Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ @lemmy.dbzer0.com

11mo ago

what's your wishlist for piracy?

What can be (realisticly) improved for a better and easier experience

155 comments

Adding proper metadata to releases. Why are we still trying to decipher release titles, why not add a little metadata JSON file to every release and make the info available to the search API?
Also keeping multiple different versions of a release in Arr apps, like ebook and audiobook in different languages. Right now I'd need 4 Readarr instances to get the English and German audiobook and ebook versions of a book, and don't even think about letting them manage the same root folder!
- Sorry, best we can do is some unrelated ASCII art.
  
  At least they sometimes include insane rants.
- and following proper naming conventions too. why can't releasers decided to choose one single naming convention together so it makes our job better to automate things?
  
  Have you tried maintaining a standard at work?
  Now imagine if several thousand people try to decide on a common standard.
- Readarr honestly feels like the most barebones of all the arrs. I tried it for a bit and decided to just use Calibre to manage my library.
  Sure, I need to manually grab stuff but it more than makes up for that with the other features it has.
- I actually like the release titles. It's encoded in the name that way, there's a somewhat good standard for it, and it's one file. I rarely need more info than what's in the release title. And I would dislike having to carry a separate json with me.
- A separate file or if the first few bytes of a file contained the metadata.

That dubbed audio tracks of movies could be downloaded separatey and easily merged in the audio, in a way similar to subtitles. This way, the audio track in non English languages would be downloaded very quickly, even with just one seeder, and the whole movie in original language has way more seeders than dubbed ones.
- Would be great for commentary tracks too.
- I'd love that!
  How do you approach the challenge (of getting the movies / series in English and non-English) at the moment?
  Do you download two versions of the same movie?
  Do you use Radarr/Sonarr and Plex? How did you set them up to be "bilingual"?
  
  I've always only torrented movies "manually" until a few weeks ago, when I set up my first media server with jellyfin and sonarr/radarr, and set the language to italian only. often however I see that the requested movies not downloading automatically because no italian torrent is found with the required resolution (1080p), and/or the ones actually available have 0 seeds, while there's plenty of English torrents with loads of seeders
  
  As someone being bilingual en/de and my family being primarily pl/de:
  I will either manually remux my own from torrent/usenet releases or (usually for shows) usually just download the german version.
  Usually the uploaders include the english track anyway.
  Regarding your question for multilingual radarr/sonarr: https://trash-guides.info/Radarr/radarr-setup-quality-profiles-french-en/
  Just replace fr with language of choice :)
- Ditto for audio in general. I notice wild differences between encodings in dialogue clarity and volume. If this were standard we could all mix and match whatever audio is best for our equipment.
- I've seen some anime releases where they had separate mka files for different languages and a little script to attach whatever dub you want into it. It is technically possible already, but super rare
- Where to download separately?

sci-hub doesn't get new research papers any more, and the new alternatives are all much less user friendly. As far as I can tell, wosonhj.com is what's currently recommended, where you have to post in a forum and wait for either a bot or a human to send the paper to you. Other alternatives, like annas-archive, nexusbot or STC all didn't have the paper I was looking for.
I just want old sci-hub back, honestly.
- You can maybe try your local library or Wikipedia’s

Honestly my biggest thing is for affordable 10 or even 20 TB SSDs to hit the market.
- Unfortunately you'll be waiting for a while. SSDs were at the lowest last year to the point that manufacturers were almost losing money. So they reduced production. We will only see the prices going up from now, at least for a while.
  
  You can't really even find a 10+ TB SSD easily right now let alone anything approaching 20, so it's a moot point for now anyway. All that pricing stuff is cyclical though. There was a big spike in SSD prices a couple years ago prior to that huge price drop we just saw. It'll come back down again eventually.
  We just moved over to a HDD setup recently because I had run out of space on SSD and the amount of space is great, but I forgot how much I hate HDD seek and transfer times and I'm not gonna invest in RAID for now so I guess this is my life.
  Might be smart to maybe keep my most active shows on an SSD and the rest of the catalog on the HDD.
- What's the current price roughly?
  
  I have not seen a consumer SSD of 10 or more TB for sale anywhere and absolutely not 20. So the answer is, I have no idea.
  Samsung has started selling 8TB drives for around 500-600 which is really not that bad, but I'm just gonna wait a couple years for larger capacities to hit the market and skip 8. It's in my opinion kind of a middling size if you're archiving a lot of video.
  For now I'll just stick with the high capacity HDD setup I'm using.
  
  Last time I checked:
  500GB = 50-70€
  1TB = 60-80€
  2TB = 110-150€ (depending on product tier like samsung evo or pro models)
  4TB = 250-400€ (same here)
  8TB = >600€
  Obviously different pricing for M.2/SATA/SAS drives.
  
  About tree fiddy.
- what's the point of SSD for archival purposes? seem like less safe option than HDD and speed is not really issue for long term archiving or watching TV shows/movies, I don't really see point in SSD besides running OS/apps
  
  To each their own. I don't care for the bulk of RAID setups or the transfer and seek time of individual spinning disks.
- I've been waiting for that for over ten years now. I thought it would take two at most.
  
  Samsung is selling some somewhat affordable 8TB drives but I feel like that's kind of an odd spot for size where it'll hold a lot of stuff, but when you get to that level of kinda semi-deranged collector mentality file hoarding, you're gonna blow past 8 pretty easily. I'm hoping it'll actually happen in a few years.
- Might be a silly question, but aren’t SSD’s supposedly worse than HDD’s for storing data long term? Or is that just a myth?
  I’ve read that if you only store data and then read it off the disk without overwriting then it’s comparable to HDD data degradation wise. Not sure how true is that.
  
  If you dump 8tb of data onto a 10tb SSD and only read from it, it will probably last just as long as a hard drive. SSD's wear from lots of write operations, reading from them doesn't really do much other than the cache will be damaged over time.

Continued losses, in the billions, for ad-riddled streaming services is all I can ask for.

Being able to find, download and seed old series and movies.
Nobody ever stays seeding anymore because big private trackers make it all about ratio and small ones simply don't have to userbase to support "old" series.
Back with RARBG I had every season of that 70's show and had around a ratio of around 50. For old scooby doo, red green show, Mr. Rogers, Tom & Jerry, some cartoons from when I was a kid, etc... Now it is difficult to even find a lot of that media, much less have a good ratio from it on smaller private trackers where it might get 1 download per 6 months or so. There is absolutely no incentive for keeping around older media. If you want to get in good in trackers, you HAVE to pump and dump the most popular torrent of the week once a month or so to get a good enough ratio.
For example, on SceneTime I have a ratio of like 0.1 because it simply doesn't have users. However, they assign bonus points based on how long your torrent is seeding, if I am not mistaken, so my site "effective ratio" has gone up to 2 because you can spend the bonus points to add "upload GB" to your account if you are keeping alive "unpopular" torrents.
- I like the trackers I'm in that have a point system that awards indefinite seeding and makes it possible to have a decent ratio even if you can't ever actually seed because of people with seedboxes.
  
  Wdym all seedbox users stealing your ratio?
  Some can't even participate with homeservers due to laws or don't even autobrrr through their whole wishlist.
- Currently seeding
  Tom & Jerry Collection 1940 1080p BluRay WEBRİ H265
  Looney.Tunes.and.Merrie. Melodies.HQ.Project.v2022
  Pretty big in size for my rented seedbox though... :(
  
  Which tracker is this on?
  I don't know what to do with my stuff from RARBG anymore because nobody can connect to it, but I don't want it to go to waste.
  Maybe I should repackage it is AV1 and put it on a tracker or something.
- FWIW, every episode of Red Green is on youtube. Just have to rip it, which is always fun /s

Honestly? Resurrection of Rarbg. That site was gold.
- I don't really care about the site, but their releases were fast and had consistent X265 quality, nothing new matches them
  Pahe is quite fast, PSA recently did something to their encoding and often/mostly can't play them anymore on my TV, they worked fine up until last year, not sure what they messed up, at least with pahe X265 I have guarantee it will work
- That was the cleanest and most curated movie site I have ever come across, honestly a big loss to have them gone. Consistent naming scheme, amazing torrent video quality (unlike low bitrate YTS), icons/logos to show what medium the rip was from. Literal gold
- there are some entry level private trackers that are good as rarbg but you have to keep track of minimum seeding time and ratio for that, plus you have to wait for open sign-ups if you are a beginner.
- Yeah, over the decades that was the golden era is convenience and quality.

A way to fairly pay the original content creator.
If I really enjoy a movie, series or music, I often actually want to send the actual creator some money to reward their creativity. May be just a dollar, may be ten. But I can't.
- But I can't
  You sure?
  I don't pay for movies or series of (I just don't). But when I like some music (bands, producers, or even a record label) I end up buying some physical records or merchandising. If you don't care about that, the most direct way is to go to Bandcamp and buy something on friday. People often want to put a price on their work, and not just "a dollar" like it's your spare change, but there are several options and websites to do it.
  With games I do the same but in Steam.
- I wish anime/manga/etc studios were transparent about their costs and profit. I want to see if my favorite show has so far made enough money to afford the next season or for the team to afford their next project.
  Kickstarter/Patreon should have shown creators that people will support what they like and even if they have made enough money people will continue to buy/donate to creators they love.
- Fairly pay og creators ... But how do I pay RARGB if they don't exist anymore? :(

Arr service that links with SoulSeek, automatically downloads music, passes it through beets, calculates ReplayGain values and the rest of the missing metadata and then organizes and renames it
- This is the fucking dream. Lidarr is serviceable to get a library going, but we could do so much better.
- Functional music sharing would be amazing. In the SuprNova days music was so readily accessible. Now it's a crap shoot with most trackers and newsgroups.
- The fact, that lidarr has no slsk integration...

filenames following the standards of library apps like jellyfin, plex, etc.
i don't want every file to be named "[ASDF]some.shitty.show.S3E7.MULTI(360p h264 7.1 dual audio).mkv"
jellyfin can't identify most of these, and the relevant information can be found out easily by tapping properties (in windows, anyway)
- Errrm, sonarr/radarr can sort that out perfectly
- i don’t want every file to be named “[ASDF]some.shitty.show.S3E7.MULTI(360p h264 7.1 dual audio).mkv”
  That file name contains the S3E7 bit, which is enough for it to get parsed by plex. Seems to be a jellyfin issue.
  
  that may very well be the case, but it's still excessive. i would much rather have a .txt file with relevant information and the "ShowXY S03E07" naming.
  at least manually identifying shows is easy in jellyfin.
- Give FileBot a try. I liked it so much, I even bought the license. It works really well.
  
  been using antrenamer, filebot looks like it's gonna make my job much easier.
  the next time i'm reorganizing my (3TB btw) library, i'll give it a try.

More people to get in to I2P.
- What is I2P?
  
  https://geti2p.net
  Fully anonymouse and FREE P2P network great for torrenting and somewhat encouraged even.
- It needs a modern rewrite atleast in terms of ui but ideally a complete rewrite. I tried it 10 years ago and it still looks just as complicated
  
  i2pd
  
  I agree that the web UI looks a bit outdated. But it is more then functional and imo not that complicated. Personally I use the container version with podman so idk about the windows version.

I need people to submit more of the research papers that I need to be able to read to lib Gen or sci hub
- You might know this already, but try emailing the primary authors directly and asking for a copy, it's often the easiest way to get them if you haven't got any other way to access.
  
  Yeah. I just don't like trying to email 100+ authors haha. But you are right in general they do like to share most of the time
  
  This actually works way better than people expect. Many authors are tied to a publisher but are still allowed to personally give away copies to students.

Better matching with dubbed versions of non-English shows. I have to manually search, since the "language" isn't English in the original, even though there's an English dub. Using Sonarr

The return of RARBG
- Hopefully they'll find a sanctuary country soon and restart it.

Arr software for YouTube with Sponsorblock built in.
A way to use Sponsorblock on podcasts.
- You wouldn't want the Sponsorblock to be part of the download process, but rather the player. Being crowdsourced, it's not immediate and often gets improved/corrected over time, so a video's least likely to have good Sponsorblock timestamps right after being uploaded (when an automated program would likely be downloading it).
  We need a Plex/Jellyfin/etc. metadata provider with the Sponsorblock info included. Could keep the data up to date, even after the videos are downloaded.
  
  Interesting. I’d not considered that Plex could build it in. That of course relies on accurate YouTube metadata but it’s not impossible.
- You can use sponsorblock with yt-dlp, if that helps at all.
  
  Interesting. Just need it to work on a server with an interface as effortless as sonarr.
- why? ublock works fine to block sponsored stuff
  
  Sponsors, not ads.
  Ie sections of the actual video the creator uploaded, dedicated to their own sponsors. Not the extra video ads youtube then puts in as well.
  
  What if I want to watch on my tv or download for offline use?
- Like to download videos from your subscriptions?
  
  Yep. Add to the server with ads and sponsor bs removed.
- Since we’re talking about sponsorblock, https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock/issues/1927

More I2P torrenting support

my personal wishlist would just be a proper homeserver and the typical home theatre stuff like a nice big screen, speakers, etc.
in a broader sense of how the ecosystem would be improved, i'd say more open source projects and solidarity in general. currently the worst, yet most common sort of piracy is people searching "watch blank online free" and clicking the shady websites full of junk ads, popups and malware just to see a shitty heavily compressed buffering version with baked in subtitles and stuff. piracy should be for the people, not for profit; lowering the amount of technical hoops you need to jump through to get to the good accessible media by having simple, free, and open tools would help a lot.

Better music support. Movies and TV do great through the *arrs and Jellyfin, but music is a big mess.
- Well, unlike TV/Movies, typically ALL music is available on ALL platforms, so there isn't a service problem. Spotify and others are still really nice to use for consumers.
- Lidarr works ok
  
  The app works pretty well but the database it has to use isn't as mature/quickly updated as Tv/Movies. I believe it uses musicbrainz? Either way it's not as standard as the others if feels like.
- At least we have Musicbrainz.
  But a big part of that problem come from the legacy time.
  Just see how many releases were made for old bands like ACDC...
- agreed then I would be able to drop my last subscription being tidal

For TMDB to end their stupid policy of setting broadcast episode order as the default. Any app that uses them for metadata to match files names ends up with wrong episodes because obviously nobody wants broadcast order.
- Yeah I want to watch my shows in alphabetical order.
  
  Haha. What I mean is that some TV series have a different episode order on DVD/bluray than what they were originally broadcast in. “Firefly” is the classic example. The TV networks broadcast them out of order and the DVD order is the “correct” one and the order in which pirate TV packs will use. But by default many tools (which use TMDB.com) have the wrong metadata for the episodes.

More VR porn 😸

A live broadcast open p2p protocol
- I can’t remember the name now (and struggling to find it) but there was some packaging of VLC with I think a customised libtorrent, where someone would effectively broadcast with an infohash (sha hash like in a torrent) and people could stream and share with not much latency. Hashes were shared on sites/telegram/discord etc and it seemed to work ok.
  Surprised it didn’t become more popular/standardised
  
  I can only find links for acestream but it's not an open protocol. If you have other suggestions I'm all ears.

I wish I could watch sports matches on demand, not just live. And I wish ad-free podcasts were available to pirate. It’s an unrealistic dream.

A different, better protocol for sharing. Torrent is cool but files on it tend to die off, and also can't be updated. I'm thinking something like syncthing might be the future.
- Yeah, ensuring availability over time requires dedicated infra. That's basically what it comes down to. Torrents for the most part lack dedicated providers ensuring file availability. Web seeds exist, but the uploader or the tracker needs to have the resources to back their torrents with bandwidth and storage. Other decentralized solutions, like say IPFS, don't solve the resources problem, because it's not technical, so although you can pay to have content "pinned" in place on IPFS, or you can pin it yourself, that "pinning" requires a server, running off electricity, using someone else's uplink to serve the content, all of which costs. If you don't have your own server, and don't pay someone else to pin it for you, it could easily fall off IPFS.
  Syncthing could honestly help, I've thought about this a fair amount, although you'd still have the resources issues. Availability of content over syncthing or something like it would likely still be tied to popularity (how long are uploaders going to keep their syncthing folders full of specific content? how long will downloaders? In order for it to really work people would have to get in the habit of building out NAS's and putting their libraries on syncthing forever, basically). It still has some of the same basic issues with torrent, but the dynamicness is cool for sure.
  
  Yes the availability will remain an issue but at least I imagine that solving other issues could make it less serious.
  More specifically, the issue (a feature too but still) with torrents is how spread they are. It's difficult to know what is available and in what condition. There are dozens if not hundreds private trackers etc. This all makes it more likely for new torrents for the same content to be created multiple times, and overall seeding resources to be spread out across multiple versions of the same things. Some centralized public index might have helped everyone find things faster and prolong those things' availability as the result. What such an index might need to stay damage-proof and useful is unrelated to this discussion, but I imagine it might work as some blockchain and thus may not require much in terms of resources.
  I didn't mean syncthing itself but some theoretical derivative that would have relevant features.
  It would help to involve a kind of software infrastructure where users would choose how much resources (mostly disk space) they are willing to give in order to contribute to the overall availability of stuff.
- eMule was better in this regard, since you shared a folder you kept sharing all your files indefinitely (provided that you kept them in that folder).
  
  So like soulseek?

I really want IPFS to go mainstream. It solves a lot of problems with piracy and the internet in general. But people started thinking it was a blockchain thing, and I haven't heard much about it since then. Libgen uses it but that's the only place I've seen it be embraced.
- Would you need a VPN for that? Cause if the MPAA lawyers have to throw money at programmers to make an example, then they will.
  If you do need a VPN, then i2P would be a better choice, though it suffers from network size/speed.
  Edit 01:
  Per https://lemmy.ca/u/mp3 https://lemmy.ca/comment/2015681
  File discoverability is poor, most people will not know how to act as a node and mirror files, and there's no builtin privacy protection in place and it's quite easy to figure out which IP addresses are hosting something.

Being able to find and complete certain torrents. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong anymore, but I used to be able to copy and paste the hash into a search engine and complete seeders for a torrent that got stalled. Now it seems like it does nothing and I'm stuck forever. :(
- Get better trackers

Would love to find old Canadian sketch comedy. CBC doesn't release much in the way of physical media. Thankfully, most if not all of Red Green is on youtube, but the vast majority of Royal Canadian Air Farce, Wayne & Shuster, 22 Minutes, etc is rotting away in the CBC archives. Maybe there's a couple episodes here and there on archive.org but there are zero torrents.
- Don't forget the hilarious house of frightenstein
- You just reminded me of something I saw once, that I'd love to find. It was some sketch comedy show, and the sketch was "Every episode of Star Trek". It was hysterical.

I want Jellyfin's OpenSubtitles plugin to work for me.
- Just get bazarr.

Not always, but occasionally I have issues with playing a video and the language not being my preferred (English). Either the video doesn't have English audio or it's not the default. Not a biggie but it can waste some time if there's no talking for the first few min and my family isn't used to navigating audio settings.
- VLC lets you set automatic audio preference matching, so that you type in "eng" in the settings, and it will try and pick an audio track that has "eng" in it's title, great for multi-lang media but doesn't work for stuff like commentary tracks rarely.
  
  Thanks, I didn't know that was a VLC setting. It'd be nice if there was some type of standard for language and audio tracks etc. so there's less chance of error due to free typing the name of a track.
- Jellyfin?
  
  Yeah, I do have my jelly fin set up to select English tracks by default but I've still had issues with the wrong track being selected. Maybe this was due to poor labeling of the audio tracks but that's still something that never happens with a regular streaming service so my family is more resistant to use the self-hosted programs.

Some kind of watch list feature for Jellyfin.
Or, a self-hosted universal watch list for both Jellyfin and any platforms I may use from time-to-time. In the past I've resorted to compiling a massive table, but now I just have an account on JustWatch. Obviously doesn't show me anything from Jellyfin, though.
Other than that, I feel like we need to teach others how to pirate themselves. I'm often the one that friends and family come to to get books, streaming links, software, etc. Its surprising how little people understand how torrenting actually works at a fundamental level.
- This is possible using Trakt. Add a movie or series to your watchlist, sonarr & Radarr sync from this list and add to jellyfin.
  There's also a plugin in jellyfin itself for Trakt that can report back to say when you've watched it I believe.
  
  Interesting, looking into it, it can automatically send a request to Sonarr and Radarr to download certain content, if I don't have it on a streaming service? How does this compare to Jellyseerr?

Doesn't quite vibe with the post, but with the title: More industrial software and operators manuals and stuff. I'm honestly having a hell of a time finding them.

I want self-sovereign identity. I want to control who gets what information about me from my ID, and how that data is hosted. I'm aware that there are some really hostile attitudes about blockchain, but I'd like if a public blockchain could be used to host the information, so that the identity info could be decentralized and decoupled from any given provider.
I want control of my digital identity back, dammit.
postscript someone kindly pointed out this is c/piracy, not c/privacy, which I thought it was. Off topic; my bad.
- Wrong sub
  
  Piracy, not privacy.
  In my defense, it was my last comment of the night, on my phone. I thought I was answering the otheg c/. Oh, well.

Torrent search engine would be a great start, similar like qbittorrent search plugins
- Liiiiike....Prowlarr and jackett?
  
  Yup, but in web not in apps (like Torrentz) & can index all torrent from all website similar like google but for torrent

I need a server to start again.

The ability to financially support those one would leech off of (both bandwidth & sourcing)... Nothing mandatory, but perhaps being able to post a bounty for particular hard-to-find material, or for someone to seed a dead torrent.

Some equivalent to *arr services for IRC dcc'ing, lol. I just prefer dcc'ing over torrents, but it's a hassle to manually do it..

One click install that provides regional VPN, multi-index torrent searching, scheduling, auto downloading based on simple criteria, and then file and metadata management.
I do all this now with various apps, but a single package that does everything that I could install on a new machine and start downloading immediately.
This is my dream app.

more stremio add-ons for subtitles and media sources, specially for shows in lat span
a Foss good anime client for android tv

155 comments