, the tvdb, tmdb, rotten tomatoes, etc.
Then tools like sonarr/radarr/lidarr remove the need to manage files at all; making it so you simply search for a title, click ‘add’ and it’s hunted down and downloaded for you.
It’s just overall a much better experience than managing folders full of files.
Holly macaroni! That’s a lot of stuff!
- Does that work on the LAN only?
- Did you describe a bunch of things working in coordination, or is it just “one software that does it all”.
- If the first, what is the architecture?
thanks :)
I was initially talking about just one piece, but realized the comment you replied to was talking about the whole ecosystem and expanded.
I’ll break it down better:
The main piece of the puzzle is media server software. There are three big names here; Emby, Jellyfin, and Plex. (only one is needed, they just provide several options) These are provided with folders of media files and do all the heavy lifting to present and stream it to clients just like a comercial streaming platform such as Netflix.
Next is finding and collecting new media. For that there is Radarr, Sonarr, and Lidarr. (Movies, TV Shows, and Music) These manage searching through torrent/usenet indexers to find files that match the media you’ve told them to find. They then pass the desired torrent/nbz files to your chosen torrent/usenet client for downloading, and finally move+sort the downloads into your media folders for your chosen media server software to serve on demand.
Finally there are tools like Ombi, which can automatically manage requests for media from users, without them having to ask you to find/add things.
These can be setup to be LAN only, or with a bit more configuration be accessible from anywhere. This may require purchasing a domain name to enable proper SSL/HTTPS security; but that’s actually a really useful thing to have. I started with media streaming; but now run a VPN, immich, vaultwarden, and many other services all accessed/secured via my own domain name.
Plex is designed to make that part really easy, providing SSL/remote access for you; but at the expense of giving Plex corp access and control over your server, requiring users (including you) to login to plex.tv before being able to access your server, as well as selling your info to advertisers while pushing their content to you.
Jellyfin is fully open source and honestly a great option, but lacks some features like an XboxOne client.
Emby is in the middle. Closed source, and requires a subscription to enable some features; but there are lifetime license options and its been a very reliable product for me.
That’s an awesome break down! Now I see that my “double click the files in the directory” was… well… “cute”, compared to this.
Thanks again for the explanation, kind stranger. Salutations!
It’s both the media downloading stuff to get new stuff that you might want, and the program that takes all that media and puts a netflix-like web (and apps). That second part is the one you criticized.
However, since sometimes my PC is off and my partner wants to see the stuff, or we like watching it on the tv, sometimes on the phone on the bathroom, having a separate PC that does all that has value. It’s always on too so sometimes it downloads new chapters of series at night and they are already there by the time I get to watch them.
I see. So it is a central server (in your LAN?) that looks ahead and cache the media, and serves many local clients.
Cool! Is this one program that does it all? Or are there different parts to configure?
Yeah, you got it. It’s a collection of different services, though. I think that the link in the original comment of this chain is that of a script that manages the while install.
Right now I have a service that searches in torrenting sites (prowlarr, for anime Tosho and thepiratebay), that is linked to the media managers (sonarr for series, radarr for movies), which are both linked to qbittorrent for the download. Then, after the download they move the files to the prior folders, where jellyfin serves them in my local LAN.
As I told my friends, if they don’t see value in jellyfin they can still get value from the rest of the stack, or if they have enough with prowlarr and then with the magnets download the videos manually, sure.
If you are not savvy though (or even if you are, let’s be real, I’m lazy) that script might be helpful.
Oh, I forgot, I also have another service called Bazarr that links to sonarr and radarr to detect series/movies and downloads subtitles via opensubtitles. It’s cool but optional.
If you didn’t already guess it, the naming convention of *arr is a joke, Arrr, pirate!
Thanks a lot! It’s much more clear. The arr bit made me chuckle
Ohhh that looks slick! Gonna have to keep that in mind if I ever have to do a rebuild
I have no idea why anyone left the high seas in the first place. The wind blows so gloriously strong out here, and the more the merrier, so come back to your past to build a future together.
All these shitty streaming companies need to be collapsed. I’d rather make my hard earned cash walk the plank than give any of it to them.
When Netflix was the only player in town with all the content, it was fine. But now it’s just back to what cable packages once were.
Even then Netflix had the same problem it has now though where it has plenty of content, just not what you want to watch
Because in the end, I’m not against paying for a service that, albeit small, does somehow sustain the actual creators of the content. That was before it all enshittified ofc.
Same reason why I usually pay games on steam or gog. Paying for goods is the “right” thing to do, so if the annoyance is low and I can, I prefer to pay.
With media though, the annoyance went through the roof again a long time ago.
There are content that there is zero torrents for.
I mean you do this “strategy” where you can just queue up a bunch those niche ones on a .txt file, then when ready and have time, get only 1 month subscription to binge it all, then cancel when it ends… xD
The tech and entertainment industries have slowly eroded any and all moral arguments against piracy.
Streaming and digital distribution have led to situations where we no longer own the media we buy. We could buy a licence to access an app, song, show or movie and then have our access revoked at any time for any reason, and maybe we’ll get a refund if we’re lucky…
Landmining terms of service with clauses banning class action lawsuits and imposing forced arbitration have become increasingly common and is further eroding our consumer rights so if a company does fuck us financially, we’re SOL.
Then we have companies like Nintendo that have litigated hard against emulators, ROM sites and third-party flash carts which have given access to old games that Nintendo otherwise have little interest in making available on modern hardware - in some cases bankrupting people like Gary Bowser for life with seven-figure judgements in the process.
We now have a substantial risk of more shows, games, songs, movies and other forms of media becoming lost because of this.
But the biggest kick in the teeth has come from the AI industry.
Hosting pirated streams of PPV events or sports matches locked behind expensive cable channels, or even selling modded Fire Sticks that enable piracy can earn you significant prison time and a massive fine. Yet training LLMs on copyrighted works without the rightsholders’ knowledge, consent or compensation is apparently perfectly fine and not landing people like Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg behind bars?
I worked at a used media store 10+ years ago, and I remember worrying about what would happen when everything was conveniently available on good ol’ reliable Netflix, which at the time seemed like the logical thing that everyone would eventually sign up for, and then what would I do?
Fast forward to today, and streaming has certainly changed the market. Huge TV show box sets are almost impossible to sell, though it’s not a totally dead market. DVDs and Blu-rays sell about as well as they ever did, if not better. Maybe everything is on a service somewhere, but most households aren’t going to sign up for every service, so as a result of all the streaming services fighting like dogs for library rights, there’s almost always someone looking to get a cheap, used, physical copy of a movie they can’t get elsewhere.
If anything, I feel more secure about the future of physical media today than I did ten years ago.
The tv show box sets often have commentary tracks, which is something you will be hard pressed to find even in pirated versions, so they still have their advantages.
I cherish my The Wire dvd box set (found ridiculously cheap at a charity shop), so much good commentary there, particularly from David Simon, who always have interesting anecdotes or facts to say about particular scenes etc.
Commentary tracks are the underappreciated treasures of physical media. Lord of the Rings gets a lot of deserved praise, but The Matrix has a philosophers commentary track which is awesome, and the 1989 Batman has Tim Burton geeking out over his own movie in a delightful fashion. Also, Jonathan Frakes does a hilarious commentary on Star Trek: First Contact where he sounds simultaneously like a popular high school jock and a gigantic Star Trek dweeb, and I adore him for it.
I pirated Free Solo the other year. Loved it so much I tried to pay for it afterwards. Only on Disney+/National Geographic subscription service.
There’s some great movies/shows out there, which I’m willing to pay for, but to watch them you need to agree to those Terms and Conditions, which I don’t agree too. So… 🏴☠️
Maybe you can grab a DVD or Blu-ray?
Does an amazon reseller count as “supporting the crew” cause that’s the only link I found…
You have to be careful what you pay for digitally as well. I once bought a digital copy of a Star wars movie and a physical copy just to see what it was like. I could only watch it on the Cineplex browser/website and they deleted it after a year or two anyways?! What a rip off.
It was just the ads for me. If I pay for a service, I should be able to watch without commercials. Since that’s not possible, I’ve dropped all the streaming services and just sail the seas now. Saving almost $100 a month.
This weekend. I wanted to watch a soccer match from my country. I have a lot of services and I could not find it anywhere. The only was was the open sea ways. I really try to find a paying one. No wanted my money.
IPTV is your friend for sure for any live content, often sports!
Streaming service: “You’re lucky, this show is available on this service this week! Who knows which service will have it next week. It’s up to the bosses, sorry.”
Me with my ADHD brain: (Ready the sloop, check the rigging) “Aye, I know where it’ll be, right tharrr on me USB stick”
Yeah I’ve been using unofficial streaming services for a while now, only issue is the lack of an algorithm.
