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Comment by slfnflctd | Hacker News Reader

It's fiddly, though. You need to pay for a VPN (and try to pick one you can trust, which if you're even a bit paranoid is none of them) or your ISP will shut off your service (happened to me), if you require subtitles there's additional hassle & they're not even always available, quality is sometimes an issue and fake or mislabeled torrents exist.

I got tired of screwing around with it and decided 50 cents or less a day per service was worth not having to. As a side bonus, I get exposed to a lot of things I otherwise wouldn't know existed.

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The funny thing about subtitles is that there are many, many cases where you can find bootlegged subtitles for content that don’t even exist on the paid streaming service that provides that content. The streaming services seem to be getting better about this, especially for new content, but there is still a vast library of content on e.g. HBO in the U.S. that doesn’t even have Spanish subtitles.

We're probably a couple years away from some AI service that actually translates with character's voices. Heck probably even adjust the mouth visual too.

I'll support A.I. that translates those characters' voices with different mouth visuals per language. That would be convenient for people who get distracted by subtitles and characters' mouths not matching words to different languages.

I'm pretty sure I've found bootlegged subtitles that are just machine translations of official subtitles in the original language. And YouTube's speech-to-text automated captioning is actually pretty good with single speakers in English with good audio production, enough so that I often use them to follow along with videos.

Yes. It's enormously frustrating that I can not pay Netflix, Google, Hulu to deliver me content in a language other than English. Google's own support pages seem to indicate that if I did do a locale switch to, say, France, that this was a fiddly process and that I would lose all my purchases if I switched it back.

Physical media on Netflix DVD, however, still work just fine and tend to have English and French and often Spanish.

Also, a much larger catalog that hasn't been diced up by license holders.

Usenet is worth the price. Sure, you can still VPN if you're super paranoid, and sure, things get DMCA'd (slowly and inconsistently), but with the fairly easy OSS automation out there (radarr, et al, and sabnzbd in my case) everything runs very smoothly (and way faster; I can saturate my gigabit connection for nearly anything regardless of popularity).

I have an IPTorrents account (private tracker) that I have heavily used for over 10 years without any VPN. Haven't gotten a single DMCA.

> You need to pay for a VPN

Not where I live. We instead use VPNs to access websites blocked by the government.

None of this is true with private trackers.

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