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Comment by nerdsniper | Hacker News Reader

Jellyfin + Jellyseer + PassThePopcorn has served me and my friends/family well. I pay $50/mo now for a seedbox with 16TB but it serves 20 people. I would self-host for $0/month but my current apartment only has Xfinity, not AT&T and the upload isn’t enough to self-host.

It’s less about the money and more about:

1) Having a single place to go for any TV show or movie. I found it very frustrating trying to figure out what service had which show - sometimes none of them have it (a few things are still not streamable at all - e.g. “Sharky and George”)

2) Knowing that my streaming service isn’t downgrading the video quality. Even my lay friends notice the picture quality improvement vs Amazon / Hulu etc.

3) Jellyseer lets my friends request media that gets auto-downloaded. So it’s a curated list of content which helps me discover high quality stuff to watch.

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I take advantage of AWS S3 for multimedia storage duty these days. My goal is to maintain stable access to content I enjoy without worrying about data loss or the burden of time it takes or maintain all the storage infrastructure.

If it costs me a little bit of money to store this information, I don't consider it to be "losing" the piracy game. I still have a lot of control and no one has a clue what I'm storing thanks to symmetric encryption, guid names and fixed chunk sizes. As far as Amazon is concerned, it appears as if I'm just running backups for some boring enterprise application.

Could Amazon take it all away tomorrow? Sure. But I've had an account with them since 2014 and something like this has never come up before. At worst, I'd expect a deprecation warning with a solid 12 months of time to figure out an alternative.

There is no way you are going to beat the durability of S3 at home. Durability seems to be ~the entire point here. At some level you need to consider which evil is the lesser evil, at least if you value your free time and the possibility of actually enjoying all this media you've spent so much effort acquiring.

I had to move, haven't settled yet, so my entire setup of Radarr/Sonarr/Kodi + torrent in a VPN container is gone and I miss it so much. The result is that I haven't been watching any movies or TV show for the past year or so. I miss them, but doing it legally or setting up something anew on a VPS is too much work or too much risky.

That said, wouldn't you have an invite for PassThePopcorn? Never heard of this one, I thought it was yet another iteration of that popcorn streaming app that was popular a decade ago. I always managed with public trackers, never cared about the entire interview process: I hate it for work, I hate it for fun even more. Email in the profile if you wish to share.

How did you find your way into PTP? I’m in a few but PTP it sounds like they expect you to be a mass uploader. I’m and seeder but how would anyone even “find” me? Do I need to be involved in the forums of the private trackers I use today?

On most private trackers if you level up to Power User you unlock an invite forum where other trackers explicitly advertise with set requirements. No risky trading or begging, no need to participate in the forums at all, nobody “finds you”. You just send a dm once you meet the requirements.

Not too many years back you only needed to be Elite on the big music site to cop an invite to PTP in the forums. Now it’s TM there which is much more work but still obtainable.

Where did you get a seedbox with 16 TB for just 50$/month?!

https://whatbox.ca/plans

How did you get a private tracker?

You don't need a private tracker for stuff that comes out now.

In fact, for those things, I'd say a private tracker isn't that interesting because of the share requirements.

None of the major movie/tv trackers have onerous ratio requirements. But yeah you don’t need them for new mainstream releases. They’re only necessary if you’re particular on quality or want niche stuff.

That said the experience is 1000x better than using public trackers. It’s like if IMDB had a download button. Basically anything you could ever want in any quality you could ever want in a perfect organized library with all the metadata, consistent seeders and no DMCAs.

Personally, I got my first invite by signing up for a seedbox accepted by the tracker. Then I got invites to other trackers from the same group by being a good seeder.

Sounds like how the AvZ network works.

All the most popular stuff is easily available on public trackers. For older/obscure stuff, you can run your own tracker easily enough that scrapes the DHT, although you'll probably burn through an SSD doing it. https://bitmagnet.io is one such self-hosted piece of software.

You find someone who is already a member and ask for an invite.

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