I'll start: it wasn't too long ago that one wasn't expected to pay out of one's coked up nose for programs (apps). One used to be able to buy a thing and then own the thing. Vacuum cleaners. Video games. Photoshops. Now one has to sign up for it, enter one's credit card info and fucking pay monthly for some harebrained "service."

And I blame all of you. Probably 9/10ths of you are on apple products and/or are locked into absolutely insane digital ecosystems and you all laid down and took it. All of you fucking libs. You took it, you normalized it, and fuck all of you.

    • Gorn [they/them,he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      A three-dollar-a-month VPN subscription is the cheapest of all the monthly subscription services, and can also replace them all through the glory of peer-to-peer file sharing.

          • Budwig_v_1337hoven [he/him]
            ·
            4 years ago

            That's looking like a real alternative to plex but I wouldn't forego the gigabit-connection of a seedbox (then again, ISPs are shit in my area, so that's mostly why)

              • Budwig_v_1337hoven [he/him]
                ·
                4 years ago

                It is faster in practice though. Negligible for single files, sure, but think about a whole season of TV; It'll torrent 100GB to the box in a minute or two, at which point I can immediately start streaming it to my local device, without having to complete a download to it first. If I were to torrent that season to my device directly, I'd have to wait until an entire episode has finished torrenting before starting playback.

                Also I'm sharing the box with a few friends, so it ends up costing me only about five bucks a month anyway.

          • emizeko [they/them]
            ·
            4 years ago

            hmm you must have been careful to never update your Emby app? not long after the fork that scumbag made changes to prevent interoperability

            EDIT: I didn't see the mention of Roku, my bad

        • Budwig_v_1337hoven [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          Plex. Get a seedbox for all your torrenting and VPN needs, put plex on it and stream from your own server, flying the black flag and spending your left-over cash on rum.

        • 0xACAB [she/her]
          ·
          4 years ago

          give this a go, also research game library managers

          https://playnite.link/

        • Gorn [they/them,he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          Huh! Good point, not really. Pirated games are pretty individual things, like back in the CD days.

          iTunes afaik still works with pirated content haha, and it gives you that nice ‘flipping through albums’ UX. Or something like VLC that offers a ‘media library’ UI. VLC and iTunes work for both audio files and video files, and I’m sure there’s better options that I’m not thinking of. There are lots of options for music, but less that I can think of for video

          Once you find a program with a good UI, it’s just about setting your torrent program’s download folder to the same location as your media player’s library. Otherwise... set your download folder to tile mode and just scroll through it? Haha

          That’s a great point though, there’s nothing quite equivalent to Netflix/Spotify in terms of library presentation, or even Steam for that matter, afaik. Even if you get a UX going, there’s not gonna be a browse function with integrated trailers, synopses, and interest-based sorting. Pirating is a little hacky haha ‘browsing’ becomes more about scrolling through new torrent uploads and reading titles for ones that interest you/sound familiar

          I hope to hear from someone in this thread who knows about a cool media library program!

    • mayor_pete_buttigieg [she/her]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Also the basic skills to use Linux and other open source programs as a replacement to the proprietary and expensive ones.