A few months ago I grabbed this torrent from rarbg, and it took weeks to download. Often going days with no seeders.
I finally got it, and decided I’d seed beyond my usual 2x to help others get this. Then rarbg went under, and now I think I’ll just keep this one going.
And this is why I backup all the torrents I download. If I lose the drive, they might not be seeded anymore and I won’t be able to re-download everything. There’s stuff in my collection that was hard to find 5 years ago.
The only sane way to have a backup would be a NAS with raid 1. Other than that? Yeah, just drop them in a folder. The other dude probably just has them on an external drive, if that fails they are gone.
The only torrent I ever removed my seed cap for was a set of DVD-audio ISOs. I had it downloading for months, but it never got above 5%. Eventually I found the same disc images on another site, so I dropped them in the download folder and rechecked the torrent, which came back 97% complete. The only files missing were box art scans and NFOs. I let that thing seed for about five months.
God, back in uni with free electricity and internet in the dorms, we managed to seed over a terabyte of data before IT got suspicious and turned off that port. Then we seeded over slower wifi until they turned the port back on next semester, haha. Good times.
That was where we learned that the pirated copies of stuff were easier to find, higher quality, and worked on hardware that websites declared “too old” to stream their content. It all started when we had a bunch of people over to watch a movie, and Amazon refused to play it on older hardware. It instantly converted half a dozen people to piracy, lol.
Like Gabe Newell once said, piracy is a service problem.
The last two things I pirated were No One Lives Forever, a game that’s completely delisted on all storefronts, and Ratchet & Clank, because Sony can’t figure out how to add the PS2 versions of games to the PS5 and I refuse to stream it (data cap) or lug around my PS3.
Both I would’ve purchased legally had they not made it a pain in the ass.
I did this with the That 70s show FGT torrents. Nobody seeds older media anymore, so each one had/has a >30 ratio on the 5GB-per-season BDrips
I wish for low-risk older media people would just keep the seed open forever. Very little bandwidth will be taken up but people will have it there if they want to go back and watch it.
In my defense I was really only trying to find a handful of specific videos from a certain porn site… But you know how sometimes it’s just easier to grab an entire album or an entire season / boxset of a show, than it is to find a specific song / episode in high quality? Well that same rules applies to porn, and since I had no issue with space (I have a very large NAS) I just grabbed the whole siterip since it actually had a decent number of seeds lol
Had that with a few movies recently which took about a week to download. I removed my limits for those, I’m only at a ratio of 5 or smth on those tho. Still, it’s honest work
The only time I seed, really. If there’s only like 2 or 3 seeders and they have shit connections, I’ll seed for a while. Not that my upload speed is any good…
But on a thing with thousands of seeders and maybe 20 leeches? Why? 🤷🏻♂️
Worth it for the Gbps download speeds. I can download two 50+ GB titles, install them, decide I don’t like them, and uninstall 'em, all in under an hour.
Not to mention that you need a VPN for torrent clients (and not Debrid), so at the end of the day, you’re paying for piracy regardless. So it makes sense to just go with the cheaper and faster option.
I’m from Western Europe and they don’t care about online piracy either. Only some countries are problematic, like France I think, with that Hadopi thing.
Seems pretty on-brand to me, considering what the general consensus of pirates has always been: it’s not about unwillingness to pay, it’s about unwillingness to deal with bullshit.
Disagree. I use a paid streaming service that’s every bit as convenient as Netflix, but has a library consisting of almost anything you could possibly think of. No need to hope somebody’s seeding it, or go searching through dozens of different sites. It’s one super easy go-to source that not only has the content, but remembers where you left off, allows user profiles, etc. That convenience is worth paying for.
Unless it was something really obscure I never had problems finding seeders.
I use the search engine function inside qBitTorrent and I sort the results descending by the number of seeders. To enable it go to View > Search Engine (iirc) and follow these simple instructions.
qBitTorrent also has a feature that lets you download a torrent in order of their pieces, and also download the first and last piece first, which is basically streaming. No need to wait for the download to finish first.
If needed, VLC has a built-in plugin called VLsub which lets you find and automatically load subtitles for almost anything. To enable it go to View > VLSub.
qBitTorrent + VLC is my Netflix. Never asked me a cent, but to me they are priceless and more convenient than any subscription service.
Not as far as I’m aware, but the way I justify it is that the more people who are using a Debrid service, the less strain it puts on torrents because of fewer leechers. Real-Debrid only needs to download the file once, and then every subscriber has immediate access to it.
You can always just use a seedbox instead. The main reason why I use Debrid is because it allows me to stream any show or movie I want instantly to my TV, without having to wait, the instant downloads for games & software is just an added bonus. So for me it’s worth the tradeoff of not being able to do my rightful duty and seed.
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