Sometimes I’m just too lazy for torrenting because downloading whole 8 seasons when I want to watch series is kinda off. Whenever I give chance to streaming it’s always low quality and sucks. I checked streaming links on reddit’s r/piracy, you know the wiki, year is 2025 and it’s still slow and sucks. Maybe I don’t know good sites. Can you link me up, and what do you think about streaming vs torrent way in general? Thanks guys.

  • Gravitywell@sh.itjust.works
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    6 days ago

    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.

  • airgapped@piefed.social
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    7 days ago

    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).

  • locuester@lemmy.zip
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    7 days ago

    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.

  • malin@thelemmy.clubBanned
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    7 days ago

    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.

  • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    7 days ago

    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.

  • unperson [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    7 days ago

    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.

    • Fushuan [he/him]@lemm.ee
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      6 days ago

      Oh, but I will. For it to be a fork of enby, it’s fucking amazing how bad the androidTV app is in comparison. The media player has improved,but its still way slower then using an external one,which is weird. It also freezes for a solid 5 seconds minimum every time I swap subtitles (while the vlc external player does it on the fly), and it makes me change subtitles every single time I load a chapter. Envy’s player lets the user set a preferred subtitle language and it makes an effort to preselect one. Not only that,but you can seal that on a series basis and you can select the subtitle before starting the video on the user interface.

      It has improved since I last tried it and at least it doesn’t die while transcoding or whatever, but the difference in performance of the android app/web version to the androifTV app is crazy. It would be better to adapt the android/web version of the app the manage a TV input than make the androidTV app actually useable…

      Besides that its amazing :)

      I rescind most of what I said because I just checked that the android app has TV casting (it didnt last time I checked) and the android app does have the preselecting and the player is waaaay smoother. Its comical that casting is a better user experience then using the native app but whatever.

      • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        6 days ago

        Tell that the mpv player that is unable to playback non-srt subtitles.

        My issues with playback are very limited and it’s usually just the playback device that sucks, can’t play the codec or not/bad configured HWA.
        For example don’t encode files to x265 4K if you can’t decode or transcode x265 at 4K. My (device) experience is Chromecast w/ GoogleTV (AndroidTV), Android and WebPlay.

        • Fushuan [he/him]@lemm.ee
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          6 days ago

          When you say Chromecast, do you mean that you cast the android app to the TV? Because that experience is fine, its the native androidtv app I’m complaining about. And it’s not only the player, the android app is able to select the subtitles on the menu before launching the MPV player. In any case yeah, I’ll test the performance of the android app casting and just do that.

    • JadenSmith@sh.itjust.works
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      6 days ago

      This is what I use. Stremio, Torrentio add-on for Torrent sources, and a bit of tinkering so I don’t see the paid options. Works pretty well for single episodes of some shows (for others I download the box set).

      Edit: I mean it works for full shows, but when I really like a show enough I’ll have a hard drive copy.

  • throwawayacc0430@sh.itjust.works
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    7 days ago

    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.

  • punkisundead [they/them]@slrpnk.net
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    7 days ago

    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

    • Goodtoknow@lemmy.ca
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      6 days ago

      Popcorn time and the Torrent plugin for stremio are nice but are leech-central and not sustainable if everyone did that without seeding

      • CherryLips@lemm.ee
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        7 days ago

        This has been working for me for a whilst however if one of the links in the chain goes down at some point then you have nothing to watch. I might even have to talk to my family!

        I’m gonna start considering local server. I remember the good old days of getting up in the middle of the night to check limewire.

        • Mugmoor@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          5 days ago

          I used to run a Plex server locally, with content provided by Usenet. It was by far the most stable/robust experience I’ve had, but I like being able to watch whatever I want on a whim.

          • CherryLips@lemm.ee
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            6 days ago

            Probs my next move. Waiting to move house and will likely do this…maybe with jellyfish. I am trying to degoogle and amazon and currently stremio is on firestick. Stremio has been great but as I said it’s not totally immune to outside factors. Thanks for the note. It helps that others have success and share so, it makes the leap seem smaller.

        • Mugmoor@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          6 days ago

          In addition to what @kek@discuss.tchncs.de said;

          You don’t need to worry about a VPN, and I find the connection much more stable and less prone to flakiness due to seeders being on shitty ISPs.

          It isn’t as robust as Usenet, or a Plex/Jellyfin server, but it’s a lot more convenient in my experience.