Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I hate streaming anything unless it's coming from my server.

Bandwidth and storage is expensive, so free streams will usually be heavily compressed and look terrible.

Feel free to use mine https://jfin.gravitywell.xyz/

Create an account using this invite code: ARRLEM so I know you came from Lemmy

For best results uss a browser or client thar supports HEVC and AV1.

There is jellyseerr for requests, its hooked to both usenet and various private trackers.

Put first episode on max priority + download sequentially. Go make a cup of tea. First episode is ready to stream. Do same to second episode before you start watching the first and Robert is your father's brother (Bob's your uncle).

After 20 years of pirating the slow way (manual searching and torrenting), I invested the time to setup a proper *arrr flow into Plex, Ombi for auto adding plex watchlist to the dl queue, and Usenet indexes and access + nzbget.

Now I can search for a movie in the plex app, if I don’t have it I add it to my watchlist, and it sends me a notification 5 mins later that it’s available.

I did all that about 6 years ago and it’s been so nice. Well worth the time to setup. I forgot how painful the manual way is.

I exclusively stream torrents. It's almost flawless for me. The trick is you need a paid service like real debrid to get access to the good links. If you are only searching free ones, it's going to be low quality, and selection sucks. I use RD and Kodi personally, it also allows you to torrent traditionally, too, and without the need of a VPN if your isp is nosey.

https://hydrahd.sh/

This is the best site I've come across, but it's still not perfect.

My advice is to keep spending time getting experience using free streaming services. Since very few are like kissanime/cartoon (been around forever, haven't changed layout), if you go awhile without using them then it's like having to relearn what to do.

This is unfortunate, but the more people we have looking at them the better they should be.

Yeah I've tried it a couple times and don't see the appeal. It's like watching nothing but cam copies except half the time the files won't load. I don't understand how streaming became so popular.

Also set up radarr and sonarr because it makes everything easy.

Nah, torrenting 8 seasons of a show I want to watch is the way to go.

You can download a torrent for a full season or full series, and only download like the first three episodes, or the first season. And then if you like it, download more of the torrent.

Nobody is making you download all 8 seasons.

Or if you want to anyway, but don't want to wait for the whole thing to finish download, most torrent clients let you set priority for individual files, and you can set the first couple episodes to "maximum" and start watching right away while the rest download.

downloading whole 8 seasons when I want to watch series is kinda off

You can untick every episode except the first few when you download.

You can also download a torrent sequentially and play it while it's downlading but it's fiddly.

Can't say Jellyfin sucks

I torrent on my media PC and stream from there.

Check out stremio

When I was a kid, I didn't even know what torrents are and ended up suffering with all the noise in the videos. Or find some really shitty quality ftp server download.

Luckily, I've since became enlightened and find torrents for everything. I set the first 3 episodes of a series at high priority, it only talkes between 30 minutes to 3 hours (depending on popularity), and then I can start watching, and then set 4, 5, 6 on high priority and once I'm done episode 3, I find that 4 5 6 is already done and the rest are at 90%.

Be a little patient and you get to enjoy higher quality.

And if you have dont much freetime to wait for downloads, you should be pre-choosing a show and have the first few episodes downloaded before your previous one is done watching.

I just use VLC for everything, torrented straight to the device, and video files played locally.

The only place I’ll stream from is the archive.

if you use streamio then you can choose whatever quality you want

I'm old but i still think popcorn time was the best solution. P2P streaming.

Streaming sites are great to share the spirit of piracy with your friends that do not want to get into any other piracy option. Literally just sending them a link so they dont buy the movie on amazon is always worth it

Sign up for some debrid service -> profit.