It's better than having some streaming service delete your show while your in the middle of watching it. It's also better than finding out you can only watch in SD because they don't approve of your CPU, GPU, monitor, operating system or web browser after paying for a subscription.

• 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.

Uh, no. Tpb, rutracker, nyaa... Work well. If you want more curated stuff then yes, private trackers might be worth it, but you can still find a ton of things on public trackers.

• 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.

No. You can just search in one of the trackers and add the torrent to your download client.

• If you are torrenting, you then need a torrent client such as qBitTorrent to actually get the files.

Yes, obviously. If you want to ddl you'll likely need a web browser, too.

I just wanna have my own home streaming service.

If you don want to automate it then just search for stuff manually and move your downloaded media to your library folders like it has been done since forever.

P2p is the way the web naturally flowed, protocols like bittorrent wore able to distribute content better than giant streaming companies without relying on giant infrastructure.

Now sharing is frowed upon, hosting your own server at home is frowed upon, the web used to be more made by users, now to do anything you need to go through a big company.

The difficulties you face on piracy is just a reflection of how capitalism is fucking the web.

My two cents, piracy is not necessarily more complicated than it ever was at its simplest, but the potential for enhanced automation and security is MUCH higher than it used to be. That's the complex part.

I'm one of the lucky private tracker people. If I wasn't in there, I'd go all in on Usenet.

The problem you describe is that there are a hundred working ways. Each path works but you have to find it and take it.

Imo, you can reduce the list to:

how to pirate movies as a beginner

1. Setup vpn
2. Install qbittorrent
3. Visit a tracker like 1337x.to
4. Download and enjoy

How to pirate movies as a pro

1. Read about torrents
2. Setup vpn
3. Setup docker
4. Setup prowlarr
5. Setup gluetun
6. setup qbittorrent
7. Find a tracker, any tracker, and add it to prowlarr
8. Search for something on prowlarr and be happy
9. Add another tracker
10. Setup radarr
11. Setup jellyfin
12. Setup nginx proxy manager traefik

Really can't get the point of the post

I'm enjoying rutracker + tpb. Very easy, very fast, always find what I want

Maybe I've unknowingly downloaded a bunch of viruses but I just tied qbitTorrent to my vpn and downloaded tons of movies from 1337x, torrentgalaxy, or ocassionally from PirateBay if I found a good one. I've been fine, but maybe I'm actually not. Who knows?

Either way, no letters or Summons so I'm doing all right.

just look at this: fmhy.net

1337x.to, qbittorrent, vpn if your isp cares. Dodi, fitgirl, johncena141 for games. For audio, video, books, just don't be dumb and open bee_movie.mp4.exe and you'll be fine.

The safest thing you can do is direct download from file share websites, but nobody says where these websites are.

Until some legal entity decides to raid the servers. Pray they do not keep logs of IPs. Though usually this may be (to some extent) a gray zone in some countries.

If you want to torrent files, you need to subscribe to an exclusive private tracker

I download anime almost exclusively from nyaa. SubsPlease, Erai-Raws and many others are borderline there within 2h from release.
Private trackers allow for even higher quality by applying a ruleset like only remuxes and maybe they only allow a certain bitrate to have it classify as a remux on their community.

. 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.

No need to level up. Some more exclusive trackers may (or may not) open their doors during an open signup. But this is like any exclusive club. Either you stay a "pleb" in the open field or work for acess to the hifher club. Don't imagine for a second you could just enter the exclusive area in a high roller casino without a few hundred 10k chips. :p

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.

Usenet was always paid in the recent years.
Paying an indexing service is not mandatory. I am signed up to 4 services in the free tier just fine.
That you will not find stuff there is just as likely there, in P2Pworld as in the open web DDL or the privately shared lists world.

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.

What?
You can search the sites just fine on their own search engine. The *arrs and jacket/prowlarr are just unifying the searching into one engine and the *arrs parse and categorize your searches to help you find the stuff you want.
As I said: You can either search TPB manually just fine, oooooor you plonk it into prowlarr and have it synced to your *arrs.

• 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.

To browse the web, you need a web browser?
To use a computer you need a storage drive?
To use anything you need electricity.
So what's your point??

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.

Any user logged to an exclusive community and uploading to something like those services are borderline stupid. lmao!
And they probably risk their account from being banned pretty quickly for breaking seeding rules They may function like a remote qbittorrent with a nice streaming interface. You basically pay someone to give you a pretty interface. Same as a seedbox, but you have no power over what you can/can not do :p

but this shit is so confusing. It is harder than paying for drugs on the dark web with illegal crypto currency.

Absolutely not. You just may be having issues understanding the material. Nothing wrong with that though.
I am still having problems understanding some concepts of for example VLANs, (v)SANs and software defined storage.

I just wanna have my own home streaming service.

Easy:

• Download and install Jellyfin (or Plex if you want to get shafted. Just donate the same amount to the Jellyfin team).
• Organizing: Download and install sonarr (tv)/radarr (movies)
• Torrent: Either wait for access to TL during an upcoming holiday like easter and monitor communication channels or watch opensignup websites.
• Usenet: Sub to a few closed communities. Same as the torrent way.
• Downloading: For torrent: qbit, for usenet: sabnzbd.
• Indexing: Prowlarr as the all-in-one solutiom.
• Download: Either search prowlarr through it's own interface or through sonarr/radarr ooooor just download all yourself from some DDL page or rip from other (pirate) streaming sites via plugins and organize it via the *arrs.

Oh man.

Stremio + torrentio plugin + real debrid subscription.

I used Usenet and then torrents for 20 years or so but this stremio stack allowed me to get rid of all that *arr crap, also VPN, and private trackers et cetera. Not to mention a hot, power hungry home server.

Others will be along to disagree with me any moment, but for me this stack is infinitely better.

Downloading and storing stuff doesn't make any sense in the era of unlimited data.

I have a few torrentleech invites, any hexbear users can hit me up with a dm for one.

We still have torrents, only thing thats new is option to set up *arr stack for next level torrenting. Piratebay is still working, torrents and/or usenet are way better with speeds we have today... I never liked LimeWire. Just use VPN my dude

Feels like you're describing growing out of p2p

I used to download stuff from XDCC bots on IRC. That was even weirder than Usenet, you'd send the bot a specific chat command for it to serve you a file.

I feel like 'my own home streaming service' is effectively what I have in comparison to those days.

It is a very difficult topic - I use slsk private trackers and now try to revive airdc++ my data set is around 60TB - it is pain in ass to manage -HDD's fail, you need to salvage the data, also buy a new bigger ones, ssd's also fail. Internet connection is limited, and the MASSIVE amount of data being produced these dayz... I also run I2P and IPFS nodes, TOR snowflake. And it is massive pain that alphatracker is down... also the rarbg loss. Please keep calm, everything will be fine, I have to mention that I live in a grey country - no need for vpn - that really helps.

I still don't have a single clue of what Sonarr and Radarr actually are. And, man, I've searched it all over, nothing's ever clear

Then we had The Pirate Bay

For computer games there are a lot of respected repacker (DODI, FitGirl) and also sites for DDL (csrinru, IGG). I think it is a fairly easy time for piracy because of the ass service and rip off on every corner (EA, Ubisoft, Epic, Nintendo, Denuvo).

I just download from whatever site's available on the megathread..

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?

You can still use ed2k/kad network, it works fine.

I think HDEncode and ReleaseBB are among the best DDL websites, though there's other options listed on the FMHY and Megathread lists. To make practical use of them though, you either need an expensive Rapidgator subscription or a more affordable debrid subscription (i.e. RealDebrid). If you use RealDebrid or AllDebrid, one method of finding releases is using Debrid Media Manager, which searches for cached releases that other users have already submitted to the debrid service you're subscribed to. As debrid downloads, in my experience at least, are often corrupted (resulting in errors either when extracting files from an archive or re-encoding a video in MKVToolNix), the best use of debrid services is to use it with an app like Stremio to have an all-in-one streaming service.

The other paid solution is usenet, which requires a NZB download program (i.e. NZBGet), a usenet indexer, and a usenet provider. The latter two usually require yearly subscriptions, but often have better results than can be found on DDL sites or public torrent trackers. While some usenet indexers are private, there are enough that are not to make waiting for open signups for those indexers optional. The public ones include altHUB, Miatrix, and NZB Finder, the private ones include DrunkenSlug and Tabula Rasa, while NZBGeek is public but is only free during a limited trial period, after which a subscription is needed. The free ones usually have a 5 downloads per day limit without a subscription. Note that Jdownloader is not a NZB download program, but rather one for regular downloads, and would instead be used for DDL site downloads.

For torrenting you need access to torrent trackers and a torrent download program. qBittorrent can do both if you add the Jackett plugin to it, though the best seeded (available for download) releases are often on semi-private and private torrent trackers. The best semi-private to start out with is TorrentLeech, given its lax seeding requirements compared to other private trackers. Keeping releases seeded on TorrentLeech gives you points over time that you can use to boost your ratio.

While I'd recommend using a paid VPN if you choose to go the route of torrenting, it's not essential if you instead use debrid and/or usenet subscriptions as in those cases you're not re-uploading downloaded releases to other users. If you'd rather not pay for any services, I'd recommend just using a site like MovieWeb to stream releases compiled from free streaming websites. While the quality is not always as good as can be had with the three options above, it works well for most use cases.

illegal crypto currency

Just use soulseek

Some of what you've listed isn't exactly confusing - they're just pirates who are gamifying piracy and in the honest pirating ways - that's disrespectful.

Direct downloading can be easy but also not easy. File sharing sites do adhere to requests from copyright holders or anyone filing complaints will get the content taken down in time. The biggest blow of this is Uloz where you could practically find anything on it and download, at the cost of spending time if you don't want to pay for speedy downloads.

But most of the time, direct downloading is a whack a mole game. Maybe people aren't telling others because they could be sharing outdated information, almost nobody can be sure whether the content will still be there. Furthermore, it is frustrating because you have to weed through so much bullshit like ads, redirect links and more just to get to a single working DDL link. I'd know, I've done this many times.