Comment by risico | Hacker News Reader

Comment by risico | Hacker News Reader

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Coming from a country where piracy was the norm, I was very happy when Spotify and Netflix finally arrived. I even went through the trouble of accessing them via VPN just so I could pay for them.

Unfortunately, that excitement didn't last long. Shows started disappearing from Netflix, so we signed up for another service, then another, and so on. Prices kept going up, and I eventually realized I was paying a lot of money for very little in return.

At the start of the year, I cancelled everything. With the help of a few scripts, I've essentially replaced Netflix and the rest, without any downsides and at virtually no cost. I now have 4K streaming, instant playback, no device limits, offline viewing, and access to what's essentially the world’s entire media library.

The moment a company offers all that at a fair price (I’d even pay $50+ per month), I’ll gladly switch back.

I assume you are using torrent based services?

I was always wondering about how this approach could provide "instant playback". This is the one feature that keeps me ensnared to the big streaming services TBH. It's hard to get into the matter if one does not have much time to scoop information from the web.

Torrents yes, if you have access to ... certain websites, usually invite only (or some premium torrent caching services) and obviously, have a decent internet connection combined with the ability to choose where to stream the torrent from (beginning), the movie/tv plays as the information comes in sequentially.

Now I have everything automated, I use Plex as the player, then I have a simple script that listens to when I add a movie to the watch list, in the background it searches for that title and puts it in the download queue, then usually in 1-5 seconds I can hit play.

Biggest problem I encounter is with subtitles, they can be hit or miss, no problem for english shows but can be annoying for non-english ones.

And again, no difference between this and something like Netflix (other than the subs ofc), I can stream 4K, all my family members have access to it, I can stream on my phone, I can download things for offline use, yet I would still pay for this if there was a viable alternative out there.

If your internet isn't delivered in literal buckets then the movie will download before you're done peeing. At 100MB/s you can download 30GB in five minutes, which is almost full Blu-Ray rip.

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