A lot of my files were shitty 480p versions of movies from the Napster days. Now they’re all 1080p, with a few 720p exceptions (mainly tv series episodes). All in all 500 something files in total. Now just watching uTorrent slowly download them all. Hopefully my VPN keeps the eyes off of me…
You re-downloaded your media to get better quality files.
I re-downloaded my media because I misconfigured Radarr.
We are not the same.
Also, pro-tip: When configuring Radarr (or Sonarr for that matter), be sure to define a recycle bin.
I woke up the next morning with all my media wiped. That was in June/July. I’m still recovering.
Jesus what did you do?
I had Radarr pointed to the “Movie” folder, then I changed it to the “Media” folder thinking that that would somehow be “better”.
Whoosh It was all gone the next time I looked, because it couldn’t find entries for whatever it came across, I guess. I ended up having to re-design the whole environment from pretty much scratch. The good news was that since I had “imported” my library initially, I had references to most of the stuff I lost.
That’s just bad program design.
My own take on it is that it’s, hmm, not really bad design, just unforgiving.
When you see that you’re about to make more than X number of changes, Stop… verify with the user, then move forward.
Now just watching uTorrent slowly download them all. Hopefully my VPN keeps the eyes off of me…
- qbittorrent is better in many many ways compared to utorrent and hasa very similar interface. qbit is open-source, utorrent isn’t. qbit doesn’t have ads or malware, utorrent has or has had both many times. qbit allows you to bind to a specific network interface (e.g. you VPN connection instead of regular ethernet one) which offer better protection if your vpn drops. feel free to do your own research here or elsewhere on the web if you doubt any of my points.
- if your VPN is a free one, that wont protect you at all. those guys will squeal and turn over server logs with ip address at the drop of a hat. Even a lot of paid-for VPNs are shitty lying bastards. So picking a good vpn can be challenging there are probably posts here covering recommendations but generally you want ones that have either been taken to court and were unable to provide logs OR ones that have been audited by a respected 3rd party firm that can confirm they are truly a “no log VPN”. I can recommend PIA, NordVPN, and Mullvad as some ones that are highly unlikely to turn over any logs (bc they don’t have them) but there are others and doing your own research isn’t a bad thing. The site torrentfreak.com does an article once a year or so that covers a few of the more popular VPNs and different aspects of thier privacy but they don’t declare a “best vpn”, just rate them on varius privacy and security aspects.
- Even if you have a good VPN, check that you aren’t leaking your real IP via dns lookups: ipleak.net or dnsleaktest.com
- Check that you torrent client set up not to leak: search for ‘torrent ip leak test’ and do one of the torrent ip leak tests. ipleak.net hasone of these if you scroll down on the page; look for “Torrent Address detection” and click “Activate” button and it will give a magnet link to start test with
- additionally, you can set up a “vpn killswitch” to prevent traffic from going over regular internet if you vpn drops. If you using qbit, this probably isn’t strictly required but many people here like to have this as an additional safety. i can’t really provide details on this bc the process varies widely. A lot of VPN client apps have this feature built in. But even if they don’t, you can set something like this up in most firewalls but exact steps will vary depending on OS (Windows/Linux/Mac) and which firewall you are using (or I guess whether or not you even have one installed).
Excellent info. Thank you!
You didn’t even mention QBittorrent’s best feature: it has a search engine that searches across lots of different torrent sites, so you don’t need to check each one!
Wait, really? I’m going to have to go check next time I log into my torrenting box.
IIRC you have to enable it separately, but it’s not very difficult to do. Just google it if you run into trouble
I agree that that is a very nice feature. So are the rss feeds.
But to me “best” is anything that makes it easier to avoid getting caught so the network interface binding is still my favorite 😉
If only qbittorrent hadn’t had that idiotic redesign that made it look like a fisherprice toy.
not really sure what you mean (maybe i didnt notice or it was before i started using it?) but to each their own I guess?
Any setup required? I tried it out and my speeds were in the tens of megabits max. Pretty sure nothing was capped in settings.
Maybe? Been awhile since I’ve messed with my setup and while I don’t like slow, I prioritize security over speed so my settings might not be what you want anyway. so I’d recommend just looking up a guide; it is an extremely popular torrent client and there should be tons of guides out there. Or if you not sure which guide to use, just create a new post here - lot of people use it and probably have set it up from scratch more recently than me. I know some people say to open ports on the router but i’ve never liked the idea (I view it as less secure) but some people swear by it.
I can recommend that you test the following:
- make sure you are using a VPN server that isn’t too far away. If you were in say San Franciso and selecting a VPN in New York or Europe, your speeds will be less than if you selected one in Seattle or Los Angeles
- do a speed test off your vpn vs on it (e.g. speedtest.net). ALL VPNs will be slower than regular non-VPN due to the encryption and having less hops. But you can see how much difference it makes when you switch servers and if you have more than one VPN service, then you can find servers in the same city for both and compare which service is faster.
- If your VPN has a modified WireGuard service (PIA and Nord both do IIRC), then that should be faster. I say modified bc the unaltered Wireguard spec has a privacy red flags so if you have a VPN service that offers it, make sure you read up or at least skim some reviews and whatnot to make sure they handled those issues that in a way that doesn’t leave your identity exposed. PIA and Nord both did that (I think Nord’s was called something else not actually WG but idr).
- make sure you do your testing on popular torrents - but if it is anything you could get in trouble for, then you should do all the leak tests I mentioned above FIRST. Only mentioning, bc I had a friend that was testing his shit on some obscure thing he was looking for and saying it was slow but when i helped him configure his settings, we tested with something popular (i think whatever the current hottest show was) and he was actually getting a lot better speeds than he thought.
edit: just searched on dbzer0 and wasn’t seeing much on this. I did find a reddit post and a makeuseof guide that both mention stuff about improving speed. For the reddit one, I think the patched exe they are talking about is likely a dev build and since that was from a few years ago, whatever fix is probably already merged in and no longer needed. will compare the other settings vs mine and post back
edit2: are are the differences i have from the guide:
- makeuseof has (Tools > Options > Speed) “Upload and download rate limits are set to infinity by default, and it’s recommended not to tinker with these limits. Most often, users limit the upload rate to save bandwidth and get faster download rates, but the torrent client’s choking mechanism compromises download rates when upload rates are limited, making the download process much slower.” - on mine, i had infinite down and was restricting upload. But I kind of think MUO’s advice is better and increased my upload amount. Mine was 100 KiB/s, now 1000 KiB/s. Only reason I don’t put it on infinite is I am on a capped internet and tend to leave my downloaded stuff around for sharing so I want to avoid uploads consuming too much of my monthly bandwidth and I don’t leave my client running 24/7 so not sure how reliable bandwidth settings are.
- makeuseof has (Tools > Options > BitTorrent) "In the dropdown menu next to Encryption mode, select Allow Encryption. " but on mine I have it as “required Encryption” - probably this would make mine slower than the suggestion tho
- Tools > Options > Connection settings I have “TCP and uTP” (same as MUO) but that old reddit thread was recommending only TCP.
- MUO has (Tools > Options > Connections) : "Ensure the box beside Use UPnP / NAT-PMP port forwarding from my router is checked. " - as I mentioned, I don’t do port forwarding so I leave mine unchecked but there is probably a speed hit for this.
- There was also something about "Don’t download multiple torrent files at the same time. This will then allocate all available bandwidth to downloading a single file, resulting in a faster download. " - I generally ignore this but there IS some truth to it. I have had hundreds of things queued before and gotten awful speeds. I recommend just not going overboard with how many you are running at once.
- Tools > Options > Advanced: Find the network interface and select the one that corresponds with your VPN. If you aren’t sure, for most Windows users you can connect to VPN then find from command line using
ipconfig /alland look for something that is NOT disconnected and probably hasTAP-Windows Adapter Vxif using OpenVPN-Protocol (most VPNs) but might be different for wireguard. For Linux users, to show network interfaces runip -4 -o -br addr- usually in linux ethernet interfaces start with anEand wifi interfaces start with aW,lois localhost, and 99% of the time the vpn interface will be namedtun0if you are using a VPN with OpenVPN-protocol (most of them) but might be something different for wireguard or if you have customized things.
People still use that malware of a client???
uTorrent 2.2.1 Build 25154 is good. There’s a few builds of uTorrent that are fine.
But yeah, qbittorrent is the default “why didn’t you use it?” client.
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Which would your suggest? It’s been a long time since I’ve had to do a little pirating.
qBitTorrent is one of the standard clients.
Thanks! I’ll give it a go after this is all done downloading.
Tixati, Deluge and Transmission are also good, modern clients
KTorrent
Tixati
A lot of the private trackers I use specifically block its usage.
Radar and sonarr would just automatically upgrade those for you. No need to mass delete and redownload.
Enlighten us smooth brains.
Install them, point them to your media folder, tell them what your preferred quality level is, and they’ll handle everything else.
The Trash Guides are probably the best resource to get running.
Does anything like this exist for audio files?
Yup, it’s called Lidarr. It isn’t quite as nice as the tools for movies/TV, but it gets the job done.
Thanks!
Radar and Sonarr are tools to track movies and TV shows respectively. You can add a movie/show to track, tell it the quality you want it in, and set up Prowlarr or Jackett to give Son/Radarr the access to the torrent trackers it needs. You can also use Usenet but I have no experience there.
It will search those torrent trackers for releases matching your movies/shows in the quality and language you set for them and send the downloads to the torrent client you set up. When the client finishes downloading, Son/Radarr copies (or hardlinks) the files to your library folders.
If Son/Radarr is tracking a show that you currently have downloaded in 480p, but the quality profile allows upgrades up to 1080p, it will search for 720p and 1080p releases and pick the best match it can find. When the torrent client finishes downloading it, Son/Radarr will automatically replace the 480p release with the 1080p release it just downloaded.
You have triggered me by mentioning uTorrent.
My apologies. I’ll be discontinuing it’s use after this project is done.
Pardon me for living under a rock, but what’s wrong with uTorrent?
Its installer comes bundled with bloatware, several years ago even having included a bitcoin miner in one of their releases.
uTorrent 2.2.1 foreverrrrrr
…but yea at this point you should have moved on by now
You really shouldn’t use uTorrent. There are a number of safer and better open source alternatives out there.
Which would you suggest?
Qbittorrent is my favorite client but there are a couple of great alternatives like Transmission or Deluge.
Pretty easy to do with just 500 fies. That’s just 2/3 of the Simpsons.
I have all Simpsons, at max res as they released them! Same with Family Guy, South Park and Robot Chicken (RIP).
Also replaced all my movies that I watch on repeat often to 4K.
I have no idea how much data I used, and don’t care. USENET rocks!
How many gigs is all of Simpsons?
152 GB in my drives
Only about half of OnePiece
There are only 10 seasons of The Simpsons and I won’t have it any other way!
K
Should probably switch to qbtorrent. What VPN are you using?
NordVPN. Is that a good one?
Umm from my understanding they handed over their users data some years ago. I think the authorities might’ve asked, you may have to google that.
I’ve been using Mullvad, it’s like $5/mo and their servers are fast. They have servers all over the world. Mullvad did away with port forwarding. This article favors Nordvpn but it depends what your needs are
https://www.safetydetectives.com/blog/nordvpn-vs-mullvad-vpn-comparison/
Edit 1, they do comply with law enforcement https://www.pcmag.com/news/nordvpn-actually-we-do-comply-with-law-enforcement-data-requests
Whether or not they comply with law enforcement is not the issue. Any company will comply with their local law enforcement if they want to keep their doors open. What’s important is what data they keep on their users. Unless I’m mistaken, Nord, like many others, only keeps billing info and limited connection info for load balancing purposes (deleted after something like 15-minutes). So, the Panamanian government (where they’re headquartered); who IIRC has no data retention laws and isn’t part of 5-eyes; asks for logs, they will get something, but not much to tie a specific customer to anything.
Also, Nord has been independently audited multiple times in the past. Something quite a few other providers can’t say.
It’s popular to bash on Nord b/c they advertise a lot, but I haven’t seen a legit reason not to use them. If it exists, I’d love to see it.
They check the boxes for log and data retention but they are a trashy organization. Skim their terms of service which states that security and uptime are not guaranteed. Support is a 36 hour turn around and they will hamstring you out of the 30 day return policy. Their client is absolute garbage with built in features to cause you to leak. I leaked twice in the first 2 months. Highly discourage them, but they are a soulless organization checking minimum requirements.
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Which do you use?
I hope this is a sarcasm, lol
Instead of being toxic, why not help educate other users on why NordVPN should be avoided.
It’s not. I need more knowledge.
I would say nord is not considered privacy respecting. At least not in the way things like mullvad or proton are?
Will nord or express work for pirating yes, are they actually private, we don’t really know.
Companies like mullvad offer no logging vpn whereas nord makes no such promise.
I honestly don’t know too much about nord but i think that’s the gyst of it
NordVPN has a no logs policy that they’ve been third party audited about multiple times though?
Ah, well my apologies, I made the incorrect assumption that it was. I’m headed to bed at the moment, so I apologize for the short explanation, I’ll try to come back with better facts and sources, but the short of it is that when you use a VPN, you’re effectively shifting trust from your ISP to your VPN provider. Trust that your data is not being mishandled, misused, is secured, and is not being used for further profits. If a VPN provider logs heavily and has a police raid or a subpoena, your data is still freely accessible. In all fairness, in using NordVPN, your traffic is still encrypted over the network, further securing you from attacks, but they tend to lean very log-heavy, and if I remember right, have had some security issues in the past, though don’t quote me on that, I want to come back more researched. Generally speaking, the consensus on Lemmy has been in favor of Mullivad since they log nothing and can even take anynomous payment, on top of being a very affordable VPN. Sorry again for my incorrect assumption regarding sarcasm, I’m used to a lot of hardcore privacy nerds on here. You’re better off with NordVPN than without is the fact of the matter, and good on you if you’re making use of it 😁
NordVPN has a no logs policy that they’ve been third party audited about multiple times though?
Well I’ll be damned, I trusted the hivemind on privacy communities on Lemmy and was needlessly jaded against a good service. I’ll stick my foot in my mouth.
Despite what the hiveminds on lemmy/reddit piracy forums think because of all the advertising Nord does, it’s actually a really great vpn. It lacks port forwarding, but it has one of the best audited no logs policies, accepts crypto and cash, and is on the very small list of VPN providers that Arch Wiki has a page about.
Don’t listen to those other comments till they bring a source for their claim that nordvpn logs.
Here’s a source that NordVPN has a no logs policy that they’ve been third party audited about multiple times: https://nordvpn.com/blog/nordvpn-no-logs-audit-2022/
I raw dog my torrents with no VPN
Can someone tell me the actual risks involved? I always thought it was so you didn’t get your ISP up your ass and shut you off, my power company is my ISP and they don’t give a shit
What really am I risking here?
Edit: US
Depends where you live. In some countries nothing. In other countries fines. In some death penalty.
Me, Germany, 20 years of no VPN = nothing ever happend Friend of me, also germany, downloads Minecraft once without VPN = 800€ cease and desist letter So yeah. Pretty much a gamble.
One of three things, one your ISP doesn’t give a shit and nothing happens. Two, you get nasty-grams telling you to cease or have your service cut, three your information gets forwarded to the copyright owners company and you possibly are fined or worse brought in by a lawsuit.
Yep, yep and yep. The nasty-grams are typically referred to as “love letters”.
And all of that wouldnt be possible if you legally purchased all of this
Where can you forever-download these movies with no DRM?
You rip the physical media.
Do you always rip it at max quality, indefinitely keep the physical copy, or repurchase it years later when you want higher quality?
Depends.
I only rip music cds as the file size isnt as big as with DVDs or BDs.
But I keep them indefinitely.
Sonarr/Radarr will do this for you automagically for most TV and Movies, never have to visit a dodgy torrent site again.
Started setting it up years ago and over time re-downloaded all those shitty yify rips with full fat bluray remuxes wherever available and the highest quality possible otherwise. Hit 100tb pretty quickly lol.
I have my rig set up to automatically upgrade to bluray remuxes when available, then once they are older than 1 month and over a certain filesize they get automatically compressed with a fairly slow, low crf H265-10bit encode with FileFlows to cut their size roughly in half while still being visually perfect on the normal TVs, all 4k content stays untouched for the main theatre.
What do you use for storage?
mostly unraid, some ZFS ontop for high priority storage, a couple of TB of SSDs on top of that for caching and ingest.
Just added it all up, its 110TB at the moment, with another 16tb to add in a couple of weeks.
How much did that setup cost you?
Not sure it’s more than 10years of slow upgrades. Nothing compared to the true datahoarders out there
Too much probably.
If I was to rebuild it from scratch with new parts but equivalent performance and capacity it owuld only be a couple of grand honestly…
my AV distro gear on the other hand… oof… decent small car money, and a terrible investment.
You’re crazy and I envy your setup so much.
I’m just starting, with a mere 4 TB storage, but I want to learn how it works before investing more money
That’s why unraid was (in my opinion) a good starting point, you can use whatever disks you have regardless of size and speed and pool them all together pretty easily. Stick jellyin or plex or both on it and you have a great starting server.
I’ll support this
If your goal is to set up a media server, a few services, and a storage for non-essential files*, it is hard to beat unraid. Free is obviously better, but it has the best support for mismatched drive sizes and, arguably, the highest percentage of “usable” space. Try to wait for a sale (there are quite a few per year) but it is also a lifetime license so…
There are performance implications and I never trust any solution that can only survive two drive failures. Especially when recovery involves heavy reads and writes. Because drives tend to fail in groups and stressing a drive on its last legs is never a good idea.
*: Which, to be fair, should be how any locally stored file is treated. Unless you have it backed up off site in at least one location (preferably two), it is not backed up. Which is why my media collection is YOLO but my (encrypted) documents and personal photos go into a cloud storage bucket on a weekly basis.
Unraid pro is expensive (compared to free DIY linux or Truenas for example) but it is extremely flexible and very easy to get started with.
Their free trial is very flexible though, and once set up and running most people will already be set and happy to pay for the licence.
Anyone not building a proper rackmount server is unlikely to need more than Unraid Plus. Which is 89 USD without a discount. Said discounts vary but are generally 20-30% or straight up 10 dollars, which gets plus down to 60-70 bucks. Unraid Pro I think is where you start getting into discussions of if this is a good decision, but we are looking at 90-110 for that.
Which is not nothing. But Plus undiscounted is about the price of a 4 TB drive. So if you can’t afford a license you can’t really afford to run a NAS with any degree of recoverability. At which point you are probably better mounting the drives as individual un-RAID’d drives and spreading files across a file system. Because, at that point, you can’t recover from any failures anyway and this at least still guarantees access to your remaining files if one or more drives drop.
And if you are going big enough to need more than 12 drives in a single system (and I say this as someone who currently has 16 in his NAS…): That is when you should not be using unraid. Multiple physical servers set up as a ceph array and dealing with a lot of smaller zfs raids of varying sizes is the way to go but… you are losing a lot of storage to parity for something that likely isn’t worth that level of redundancy. But you also start getting into a discussion of “what is my time worth” at that point because… Ceph is a mother fucker.
I was thinking of YOLOing my media collection too, but at the same time I’m scared of downloading lots of things and then losing everything and having to download everything from scratch again.
Yeah. For me, the vast majority of my media collection are rips of the blu-rays and DVDs I have in a box in the closet. So recovery is just annoying. There are a few somewhat obscure shows (or shows with massively generic or reused names) that I might never be able to find again but… whatever.
But I definitely have a few porn videos I found on DC++ ten (… twenty?) years ago that I have never been able to find again after accidentally deleting the “Special Textures” folder of my Unreal Tournament directory.
that would take me awhile. im up to ~30,000 episodes of ‘shows’ and 2,500 movies
ive been recently doing the same…grabbing the 4k versions of stuff that matters.
my fav config is gluetun+deluge for a containerized seedbox
What kind of storage do you use?
i have a main server stuffed with drives (hot use), which is backed up to a nas, which is replicated to a cold nas. ~20tb x 3 for redundancy. 6x4tb arrays at the moment
Jesus fuck!
‘data hoarder’
i have this weird problem with streaming… i dont ever want to rely on someone elses.
Don’t radarr and sonarr download better versions automatically? Seems these measures were drastic.
It’s been a while since I’ve used those. I didn’t want duplicates of everything either, so I decided to start over.
Duplicates aren’t an issue. Doing this sort of upgrade without radarr/sonarr is just silly.
Duplicates may not be an issue for you, but they are for me. First off, I have limited storage. Secondly I want my Plex library to be nice and tidy.
I meant if you use sonarr/radarr, it doesn’t create duplicates by design.
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That’s the neat thing about the internet. Nobody had the expertise needed to do lots of things until they started to learn how…and all the information you need’s right there, just waiting for folks to go find it and learn from it.
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I must have read something because I replied to it. What made you think I had some fortune tellers knowledge of OPs expertise.
I’m keeping my original pirates of Mr. Robot for posterity
did they censor new versions of the show or something?
I don’t think so, but I got the entire series as it was aired, ripped straight from over-the-air HD transmissions complete with chyrons in the lower third for some Newfoundland TV station.
