It was so easy when I was growing up. I would just type my search into LimeWire and if it turned out to be weird porn I would delete it. Then we had The Pirate Bay, and I could go through reviews to see whether something was a virus or not. Now all public sites I am aware of are riddled with viruses, and I am warned that attempting to download any of them will result in me receiving threatening letters from copyrights holders in the post.
Here is what I have discovered today, trying to pirate things again:
- The safest thing you can do is direct download from file share websites, but nobody says where these websites are.
- If you want to torrent files, you need to subscribe to an exclusive private tracker. To get access to a private tracker, you need to get lucky, or you need to go through a painstaking process of levelling up over months and months of seeding torrents from semi-private trackers until you get to an actual good one that may or may not have the content you are looking for.
- If you don't want to do this, you need to pay for a UseNet provider, then you need to register for a similarly exclusive UseNet index service, probably paid as well. There is no guarantee you will find what you are looking for on here either, and there is a chance that your download will fail.
- Whether you are using torrents or UseNet, you need a service to help you find the content in the first place, for example Sonarr, Radarr or Lidarr. Something called Jackett also fits into this somehow and apparently links to whatever indexes you are using.
- If you are torrenting, you then need a torrent client such as qBitTorrent to actually get the files.
- If you are using UseNet, you need a UseNet downloader such as jdownloader.
- Alternatively, for either option you can pay for a Debrid service such as Real-Debrid or Premiumize to download the files for you, if you send them the links. Besides protecting your privacy and your bandwidth, these services are also great for bypassing the limits on the elusive direct download sites nobody can tell me any more about.
I don't really think of myself as a stupid person but this shit is so confusing. It is harder than paying for drugs on the dark web with illegal crypto currency. Am I nearly there? Is this everything? If I pay for a UseNet provider and somehow register for a UseNet index, is it as simple as connecting the two together to something such as Sonarr to find the content and jdownloader to get it?
I just wanna have my own home streaming service.
Am I the only one that still just uses a VPN with Pirate Bay and Magnetdl? I only download videos and music, no games, and I'm finding 98%of what I want in the resolution I want. Is it really worth setting up the rest of it?
Everything else just makes it easier to manage which depending on your preferences and how much content you're dealing with that may not be a problem for you. I run the whole stack using Deluge as my downloader with a VPN. Radarr, Sonarr, and Lidarr automatically locate the torrents on the public tracker sites for me, send the downloads to Deluge, and imports the media into Jellyfin when the download finishes. I also use Jellyseer for discovering and requesting content, as well as allowing family members to request content. I also use Prowlarr to manage the trackers being used in the various arr apps. It's a very robust and automated system but it all boils down to just downloading torrents over a VPN.